1. Introduction
When is an audience not an audience? Since the 1970s, artists engaged in public art have departed increasingly from the aesthetic autonomy associated with the art gallery, aiming to embed their work more closely within the physical, geographical and, importantly, social context in which it is situated. In doing so their art aims towards dialogue not only with place (architecture, space, site) but also with its inhabitants, ‘articulating the implicit values of the city or of the particular place held by the work of art’ (Gaie Reference Gaie2010: 25). Suzanne Lacy observes that the artist is faced with the difficult responsibility of identifying these ‘implicit values’, even while acknowledging that these broader perspectives will be filtered through his or her own in the realisation of the work (Lacy Reference Lacy1995: 35). Artists engaged in public art in the twenty-first century take such responsibilities seriously, attempting to present art that is both relevant to and engages the users of the space in which it is situated. Nevertheless, a large proportion of the ‘audience’ for public art is an unwitting one, subjected to the art rather than subscribing to it; individuals become audience members and participants simply because they encounter the art while going about their everyday activities within the public domain. This raises questions as to the boundaries of public perception and engagement when confronted with art in such circumstances. At what point does an audience become an audience? Is it at the point at which the public starts to notice the work? Or the point at which they start to subscribe to the work – to engage with it or to consider its ‘message’? This question is perhaps particularly pertinent when dealing with public art involving sound. Sound invades and occupies spaces, and, as McLuhan observes, ‘we simply are not equipped with earlids’ (2001: 111); a public cannot simply turn away from an audio ‘spectacle’ if uninterested or unmoved by it. That is, of course, if the public notices it at all.
A variety of modes of engagement might be identified for the audience of any kind of sound art presented in the gallery space, ranging from passive audition (hearing without listening), through active listening (perhaps ambulatory – circumnavigating a space to explore how things sound from different perspectives) and to active agential participation (e.g. touching or tapping an object to see what sound it might make, or triggering/responding to the behaviour of an interactive installation). With sound presented in the public domain, the continuum extends beyond passive audition to the barely perceived or perhaps un-perceived. We should certainly draw a distinction between audients/non-audients (those who simply hear without engaging with the intervention, or don't hear it at all) and audience/non-audience (those who make a decision to subscribe to it, or to not do so), along with recognising a variety of states of ambiguity between these.
This essay seeks to investigate this ambiguous territory in public sound art, proposing it both as an area rich in possibility for creative exploration and as a means by which artists may reveal and encourage sensitivity to the hidden characteristics – and ‘implicit [sonic] values’ – of a site. Since this transitional state of audience has much to do with the cusp between the perceivable and the unperceivable, of particular interest is the idea of the understated and transparent – work which is explicitly designed to be low-profile, approaching-invisible or ‘lowercase’.
2. Lowercase and background
Primarily associated with composers working with electronic media (Bernhard Günter, Ryoji Ikeda and Richard Chartier), but arguably including works by acoustic composers (e.g. Morton Feldman), lowercase is music which celebrates the very quiet. The term was coined by Steve Roden, who describes it as ‘resembl[ing] what Rilke called “inconsiderable things” – the things that one would not ordinarily pay attention to, the details, the subtleties’ (Roden in Kahney Reference Kahney2002). Roden's own work presents almost inaudible recorded materials – ‘an amplified anthill, a mobile phone running out of power and the soft pops of bacteria being flash-frozen in dry ice and methanol’ (Kahney Reference Kahney2002) – within an aesthetic that derives from glitch and microsound. It encourages reflection, and ultimately a practice of ‘listening in’, implying an altered and more intense listening mode.
