1 MOVING SOUND ART: INTRODUCTION

Western audiences have been fascinated with music automata since antiquity. Against this backdrop, it may not be surprising that curators of contemporary art and music keep displaying historical examples of such mechanical musical instruments together with contemporary sounding art. Yet what exactly do these curators aim to accomplish when combining historical music automata with kinetic sound art? And do visitors understand the connections in the ways intended by the curators? This article sets out to analyse the curatorial ambitions behind three relevant exhibitions: Für Augen und Ohren curated by René Block and Nele Hertling (Akademie der Künste (AdK), West Berlin 1980), an exhibition as part of the Ballet Mécanique festival organised by Paul Coenjaarts (Intro in Situ, Maastricht 2002), and Art or Sound by Germano Celant and Mario Mainetti (Fondazione Prada, Venice 2014). We examine the curators’ aims by drawing on catalogues and archival materials of the exhibitions as well as interviews. In order to understand the visitors’ responses, we focus specifically on the exceptionally well-documented exhibition Für Augen und Ohren. The archival materials of this show included visitor letters and newspaper reviews, as well as radio and video documentaries which also captured visitors’ reactions. Among these visitors were professionals such as art historians, art critics and journalists, and also leisure visitors and secondary school students. Our sources include letters by 14 and 15 year olds who wrote to the AdK’s director for a school assignment, a lay-but-not-leisure audience.

We claim that curators are staging the kinetic as a binding element between mechanical music machines and contemporary artworks. Our understanding of the kinetic differs from the widespread art historical understanding of ‘kineticism’ as a movement that lasted roughly from the 1920s up until the 1970s, when artists set their sculptures in motion through natural forces or mechanical motors in an effort to introduce the dimension of time as well as the possibilities of machines into the visual arts (Guggenheim Reference Guggenheim2018; Tate Reference Tate2018). Instead, our notion of the kinetic in sound art focuses on automated movement that produces sound. While this definition excludes kinetic sculptures that are powered by natural forces, such as the mobiles by Alexander Calder or the electromagnetic sculptures by Takis, it helps to shed light on the connections between the early music automata by de Vaucanson, self-playing musical instruments such as the pianola, the industrial machine sculptures of Jean Tinguely and the so-called ‘audio-kinetic sculpture’ by Stephan von Huene (Newmark Reference Newmark1972; Maes Reference Maes2013). In fact, narrowing down our definition of the kinetic allows us to situate it in a longer cultural history and unpack various dimensions of a lasting fascination with automated movement. We argue that, by staging the kinetic, curators appeal to these historical fascinations to encourage audiences to open their senses to contemporary sound art. By drawing on the notion of the ‘habitus of listening’, we will show that even though many visitors indeed allowed these fascinations to shape their approach to the kinetic sound art works, this does not necessarily mean that they actually appreciated them.

Our approach resonates with tendencies in electroacoustic music scholarship that strive to take the experiences of lay listeners into account. Composers and scholars such as Leigh Landy and Denis Smalley have long acknowledged that uninitiated audiences may not know what to listen for in a dark concert auditorium with nothing to see other than the loudspeaker orchestra and so developed listening aids that are meant to facilitate access to diverse repertoires of electroacoustic music (Landy Reference Landy1994; Smalley Reference Smalley1997). Landy suggests that composers should provide listeners with ‘something to hold on to as a means of entering their works’ (Landy Reference Landy2007: 26). These access tools can be provided in the form of hints about what to listen out for and information about composers’ intentions and inspirations. He believes that part of the reason why sound art appears to attract larger and more diverse audiences than electroacoustic music is that sound art offers more of such access tools (Landy Reference Landy2007: 162; Landy Reference Landy2016). Kinetics understood as automated movement plays a role in both sound art and electroacoustic music: in the aforementioned sculptures of Stephan von Huene, for instance, as well as in the machine performances of Pierre Bastien. In both cases, Landy would probably describe the visibility of the sound production mechanisms as an important thing to hold on to (Landy Reference Landy2007: 32). In what follows, we aim to establish curators’ staging of the kinetic as something to hold on to, analyse what audiences actually held on to in their encounter with kinetic sound works and explore whether there may be lessons to draw from the exhibition practices of sound art for the presentation strategies of electroacoustic music.

