Background Noise Second Edition by Brandon LaBelle

Author:Brandon LaBelle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury

Chapter 11

Other Architectures: Michael Brewster, Maryanne Amacher, and Bernhard Leitner

Activating space through implementing and inserting auditory features shifts architectural understanding. Fusing listening with spatial narratives, audition with inhabitation, and the movements of time and body as dramas of discovery, sound installation heralds new forms of embodiment. Such spatial activations feature throughout the works of Michael Brewster, Maryanne Amacher, and Bernhard Leitner, each by putting sound at the front of spatial experience and expanding the early works of Max Neuhaus.

While Neuhaus seeks to create an artwork that engages the public at large, through installations of systems of sound production, the work of Michael Brewster aims for the specifics of the ear as found in direct acoustic environments. Active since the early 1970s, the California artist has been working with sonic material in defining “sound sculptures.”1 For Brewster, sound sculpture is about creating form through the interaction of sound in space: frequencies tuned to a given architecture are amplified to create sculptural presence.

Generally, we think of interior spaces as quiet rooms minimizing the amount of interference and remaining slightly outside our view: rooms are meant to simply fulfill the spatial need to dwell, as a neutral background to habitation and experience. In essence, interiors are meant to remain silent against the personalized ways in which they are put to use and how they take on character. This usage though for Brewster is, in contrast, one that amplifies the room itself as a sound-producing object, as foreground. This shift of attention pervades Brewster’s work and methods, and functions as an operative term in his vocabulary of sound, space, and perception, which pushes sculpture up into a different material condition, that of acoustics. For ultimately what is at stake in his work is the form and function of the art object in general, and how these are stitched together in a perceptual and ontological play. Brewster’s work over the past thirty years has set the stage for a rethinking of the very nature of sculpture, and by extension the object, continuing the legacy of the “expanded field” argued so pointedly by Rosalind Krauss in 1978, where sculpture entered more dramatically into conversation with the site-specifics and complexes of landscape, environment, and architecture. This expanded field in essence pushes sculpture up against its very own disintegration: Carl Andre’s minimal repetitions leads one into an infinity of form, or Robert Smithson’s entropic spillages of tar or glue dissipate into their natural environments. From here, sculpture becomes more an event seeking the specific dimensions, conditions, and natural attributes of existing environments and spaces. Yet for Brewster, the notion of the expanded field creates opportunities for a continual recuperation of sculpture by rethinking its formal qualities in aural terms. For the sound sculpture neither fully dissolves into an existing terrain nor ever fully resuscitates itself as an autonomous object. Rather, sculpture, in remaining pure wave and sonic resonance, exists relationally, activating space as well as the ear canal.2 Here, the phenomenal intensity of hearing straddles the line between

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