Public art might be said to be ‘lowercase’ when it involves similar preoccupations, being low-key in both conception and realisation, ‘sit[ting] quietly awaiting discovery, as opposed to loudly calling attention to itself’ (Roden in Haunted Ink 2002). However, lowercase music requires highly controlled conditions in order for its detail within the minuteness to be appreciated – often a private setting with an attentive audience predisposed to listen. Lowercase public art does not necessarily present the same imperative for close listening; indeed, the whole required listening mode for lowercase music is arguably at odds with a public setting in which such delicate music would be obliterated by the ambient sonic environment. Such a circumstance is embraced by some composers. Erik Satie's musique d'ameublement (furniture music), involving instrumentalists playing repeated passages at low volume in public spaces, was explicitly designed to fade into the background – to ‘be a part of the surrounding noises and [to] take them into account’ (Satie as quoted by Fernand Léger, cited in Cox and Warner Reference Cox and Warner2006: 65). And Brian Eno describes the nascence of the idea for his ambient music as being an acquiescence to just such an inability to hear:
It was raining hard outside, and I could hardly hear the music above the rain – just the loudest notes, like little crystals, sonic icebergs rising out of the storm. I couldn't get up and change it, so I just lay there …, and gradually I was seduced by this listening experience. I realized that this was what I wanted music to be – a place, a feeling, an all-around tint to my sonic environment. (Eno in Cox and Warner Reference Cox and Warner2006: 95–6)
Thus ambient music, designed to accommodate the existing sounds within the environment, was not intended to encourage a listening mode, but rather to inform an individual's experience of a space, to add a subtle ‘mood’ layer to an otherwise emotionally neutral environment that was appropriate to its functional purpose, thus appealing directly to sensibility.
Several authors make reference to background or ‘programmed’ music as an understated means of engineering mood and behaviour in public spaces and working environments in a similar way (e.g. Atkinson Reference Atkinson2007; Attali Reference Attali1985; Jones and Schumacher Reference Jones and Schumacher1992; Lanza Reference Lanza1991). With specific reference to the shopping mall, Jonathan Sterne provides an extensive analysis of the deployment of Muzak in public space. Sterne makes no distinction between active and passive listeners in these circumstances, pointing out the vacillation between listening states: ‘such music certainly isn't meant for the contemplative listener; it also isn't always “heard” in an entirely passive fashion – rather, it tends to pass in and out of the foreground of a listener's consciousness’ (Sterne Reference Sterne1997: 25). Nevertheless it is designed to have an impact on customers’ subconscious perception of space, along with their movements within it. Enforcing or reinforcing architectural boundaries, ‘it builds and encloses the acoustical space, and manages the transitions from one location to another; it not only divides space, but also coordinates the relations among subdivisions’ (Sterne Reference Sterne1997: 31). Thus, for example, background music (nondescript instrumental renditions of popular tunes) permeates and unites hallways, entrances and food halls, emphasising these as transitional spaces. Individual shops are the ‘destinations’, presenting more recognisable, consistently high-intensity ‘foreground’ music, the choices of which are more specific to each shop and intended to appeal to its desired clientele – thereby providing an incentive to enter and spend.
While the Muzak company asserts that ‘75% of consumers believe that music is an important part of the in-store experience’ (Muzak 2011), Sterne points out that the consumers (‘audience’?) of programmed music are the businesses which buy and make use of its relevant services and those of other related companies (1997: 25). It is they who subscribe to the sonic intervention, though its intended functional recipients are the customers who visit the commercial space.
The Muzak corporation makes no secret of the fact that it produces a product specifically designed to manipulate: ‘its power lies in subtlety. It bypasses the resistance of the mind and targets the receptiveness of the heart’ (Muzak 2012). While Joseph Lanza celebrates such ingenuousness (along with the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the company's approach) (1991: 51), other authors see such practice as highly sinister: Jacques Attali observes the ‘silencing’ of will through strategies such as ‘intensity limitation’ – the amelioration of particular moods according to the needs of a particular context (1985: 111–12). Meanwhile, Murray Schafer produces a scathing critique of ‘Moozak’, deploring its ‘concession to lo-fi-ism’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1994: 98) – the saturating of space and subsequent masking of site-specific sonic detail within the environment with a generic ‘background drool’ of canned music (Schafer Reference Schafer1994: 110).