2 STAGING THE KINETIC: CURATORIAL AMBITIONS

Let us start our discussion of the curatorial agendas, ambitions and aspirations by contextualising the three exhibitions. The Maastricht 2002 exhibition, which was on display in a former furniture factory, was initiated by Paul Coenjaarts, artistic director of the sound art venue Intro in Situ. This exhibition brought together a range of music automata from the twentieth century as part of a festival which also featured the performance of George Antheil’s Ballet mécanique, including its player pianos, sirens and other sounding machines. The 1980 West Berlin exhibition took place in the Modernist building of the Akademie der Künste, where it was organised by Nele Hertling, the institution’s music secretary who took charge of the historical music machines on display, and René Block, a contemporary art gallery owner and curator who assembled the contemporary artworks. They presented a range of music automata dating back to as early as the eighteenth century in a separate exhibition space, while two additional exhibition spaces were devoted to sounding artworks. In 2014, Germano Celant and Mario Mainetti curated an exhibition of musical objects, instruments and automata, intermingled with artworks from the seventeenth century onwards, in the Baroque palazzo of Fondazione Prada Venice. The exhibits were arranged in a loosely chronological order, but without making any categorical distinctions between historical craft and contemporary art. In both Berlin and Venice, the musical objects and automata constituted about one-third of the exhibits, the rest comprising artworks from the twentieth century and, in the case of Venice, early twenty-first century.

How did curators stage the kinetic given these quite different circumstances? A central aspect of the display strategies of all three exhibitions was to present the music automata not just as silent historical witnesses, but as functioning mechanisms to be heard and enjoyed by the visitors during the exhibitions. To achieve this, the smaller Maastricht exhibition relied on intimate demonstrations and performances. The large-scale exhibitions in Berlin and Venice activated the automata on display either by timers or by staff. While the staff activations in Berlin took place on request, the staff activations in Venice followed a schedule carefully orchestrated with the timed activations. The open display setting and the rather incidental activations may have made for a slightly turbulent historical exhibition section in Berlin, which the Venice curators prevented by commissioning fashion industry composer Frédéric Sanchez for the sound design of their exhibition. He orchestrated the exhibition’s soundscape by placing selected recordings and carefully timing the activations of both automata and artworks (Mainetti Reference Mainetti2017; Sanchez Reference Sanchez2017).

Another aspect of the curators’ staging of the kinetic is the art historical account they provide. The Berlin exhibition by Block and Hertling aimed at a contextualisation of the then-recent emergence of ‘intermedia art’ at the intersection of art and music history (Block and Hertling Reference Block and Hertling1979). Their catalogue is prefaced by an elaborate scheme mapping out the developments of music and art in the twentieth century. Within this scheme, the kinetic takes a small, but central position having links with ‘Mechanical Music’, ‘Acoustic Images and Installations’, ‘Bauhaus’ and ‘Sound Sculpture’ (Block and Hertling Reference Block and Hertling1980: 6, 141). While artists such as Jean Tinguely and Takis are categorised as Kinetic, Stephan von Huene’s work is grouped with Sound Sculpture, and Joe Jones’s self-playing musical instruments are understood as Mechanical Music (Block and Hertling Reference Block and Hertling1980: 6). Coenjaarts’s historical account is similar to Block and Hertling’s when he stresses that the history of mechanical music was important to sound art ‘because sound artists make use of mechanical sources of sound in all kinds of projects in order to materialize their ideas and aim[s] in soundscapes’ (Coenjaarts Reference Coenjaarts2002: 1). In fact, the sound artists would not have been able to accomplish what they had in mind ‘without these expedients’ (ibid.). Germano Celant’s catalogue text only mentions kinetics in passing as he explains how sculptors such as Alexander Calder and Takis ‘rediscovered an extraneous value like sound’ upon setting their sculptures in motion through wind, magnets or motors (Celant Reference Celant2014: 23). While kinetic motion appears to play a minor role in his thinking, he speaks more elaborately about a ‘phase of artistic and sound “engines” used to modify and boost the effects of seeing and hearing. With them the art for seeing and playing music became a mixture, a contrivance that when set in motion issued entities in which subjective and objective could no longer be considered antinomic’ (Celant Reference Celant2014: 24). He suggests that these contemporary ‘engines’ have strong affinities with historical clocks and automata.

