Uncurating Sound
Knowledge with Voice and Hands
Published on 23. February 2023
Book
Hardback
136 pages
978-1-5013-4541-8 (ISBN)
Description
Uncurating Sound performs, across five chapters, a deliberation between art, politics, knowledge and normativity. It foregrounds the perfidy of norms and engages in the curatorial as a colonial knowledge project, whose economy of exploitation draws a straight line from Enlightenment's desire for objectivity, through sugar, cotton and tobacco, via lives lost and money made to the violence of contemporary art.
It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to "uncuration": untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.
Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.
It takes from curation the notion of care and thinks it through purposeful inefficiency as resistance: going sideways and another way. Thus it moves curation through the double negative of not not to "uncuration": untethering knowledge from the expectations of reference and a canonical frame, and reconsidering art as political not in its message or aim, but by the way it confronts the institution.
Looking at Kara Walker's work, the book invites the performance of the curatorial via indivisible connections and processes. Reading Kathy Acker and Adrian Piper it speculates on how the body brings us to knowledge beyond the ordinary. Playing Kate Carr and Ellen Fullman it re-examines Modernism's colonial ideology, and materialises the vibrational presence of a plural sense. Listening to Marguerite Humeau and Manon de Boer it avoids theory but agitates a direct knowing from voice and hands, and feet and ears that disorder hegemonic knowledge strands in favour of local, tacit, feminist and contingent knowledges that demand like Zanele Muholi's photographs, an ethical engagement with the work/world.
Reviews / Votes
An actual and effectual processual removing of the residues of decades of artistic and intellectual encrustations. * Morten Sondergaard, Seismograf * Salome Voegelin's oeuvre epitomizes sonic dynamism. Her latest work is no different. In Uncurating Sound, Voegelin invites us to listen along as she troubles and blurs static lines between knowledge and curation, writers and bodies, sound and the book, reading and performing. As she converses with works by such figures as Kara Walker, Kathy Acker, Adrian Piper, Kate Carr, Ellen Fullman and Manon de Boer, Voegelin reminds us vitally - especially as we continue to emerge from pandemic isolation and sustained distancing - that we are embodied. And questions like, Who is the "I" and the ear that writes? and For whom do we write and listen? are vital to our collective flourishing. Compelling in its speculation and expansive in its sonic wanderings, Uncurating Sound will interrupt our deep assumptions about sound and knowledge as it calls for us, in all our full embodiment, to listen. Where is your body tuned now? * Nicole Furlonge, Professor and Director of the Klingenstein Center, Columbia University, USA * With detours and fuzzy paths, inhalations and exhalations, rivers and their volumes, Uncurating Sound proposes the decolonial and transversal politics of sound is a matter not only for art institutions and their publics but also for a broader untethering from extractive histories and ways of knowing. * Sasha Engelmann, Senior Lecturer in GeoHumanities, Royal Holloway University of London, UK * Salome Voegelin's sensitive handling of sound topics as a post-colonial un-discipline is both observational and treatise-ish, caring and critical, and affirms the complex entanglement of curation, the cannon, the archive, and the body, and proposes a new traversing identity of sound studies. A Tour de Force. * Miya Masaoka, composer, artist and Associate Professor of Visual Art (Sound Art) and Director, Sound Art Program MFA, Columbia University, USA * Salome is able to bring art work and theory into a real dialogue (instead of the art work being subordinated to the theoretical frame), which implies that there's a win-win situation: on the one hand, Salome invites the reader to encounter a sonic art work by offering an open theoretical frame; on the other hand, the theories are brought to another plane by confronting them with concrete art works that "speak back." * Marcel Cobussen, Professor of Auditory Culture and Music Philosophy, Leiden University, Netherlands *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Target group
College/higher education
Dimensions
Height: 206 mm
Width: 132 mm
Thickness: 16 mm
Weight
260 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-5013-4541-8 (9781501345418)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Salome Voegelin is Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, UAL, and an artist and writer engaged in listening as a socio-political practice of sound. She is the author of Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), Sonic Possible Worlds (2014) and The Political Possibility of Sound (2018), all by Bloomsbury Academic. Her work and writing deal with sound and the world sound makes: its aesthetic, social and political realities that are hidden by the persuasiveness of a visual point of view.
Content
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Sounding Gaps in Pavements
Introduction: Taking a breath together
Breath 1 Curating politics in the gallery space
Breath 2 The possibility of resistance and the performance of alternatives
Performance score listen across to uncurate knowledge
Breath 3 With voice and hands
sound it IIIIIII
Breath 4 Postnormal
Performing Walls IX
Bibliography
List of Works
Index
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Sounding Gaps in Pavements
Introduction: Taking a breath together
Breath 1 Curating politics in the gallery space
Breath 2 The possibility of resistance and the performance of alternatives
Performance score listen across to uncurate knowledge
Breath 3 With voice and hands
sound it IIIIIII
Breath 4 Postnormal
Performing Walls IX
Bibliography
List of Works
Index