Robin Minard alludes to (and presents in a rather more favourable light) comparable strategies of ‘conditioning’ or ‘colouring’ of space, and/or the masking of ‘unwanted sounds’. He observes the preference of individuals choosing to conduct quiet conversations around his own installations, which were emitting consistent ‘colouration’ of this kind, above areas in which noise levels changed regularly: ‘The temporal fluctuation of noise is one of the most important factors in determining its tolerability, the integration of quasi-static “masking” textures in certain areas which are disturbed with intermittent noise, can help to make these spaces effectively calmer’ (Minard Reference Minard1996). The masking nature of sound is also explored by, for example, Bill Fontana in his Sound Island (1994) and White Sound: An Urban Seascape (2011), installations in which sounds of the Normandy and Dorset coasts respectively are transmitted live to busy urban environments. This enabled exploration of the ‘contradiction’ between visual and aural experience – ‘the presence of the breaking and crashing waves created the illusion that the cars were silent’ (Fontana Reference Fontana2002) – and therefore to prompt reconsideration of the soundscapes in these areas; in Minard's words, to ‘create an atmosphere of silence … through carefully considering the role which sound masking plays in a particular work’ (Minard Reference Minard1996). An observation of the phenomenon of masking is pertinent in terms of garnering an awareness of acoustic environment, but it is perhaps ‘anti-audience’ insofar as it actively discourages listening per se. It is instead about the quiet (silence) or a quietening (silencing).
Other lowercase interventions into architectural space, however, are more in tune with Schafer's own call to ‘tune the world’. Greyworld's Tune (2003), for example, involved the creation of a unique sonic signature for a building by developing a ‘master palette’ of sounds, elements of which were embedded in the ‘fixed assets and elements’ of the building (for example lift buttons, doors, cash registers or security card readers). Upon activation the sounds collectively produced a coordinated ‘signature, a sonic “feeling” for the building, an identity often felt unconsciously by its inhabitants’. While some occupants of the building might be inclined to explore these sonically related fragments, most the work would go entirely unnoticed, yet it would nevertheless contribute subconsciously to a sense of local identity – a ‘profound recognition of place’ (Greyworld 2011). The purpose of this work was to create community-building in public spaces . As with background music it is an intervention designed to be on the periphery of engagement. It is in principle participatory in permitting the exploration and triggering of events, but it is predominantly designed to subconsciously reinforce architectural delimitations of space (or place), albeit without the intent to influence behaviour within that space.
3.1. Calls to listen: the visible
Schafer insisted that such ‘tuning [of] the world’ could only be achieved through an increased public awareness of the acoustic environment. To this end he devised a series of educational strategies – ear-cleaning studies and soundwalks – in an effort to encourage close and critical listening to this environment (Schafer Reference Schafer1994). Such strategies of course require subscription to such a ‘cause’ from participants to begin with – in other words, an already engaged audience or set of participants willing to partake of the experience and to learn; the public, by default, is neither of these. (Re)sensitisation of public ears outside the classroom therefore requires means by which a transition to the listening state might be encouraged.
One method of achieving this is simply through the use of visual cues or instructions to listen (or on how to listen) in public settings. Greyworld's Sound Awards is an ongoing initiative in which plaques are positioned prominently to denote areas ‘of outstanding sonic importance’ in the urban environment. Greyworld observes that ‘the unmarked Sonic Monuments that exist in cities [are] truer works of public art than the bronze statue or the highly polished rock we often find in cities’ (Greyworld 2010). Akio Suzuki's Otodate series (1996–, presented in Berlin and Turin) also designates particular listening points – denoted by the symbol of a circle enclosing feet/ears. Positioning themselves on these listening points, individuals are promised a listening experience that is ‘exceptional’ (Reference SuzukiSuzuki n.d.).