A final aspect of how the curators in Berlin and Venice in particular staged the kinetic involves the selection and presentation of artworks. Both exhibitions covered a wide spectrum of contemporary art ranging from early twentieth century Dada and Futurism to the latest generations of sound artists, such as Christina Kubisch, Rolf Julius and Bernhard Leitner in Berlin in 1980, and Janet Cardiff, Céleste Boursier-Mougenot and Anri Sala in Venice in 2014. While the Berlin exhibition had a stronger musical focus by presenting the work of composers in an elaborate performance program, the Venice exhibition comprised works by many established artists from the visual arts as well. What is striking about the selection of artworks for both exhibitions is the emphasis on artistic practices from the late 1960s and early 1970s that are involved with automated music, such as those of Jean Tinguely, Stephan von Huene, Joe Jones and Takis. In both exhibitions, the high number of sculptures by Stephan von Huene – three in each case – stands out, as does their placement, which defies the logic of the curatorial strategies. Even though Block and Hertling strove to separate the historical music automata from the contemporary artworks on display, works by von Huene appear in both sections of the exhibition as well as in the entrance hall (Ohff Reference Ohff1980). And despite Celant and Mainetti’s proclaimed aim of a chronological presentation, sculptures by von Huene from the very same year are placed in different rooms. While the automated sculptures by Joe Jones and Takis presented the state of the arts for Block and Hertling in 1980, Celant added quite a few contemporary sound works which can be linked to the kinetic tradition. Among them are the mechanically activated instruments by Rebecca Horn and a life-size drummer boy automaton by Maurizio Cattelan. The latter welcomes visitors by loudly drumming above their heads as they enter the exhibition. For all three curatorial teams, automated movement was certainly just one element among many they considered interesting about historical music automata and the sounding artworks of their time, but they presented them strategically.

The strategy focused on sensitising visitors to the more experimental sounds of contemporary art. This particular aim is put forward most explicitly by Germano Celant in his catalogue text subtitled ‘embracing the senses’. He describes the exhibit selection process as

His audience is thus invited to wonder about the workings of contemporary artworks as well as marvel at the beautiful decorations of historical music machines. He understands his project as part of a wider cultural ‘aspiration to the multisensory’ in which the distinctions between arts and crafts blur (Celant Reference Celant2014: 23). Paul Coenjaarts describes the possibility of a sensitisation through musical automata by pointing to his personal biography. He recounts how, as a young boy, he had once seen and heard a huge dance organ, which not only fascinated him at the time, but also inspired a lifelong love for sounding machines (Coenjaarts Reference Coenjaarts2017). He became a pianist himself, and founded a salon orchestra for which he asked André Rieu to be violinist – who developed it into his own famous orchestra some years later (Coenjaarts Reference Coenjaarts2016). Meanwhile, Coenjaarts started Intro, for which he organised countless presentations of sound art in characteristic buildings and at special locations, hence the addition ‘in Situ’. Like Block and Hertling, Coenjaarts refers to the power of the historical to set the scene and spark a wide audience’s interest in the sound mechanisms of contemporary artworks. He expected his exhibition to be of interest to publics with a stake in mechanical music, ‘from the pianola to the computer’, and to those who would come for avant-garde concerts or a dance evening. The Maastricht educational programme also included an afternoon for youngsters, allowing them to ‘play’ the pianolas (Coenjaarts Reference Coenjaarts2002: 1). It was a way to connect ‘serious music’ to other art forms, such as ‘popular mechanical music forms’ in pubs and on the street, a strategy which, according to Intro, attracted more and more visitors (Uit in Maastricht Reference Uit in Maastricht2002). In 1980, Block and Hertling also proclaimed it to be their aim to appeal to wide audiences consisting of professional and lay people alike (Block and Hertling Reference Block and Hertling1977). In retrospect, Block remembers that

Block and Hertling, as well as Celant and Mainetti, put emphasis on curiosity as the ideal state of mind for approaching contemporary artworks (Block and Hertling Reference Block and Hertling1980: 8; Celant Reference Celant2014: 21). These contemporary artworks would continue to be the focus of their endeavours, implying a subordinate role for the historical dimension (Block and Hertling Reference Block and Hertling1979).

To gain a better understanding of the curators’ take on the historical connections between music automata, the kinetic and sound art, as well as of their ideas on how the appeal of mechanical instruments can sensitise visitors to contemporary sound art, we have to unpack the category of the kinetic as automated movement in more conceptual detail, and need to situate it historically.

