Talk Art by Russell Tovey & Robert Diament

Author:Russell Tovey & Robert Diament [Tovey, Russell & Diament, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2021-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Man in the Violet Suit No. 14 (Violet Bedroom), 2020, acrylic on panel, 91.4 × 182.9cm (36 × 72in).

Salman Toor, Boy Ruins, 2020, watercolour on paper, 24 × 19cm (9½ × 7½in).

Haroon Mirza, Digital Switchover, 2012, installation view: \|\|\|\| \|\|\ Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St.Gallen, 2012. Haroon Mirza creates sculptures, performances and immersive installations that generate audio compositions.

When considering sound art as a medium, many have assumed it to be the awkward middle sibling – not as easily understood and worthy as its older, wiser painting brother, and not gifted with the punky fresh clarity of its younger, film-making sister. But in the last few years there has been a resurgence in sound art artists. Noise has fully entered the arena, backed with doubled-down support from institutions, and many art prizes and grants specifically tailored to sound art. It’s time for this medium to be properly heard.

Many artists connecting through sound do so using its purest form – literally, ‘noise’, and the vibrations of noise. They thus convert the experience of simply listening to an art form. Think of mediated noise – your favourite song or type of music – and how, through hearing this music, channels open up in your body, tapping into and releasing your very core, often allowing deeply ingrained emotional paradoxes to be revealed. Heavy stuff. But by reducing music down to its essentials, and using that base molecular form of sound, artists can create an extraordinary experience, and this can be explored.

Detaching sound work from the music world seems to be the ongoing bugbear for sound artists. Many artists find that music and sound are grouped together under one big noisy umbrella and that picking them apart, for most people, proves sticky. Ironically, many sound artists have found their way into this art form through music. ‘Mostly I grew up with . . . what you would remember as ’80s pop music.’ We spoke to leading artist Haroon Mirza, who, through music and painting, discovered his love for a rarely explored world of sound expressionism – and that it was there, in essence, from the very beginning. ‘I was obsessed with painting seascapes, then [that] fizzled out. But I understand now that I was already obsessed with waves.’ Sound waves – the way that noise can travel, be tracked, recorded and harnessed – have fascinated Haroon for many years. ‘Waves in various forms: sea waves, sound waves, light waves, brain waves. It’s this obsession with waves that is still happening in my work now.’ Haroon creates work that an audience experiences live, by being placed into a chamber where they can literally feel sound. His environments are charged with electrical currents, through light installations and pulsing sound vibrations. The air tingles and our bodies react. ‘When you encounter these pieces and you have the sound of electricity being amplified and you’re hearing it, you have a physiological response to it. It’s not explicable. It’s not understood. You wouldn’t really know that it was happening. You might not even know that the sound is a live sound, but somehow your body knows.

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