Rather than simply pointing out what there is to listen to, David Prior proposes the encouragement of self-reflective listening in his notion of a ‘listening aid’ – a means of ‘provoking us to listen differently’: ‘by actively framing the act of listening it invites us to reconsider what it is to listen and helps us in finding new ways of engaging with the sites we are listening to’ (Prior Reference Prior2010: 95–6; my italics). Prior discusses a potential approach to this developed by liminal, an arts collective comprising himself and architect Frances Crowe. The Cochlea Unwound is a proposed sculpture for a weir at Diglis Island, Worcester, UK based on liminal's successful prototype Organ of Corti (2011). It comprises a sonic crystal array – a cluster of vertical cylinders which ‘sculpt the noise of the weir into a sound composition that unfolds according to both the speed that the visitor passes the structure and their proximity to the structure’ (Prior Reference Prior2010: 95). Designed to catch the attention of casual walkers and cyclists as they pass the installation, this work therefore secures its audience and conveys its message in large part simply by means of arousing curiosity. The sculpture emits no sound of its own, and is lowercase inasmuch as it is designed to ‘intervene only in the context of our listening and not in the material of the thing heard’ (Prior Reference Prior2010: 98). As such it operates as a visually overt, aurally understated (at least in terms of sonic manipulation) lens through which to experience the existing sound. In this case, the positioning of the work is significant in relation to its potential audience. Situated along a cycle path it will be first noticed visually; the sonic phenomenon becomes apparent only upon riding past it. With such a work, the transitional moment is perhaps in the sudden surprise that an audio phenomenon exists at all. At the point at which this happens, the listener is immediately engaged, and may stop/return to listen more closely or navigate the structure sonically, all the time aware of the means of intervention – the aid itself; the frame.
3.2. Calls to listen: the invisible
Establishing an appropriate level (the lowest [practical] case) for lowercase work is a matter of judgement: Dugal McKinnon's Geophony (2008) involved the sonification of realtime seismic data in New Zealand via transduction to large window panes. Stronger seismic events elicited longer and more timbrally complex outcomes. Even so, McKinnon says of the work: ‘the ground material was low in volume and was often difficult to distinguish from the infrastructural noise of the building – this was the conceptual ploy – which of course backfired because most people had no clue that anything was going on.’ (McKinnon Reference McKinnon2009). While McKinnon was clearly disappointed with the ‘failure’ of the work to reliably secure an audience, Max Neuhaus embraces the potential for his work to attract no audience at all. He remarks: ‘I never do a work where everybody stops and notices it in a public place. I want at least 50% of the people to be able to walk through it without hearing it’ (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus2002).
Thus beyond the lowercase is the truly imperceptible work. The aesthetics and social agendas of the counter-monument work are perhaps relevant here. These advocate the avoidance of traditional monumental art, favouring instead the transient, undemonstrative and sometimes invisible. For Jochen Gerz's 2146 Stones: Monument Against Racism, the names of 2,146 pre-1933 Jewish cemeteries were engraved on the undersides of as many pavement stones in a public square in Saarbrücken. This intervention was uncommissioned, and completed illicitly, overnight and over a period of weeks by Gerz and his students; and it was (and remains) invisible physically. The only trace of the work might have been documentary had it not been recognised and sanctioned by the government, commissioned retrospectively, and the square renamed Square of the Invisible Monument shortly after the work was completed. As such, in fact, the work, and its invisibility, has been rendered visible by both its documentary evidence and its label. However, as Gerz remarks: ‘When you cannot [physically] see something, then you are almost forced to talk about it’ (in Pickford Reference Pickford2005: 165). Comparison might be drawn here with Marcel Duchamp's With Hidden Noise (1916). The one individual who might have revealed the nature of the object within this clamped ball of twine died fifty years ago. The object is one of intrigue, forcing contemplation.