3 DIMENSIONS OF FASCINATION WITH THE MECHANICAL IN MUSIC AND THE KINETIC IN ART

The fascination for self-moving machines harks back to antiquity, whence the Greek word automaton. While we have a description of the mechanical theatre of Heron of Alexandria, the first musical automaton was built in ninth-century Baghdad. This automatic flute player used the principle of a rotating drum with pins which manipulate levers connected to the holes of the flute. Experiments with reprogrammable music machines in the early Renaissance connected clock mechanisms to the bells of a carillon or even to an iron cock that at noon opened its beak, flapped its wings and uttered crows produced by bellows and a reed (Koetsier Reference Koetsier2001: 591).

In the early eighteenth century, the mechanisms that made the automata move became increasingly sophisticated. The ultimate test was whether it was possible to build a machine which convincingly mimicked a human musician. This liminal area between human and machine (Nassar-Fredell Reference Nassar-Fredell2013) was successfully explored by Jacques de Vaucanson. In 1738, the French clock maker and inventor, who had previously built a mechanical duck that could eat, digest and excrete its food, presented his mechanical flute player to the French Academy of Sciences. The machine did not just reproduce the movements of flute playing, it could actually play the flute. Whereas previous humanoid music automata combined a clockwork mechanism to produce the body’s movements with a mechanical organ to play the tunes, Vaucanson’s player had lips and a tongue that controlled the airflow, and fingers that opened and closed the holes of the flute (Richards Reference Richards1999: 382).

The mechanical flute player thus embodied the materialist philosophy of the French physician Julien Offray de la Mettrie. The claim in his L’homme Machine, originally published in 1748 (de la Mettrie [Reference de la Mettrie1748] 1996), that there is no essential difference between a man and a machine, questioned the existence of a soul or mind that is independent of the body. Analogously, the musical automata raised the question whether or not mechanical performance was different from human playing. Theologians argued that the genius of musical invention and the ability to appreciate it were proof against de la Mettrie. The ambiguous relation between the musical and the mechanical also affected composers. When Mozart worked on his Fantasie KV 608, a commissioned piece for musical clock, he wrote to his wife Constanze that he detested the composing because the instrument with its high pitches sounded childish to him (Richards Reference Richards1999: 366).

In the nineteenth century, musical automata continued to fascinate audiences, composers and writers. The trumpet automaton built by the mechanist and acoustician Friedrich Kaufmann (1785–1866) was presented all over Europe after its first display in 1812. This huge interest can be seen from written accounts by critics as well as writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann (Wolf Reference Wolf2012). In his short story ‘Die Automate’ from 1814, Hoffmann develops ideas on music and its relation to machines, virtuosity and what could be called ‘mechanical’ art (Hirt Reference Hirt2010).

Part of the interest in the musical automats related to their technical finesse. The Viennese instrument-maker Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, known for being the inventor of the metronome, was admired not only for the high level of precision in his instrument-making, but also for how he presented the instruments and his elaborate technical explanations (Wolf Reference Wolf2009). Although Mälzel built his own mechanical trumpet player, his Panharmonikon, invented in 1805, no longer hid its mechanics in the body of a human-looking player. Instead, these machines combined several wind instruments and drums in one case where they were controlled by pinned drums. After a suggestion from Mälzel, Beethoven wrote his composition Wellingtons Sieg (1813) for the new automatic orchestra (Wolf Reference Wolf2009: 114). Mälzel’s Panharmonikon paved the way for the Orchestrion, a musical automat built for salons and hotels that mimicked an orchestra sound and was able to play Beethoven symphonies as well as other orchestral music.

The first decades of the twentieth century, and especially the mid-1920s to early 1930s, witnessed another period of intense experimentation with automated musical instruments, either mechanically or electronically propelled. The player piano for instance, introduced in the late nineteenth century, sounded through instructions stored on perforated music rolls, and was sold widely in these years. The instrument met with fierce opposition from music teachers and musicians as it was thought to undermine key middle-class Victorian values such as perseverance and self-control, and to wipe out interpretation, expression, unique musical experiences and perhaps even the amateur musician him- or herself (Roell Reference Roell1989). But the manufacturers’ ads, sketching the prospect of effortless music-making, resulted in commercial success nonetheless (Théberge Reference Théberge1997).

