INSTALLATION PLAN     PHOTOGRAPHS
THE SPACE OF THE SOUND / THE TIME OF THE GAZE
An exhibition of sound and visual installations and objects
Koldo Mitxelena Cultural Centre - Exhibition Hall
29. July - 25. September, 1999
Curator: Josè Iges

Introduction.

The first part of the title - "the space of the sound"- refers to what Marcel Duchamp, one of the essential artists of our century, said with regard to the new artistic thinking that created conceptual art and "intermedia" trends. The French artist said that sound also took up space and, as a corollary to this, it can be stated that the substance of sound has plastic possibilities, like a piece of iron or wood.

Moreover, although sound can be briefly perceived in the moment of a glance, the organized sound discourse - whether in an artistic sense or not - can be perceived in time as much as, or even more essentially than, in space. This means that the diachronic process of perceiving this discourse inevitably takes up time. A period of time - "the time of the gaze" - which will inevitably be marked out by a sequential gaze, not a "snapshot", and this is a fact that the artist needs to come to terms with and resolve in this type of work.

Of course, and this leads us on to the various approaches taken by the artists who have been selected for the exhibition, some of them tend to incorporate sounds into their work that take up as little of the observer's time as possible, so as to encourage people to get closer to the piece as if it were a picture or a sculpture. A glance enables you to assimilate the piece as a whole all at once, and this glance includes listening: it is a brief sound object, that is almost like an icon, or a series of sounds that are almost broken down into tiny pieces, so that when we hear a brief fragment of these sounds, it refers us to the whole piece without losing anything important, as would happen on listening to the sound of the waves. This does not happen in other kinds of pieces, especially in installations, as in these the artist may have allowed him/herself to produce a sound discourse that is more strictly "sequential". In any case, these pieces usually guarantee that the observer/listener gets much closer as they include more interactive systems and approaches than works that are presented as simple sound sculptures.


Selected artists

The starting point for the pieces that are on show is to be found in the avant-garde, and their hybrid nature could not be sustained or obtain legitimacy without the existence of the term intermedia, formulated in the sixties by the Fluxus artist, Dick Higgins.

With the term intermedia art Higgins, and after him, all those of us who have come close to genuinely intermingling resources and media in the creation of art, described a new site for artistic activity "between the various media" This notion accepted the confusion and dissolution of conventional art forms that had begun at the start of the century, and which is particularly relevant in sound sculptures and visual and sound installations.

Although the selection is still not definitive and the list of artists taking part is not closed, two sections will be presented:

A) Information panels and sound and visual objects that represent the historical precedents in the avant-garde of the sixties of these pieces: Esther Ferrer, Luis Lugn, Joe Jones, Max Neuhaus, Philip Corner, Laurie Anderson....

B) Contemporary sound installations: Rolf Julius, Josè Antonio Orts, Quin Yufen, Robert Adrian, Peter Vogel, Cristina Kubisch, Wolf Vostell.


Catalogue

To accompany the exhibition a catalogue will be published that will include a critical text by the curator about the exhibition as well as graphic reproductions of the pieces on show. At the same time a CD will be issued that will include sounds from the various pieces installed in the exhibition.

The catalogue will be published in three languages: Basque, Spanish and English.


        Josè Iges, Madrid, Feb. 1999