Christina Kubisch's Electrical Walks (2004–) is a work which paradoxically involves a level of ‘invisibility’ while being highly visible. The work requires participants to put on specially designed headphones which transduce (sonify) the magnetic fields produced by electrical equipment. They are then invited to navigate the otherwise imperceptible electromagnetic urban landscape, searching for interesting electronic signatures (Kubisch Reference Kubisch2006). In principle, all participants in the work are those who have explicitly subscribed to the experience. However, as Seth Kim-Cohen observes, while the sounds remain inaudible to anyone not taking part, the headphones – oversized and cumbersome – along with the self-conscious (and incongruous) behaviour of the participants while searching for sounds, provides a strong visual cue to the work's existence to non-participants, by whom the work would otherwise go unnoticed (Kim-Cohen Reference Kim-Cohen2009: 111). From this point of view the work is non-cochlear – about sound rather than involving sound (at least for those non-participants) – and simply invites a contemplation of sound (and the act of listening), even for those not taking part.
3.3. Calls to listen: ‘silence’
Through his explorations into ‘silence’, John Cage established the idea of absence of sound providing a catalyst to listening. His famous anechoic chamber experience of 1951 is identified as having prompted a shift of attention to subtending sounds (an internalisation of his listening experience which (supposedly) allowed him to hear his nervous system and blood circulation (Cage in Cox and Warner Reference Cox and Warner2006: 4) once all external sounds had been suppressed) and surrounding sounds, resulting ultimately in his 4′33″ (1952), which involved silencing the performer in order to prompt the consideration of sounds within the surrounding environment (Kahn Reference Kahn1999: 190–1). In this instance, the concert environment facilitated the explicit framing of a sound circumstance and provided the subsequent call to listen. Such a frame can be contributed by other means of intervention – in particular by introducing an alien element to a particular sounding state that recontextualises it, almost acting as a ‘resetting’ of the hearing/listening mechanism. Salomé Voegelin discusses Christof Migone's Quieting (2000), a work comprising a series of extremely quiet, lowercase CD tracks in the midst of which, in the eighteenth track, is a loud canon blast. She says: ‘[i]ts shot snaps me into the readiness of listening, and I become aware retrospectively of the intentionality of the faint hushes, bubbles, voices and crackles that punctuated my soundscape for the last 15 minutes’ (2010: 88).
Max Neuhaus's ‘moment’ works attempt to instil such a ‘readiness of listening’ within a condition of sudden silence in the public domain. He recalls the following experience, which provided a catalyst for these works: ‘When somebody turns the machine on in a noisy café, you do not register it. It just seems to make talking a little harder … . Then, when it is finished and suddenly stops, there is a huge silence which envelopes the café, even though it is still very noisy. I've always loved that moment’ (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus1993: 3). Accordingly, his Time Piece Graz (2003), installed in the public square around the Kunsthaus in Graz, consists of an hourly sound signal characterised by the absence of sound. A sound imperceptibly introduced ten minutes before each hour grows over the course of five minutes until it is suddenly curtailed, the subsequent ‘moment of stillness’ entering the consciousness of passers-by as readily as (if not more readily than) an explicit sound signal. The public here becomes audience almost in retrospect, awareness of the intervention only dawning after it has concluded. Nonetheless, a listening (audience) mode will be likely to persist for a period beyond this revelation, revealing the sonic environment as a continuation of the ‘performance’.
3.4. Calls to listen: the transparent
Sharawadji is described by R. Murray Schafer as the ‘sublime of the everyday’ in which unexpected sounds or sound combinations might evoke ‘perceptive confusion [which] gives way to an inexplicable aesthetic pleasure’ (Schafer in Augoyard and Torgue Reference Augoyard and Torgue2006: xv–xvi). This in turn can lead to an extending of the ear towards other sonic phenomena within the environment in a manner similar to that discussed in relation to the Neuhaus work: ‘we are sometimes completely deaf to the environment. However, while on a walk or on a journey, our spirit can combine availability, attention, perspicacity and therefore become receptive to new things, including sonic fantasy’ (Augoyard in Schryer Reference Schryer1998).
Michel Risse's Sharawadji Effect (2011) aimed to evoke this effect by playing sounds from 43 lampposts within Jakominiplatz, Graz. The work was explicitly set within a place apparently incompatible with artistic activity or spectacle – a transitional space with busy vehicular and pedestrian traffic and ‘no physical space suitable for a proper relationship between “scenic” and “public”, nor for a theatrical performance temporal space’. The aim was to elicit the ‘right pinch of abnormality that can provoke the sharawadji effect’, thus ‘creating “windows of unexpected” zones of ambiguity, passing through looking-glasses, in which nobody is certain that nothing nor anybody is “as usual”, and that after all the common is undoubtedly very strange’ (Décor Sonore 2011). Risse asserts that his work was very categorically to be inserted into, and to become virtually indistinguishable from, the existing ‘life’ context of the space, being a ‘non-event”, for a “non-audience”, in a “non-place”’ (Risse Reference Risse2011) (as well as ultimately fulfilling the ‘non-art’ criteria that will be discussed below).
The presentation of aberrant behaviour within the otherwise familiar is pertinent, too, to the notion of trompe l'oreille, about which I have written before (Batchelor Reference Batchelor2007). This I describe as being the practice of superimposing fabricated aural landscapes over real ones such that the two are indistinguishable. However, any unusual behaviour introduced into a given sonic narrative will likely lead to the collapse of the illusion, yielding a similar ‘call to listen’ to those proposed above. Jon Aveyard's ‘birdsong’, for example, within his series of Anonymous Landscape Interventions (2003) presented a series of synthesised talea sounding like, but unlike, birdsong (Aveyard Reference Aveyard2004). Placing such sounds in a woodland where they were subject to the acoustic conditions and contextual cues provided by that environment enhanced the illusion – Trevor Wishart identifies this phenomenon as contextual recognition (Wishart and Emmerson Reference Wishart and Emmerson1996: 150) – but the ambiguity remained. Additionally, my own Old Joe Sound Sculpture project (2001) involved electroacoustic compositional manipulation of the quarter-hourly chimes of the clock tower at the University of Birmingham. Simply by artificially extending the resonances of clock tower chimes so that they became impossibly long, I hoped, with some chimes, to draw attention not only to the existing intrinsic musical qualities of the bells themselves, or indeed to their acoustic and social significance, but also to the soundscape that remained when the sounds eventually faded.
All of the above works discreetly encourage a switch from public (non-audience) to audience through the concurrent switch from Truax's designated ‘distracted listening’ to a state of ‘listening-in-search’ (Reference Truax2001: 79). Perhaps this is a kind of ‘transparent prolongation’ as proposed by Mallarmé – a listening-through (or more accurately a listening-beyond/after) of the aural event, and an opening up of the imagination (or consciousness) to what lies beyond (McCarren Reference McCarren1995: 756–7). Equally, just as with liminal's work (and agendas) discussed above, the revelation of the illusion draws attention to the listening experience, and thus, once again, to the ‘act of listening itself’.
4. Ethics of the discreet: secrecy/deception, weakness, and the non-art
As with programmed music, exploitation of some of the lowercase strategies discussed does have ethical implications, both in their implementation, and in the recording of their effects (in order to establish whether they have been successful, for example). Quietness and in particular illusion can be redolent of secrecy, subversion and general underhandedness. I have suggested elsewhere that trompe l'oreille can to an extent be made to direct reality, since people (and animals) will be likely to respond in predictable ways to particular aural phenomena. The recording of a barking dog behind a locked door may well deter a burgler, for example, while the imitation of animal cries or calls is an effective hunting lure (Batchelor Reference Batchelor2007: 3). The trompe l'oreille model operates by means of deception, and, because a condition of unknowing is critical in an observer/listener for such work to do what it is supposed to do, it cannot be done with the explicit authorisation of those at whom it is directed. Steve Goodman identifies a variety of sonic deception methods investigated during warfare, including the recording and ‘distribution’ of sounds – troops, tanks and landing craft, sometimes with emulated Doppler characteristics to imply approach – ‘in order to confuse, mislead, or distract the enemy’ (Goodman 2010: 41–3). Less specifically, it seems reasonable to suppose that introducing any sound which, if it were real, would pose a threat is likely to cause both disorientation and distress to any proto-audience member.
Augusto Boal's invisible theatre, which he practised during the 1950s–60s, has equivalent ethical implications. Involving politically motivated theatrical interventions in non-theatrical (i.e. public) space, this was designed to deliver potent messages to passers-by who were unaware that they were watching a planned performance (Boal Reference Boal1979: 143–4). In such cases, however worthy or ethical the motive and the message, the means of delivery involves manipulation, misrepresentation and arguably, in its potential for entrapment, a degree of cruelty.
A number of other works explore the boundary between public and private in seeking ‘participants’ in public (or publically presented) sound art. Janek Schafer's Recorded Delivery (1995) exposes (rather gleefully) the private goings-on within a public system, presenting recordings made by a voice-activated dictaphone as it travels through the postal service in a parcel, picking up fragments of lewd conversations of Royal Mail workers. Robin Rimbaud's interception, as Scanner, of mobile phone conversations, and their integration into his (public) musical works and installations during the 1990s (Scanner 2001: 65–6), raises similar issues surrounding what constitutes the public (in art or otherwise) along with similar questions regarding the ethical implications of such practice. While neither of these works are presented in a public forum, they nevertheless explore the boundary between public and private in seeking ‘participants’ within the public domain (who, incidentally, are not the audience; indeed, probably never will be).
Such unsanctioned participation in public (or publically presented) art through the assimilation of private worlds (or private communication) is complemented by equally unsanctioned delivery of public art into private worlds. Janek Schafer's Memory Museum (1996) involved recording and storing the utterances of visitors to his ‘museum’ – a pedestrian underpass in Paddington, London – along with its acoustic reflections, and transmitting them over the radio into the private worlds of all the cars that passed ‘through the realm of the museum’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1996).
There are other more positive ethical issues presented by the discreet work in relation to a public audience. Max Neuhaus's most famous work, Times Square (1977), involves resonant sounds/drones emerging from subterranean vents into the streets in New York. Just as with the sharawadji and trompe l'oreille examples discussed above, these could have been interpreted as an artistic intervention, as unusual mechanical sounds from the subway, or simply not noticed at all. The work is presented anonymously, without label or explanation, and Neuhaus observed that ‘Most of the people who don't know what it is take it as a beautiful anomaly that they found … something inadvertent that they take as their own’ (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus1990; my italics).
For the most part, in artistic practice, ‘we have the artist who wants to show off, who wants to have a conversation with the public, and who, with this in mind, distributes objects with the attribution of his or her own spirit’ (Camnitzer and Weiss Reference Camnitzer and Weiss2009: 201). Socially, compare the show-off with the shy, reticent, undemonstrative. The latter is generally deemed to be more virtuous or ethical. And certainly it is consistent with ideals of ‘weakness’ in contemporary arts practice.
Weakness, in arts discourse, is often linked to the status of the spectator … . To adopt the position of the spectator … is to assume a position that is ethically enhanced, since the weakness of the non-artist is more acceptable than the imposed power of the artist (power that is, to impose aesthetic judgements, to impose judgements of socioeconomic position on those who do not necessarily share those things). (Phillips Reference Phillips2005: 510)
While Phillips is in fact referring to collective, community-driven creative practice (which I am not discussing here), the passivity of the art in terms of how and whether the practice is received certainly seems consistent with this notion of ‘weakness’. Thus ‘I think that by not claiming it myself I allow them to claim it’ (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus1990; my italics). This recalls the Alan Kaprov notion of the ‘non-art’, the empowerment of the individual to identify a phenomenon as being aesthetically interesting, significant, perhaps beautiful, and ultimately art-like on his or her own terms, without the object explicitly being identified as being art, either by the perceiver or the maker. This is an experience very much related to that of the sharawadji effect, which equally acknowledges the independence of aesthetic discrimination of the observer.
Here again we might return to Gerz's work, and in particular his Monument against Fascism, War and Violence – and for Peace and Human Rights (1986). This work involved a black column on which the public were invited to write graffiti, which was gradually lowered into the ground until it disappeared altogether, its submerged presence merely denoted by tablet labelled ‘Harburg's Monument against Fascism’ which covered the hole into which it had been sunk. Gerz observes: ‘Art, in its conspicuousness, in its recognisability, is an indication of failure … . If it were truly consumed, no longer visible or conspicuous, if there were only a few manifestations of art left, it would actually be where it belongs – that is, within the people for whom it was created’ (Gerz in Young Reference Young1992: 278). Thus ‘the best monument, in Gerz's view, may be no monument at all, but only the memory of an absent monument’ (Young Reference Young1992: 279) since ‘[i]t forces viewers to desanctify the memorial, demystify it, and become its equal’ (Gerz in Young Reference Young1992: 279). This is all consistent with the empowerment of members of the public to address the work on their own terms: ‘What we did not want … was an enormous pedestal with something on it presuming to tell people what they ought to think’ (Gerz in Young Reference Young1992: 274). The idea of planting an idea and stepping back to allow its implications to become apparent through ‘observing oneself observe’ is consistent with that advocated by liminal in their intention to enable or encourage contemplation of the ‘act of listening itself’. Prior comments that ‘an aid to listening requires a response not only to the fact of being able to hear but also to the act of choosing to listen’ (Prior Reference Prior2010: 95).
5. Conclusion
The audience for any public art is a fickle one, whose engagement, as discussed, varies from the engrossed to the completely unaware. Pursuit of the lowercase and transparent in sound art within the public domain acknowledges the unpredictable and transient nature of this audience along with the difficulties of listening in Prior's designated ‘listening impaired society’ (2010: 95). Rather than adding to the cacophony, it ‘change[s] the scale of how you hear. When you change scale, you start to look at things differently’ (Neuhaus Reference Neuhaus1993: 2). It accommodates vacillating states of perception/listening/audience – through Schaeffer's proposed ouïr (disinterested perception of sound) to écouter (listening for the purposes of information-gathering and affordance; what a sound might represent for an individual in terms of opportunity or threat) to entendre (active listening, and perhaps finding value in the audio phenomenon itself) (Chion Reference Chion1983: 19–20). But it also acknowledges that public space is a space for the public, celebrating the concurrent pursuit of art and life in that space. In purely practical terms, it circumvents the potential for noisy sound art in public space to be an intrusion and/or irritation, which impedes its potential to relay any message; equally it can allow that public the opportunity to subscribe, or not, to the work.
Ultimately, such a strategy is only possible in public art (or works presented in public spaces): in a gallery space, concert hall or on a CD, however understated the work, art remains an essentially presented, labelled, named phenomenon. And the naming of a thing concretises it while circumscribing (both physically and conceptually) the manner in which it is to be experienced. Identifying (naming) an object precludes surprise and personal/independent discovery, which, at least in some of the instances described above, is what makes the experience so compelling. Public spaces permit unknowingness; they permit the erasure of the name, which ‘allows a name’ (and an experience) ‘to occur according to its own directives and force’ (Labelle Reference Labelle2006: 21). In conjunction with the quiet in public sonic art, this empowers the listener, while nevertheless encouraging an individual's ecological awareness of their sonic environment.