The world of composers and music critics was deeply divided on the issue. To opponents, music produced by mechanical instruments was music without a soul – dull and frozen. Advocates, however, embraced mechanical instruments such as the player piano for their unprecedented precision, exactness and superhuman capacities; new electronic instruments for their rich sound colours and microtones; and both types of instruments for their ability to capture the new age of objectivity (Pinch and Bijsterveld Reference Pinch and Bijsterveld2003). Intriguingly, some of the artists, among whom were Luigi Russolo and George Antheil, also saw the use of these and other new instruments as a way to express a search for spirituality (Bijsterveld Reference Bijsterveld2008; Mansell Reference Mansell2017). For a composer such as Conlon Nancarrow, however, the player piano was an instrument that was uniquely suited to making his complex music audible. Some of the challenges of reception that electroacoustic music faces today already started in the early days of mechanical and electronic musical instruments, with the audience of a player piano concert wondering if they should applaud after the performance by a machine (Pinch and Bijsterveld Reference Pinch and Bijsterveld2003: 538).

This brief historical overview suggests three dimensions of the fascination with the mechanical in music. First, there is what we would call the magical invisible. Mechanisms such as Vaucanson’s flute player sophisticatedly hid or disguised the parts that made it function. Like other representative music automata, the flute player was presented before audiences in theatrical settings aimed at wonder and entertainment. Second, there is marvel at the mechanical as a sublime feature of the automaton. Here fascination is triggered by the complexity of the mechanisms as well as the competences and skills of those who construct them. A third dimension of fascination results from the philosophical, normative and aesthetic questions raised by automata. These follow from the ways in which the musical machines articulate various boundaries: between man and machine, between hearing the music and seeing the spectacle, between mechanical and human performance of music, and ultimately between the cultures of crafts and autonomous arts. As we will see, these three dimensions of fascination can also be traced in the history of kinetic art in the twentieth century.

Early publications on kinetic art as a genre in the visual arts stress how meaningful mechanical instruments were to the visual artists since the 1920s who attempted to express time by producing sculptures that moved. In his posthumously published Vision in Motion, Bauhaus artist and writer László Moholy-Nagy briefly mentions the Greek hydro-clock as the first ‘application’ of kinetic sculpture, while also pointing to toys, advertising signs and fountains as inspirations to his practice (Moholy-Nagy Reference Moholy-Nagy1947: 237). Describing ‘the effects of science and technology on the sculptures of this century’, the art historian and occasional curator Jack Burnham draws a much sharper distinction between high and low arts. He devotes an entire chapter to the history of automata – which tend to be humanoid in most of his examples – from Egyptian servant figures to the kinetic artists of his day (Burnham Reference Burnham1968: 185–218). To him, humanity’s automatic aspirations clearly belong to the realm of ‘subsculpture’, which he ranks below the fine arts aesthetically, but which he describes as being of interest for many artists of the twentieth century. Unlike Moholy-Nagy, Burnham writes about these artists as a category completely separate from automata developers, reasoning that even though kinetic artists wanted to work with motion, they lacked the automaton developers’ ‘traditional craftsmanship and mechanical competence’ (Burnham Reference Burnham1968: 219). Despite these fundamental differences, he also notes the ‘joint religious and magical functions’ that automata and kinetic sculptures had until the late nineteenth century, when automation began to be associated with the threat of replacing human beings (Burnham Reference Burnham1968: 187, see also Toop Reference Toop2002). Burnham describes this process as the invasion of the robot ‘in the spirit of the modern, ultra-functional machine’ taking over from the humanoid automata (Burnham Reference Burnham1968: 200–1). This shift well captures our distinction between fascination with the magical invisible workings and the transparent mechanical workings of automated movement. Burnham strictly differentiates between the realms of robotics and kinetic art, criticising the latter for continuously lagging behind developments in technology, aesthetics and the economy (ibid.: 280). Eventually, he and other theoreticians turned their attention away from the fact that the artworks moved, and became more interested in the different technologies that made them move, and what these meant for the conceptual definition of the work in relation to society. Notions such as systems art, process art, cybernetic art and conceptual art soon took over from the kinetic.

For a long time, kinetic art has thus remained a descriptor for a specific historical development peaking in the 1950s and 1960s, and fading in the course of the 1970s. Only recently, Christina Chau (Reference Chau2017) and Jon Pigott (Reference Pigott2017) have suggested its renewed or even ongoing relevance for understanding contemporary art at large, and sound art in particular. Both point to restrictive notions of objecthood and movement bound to Modern mechanical or electromechanical media as a reason for the kinetic’s falling out of time. Chau strives to broaden the notion beyond its medium-specificity. From her point of view, kinetic terms are still useful for theorising contemporary art in the twenty-first century, because the movement of any new artistic medium affects a viewer’s perception of temporality in a specific way. In contrast, Pigott uses the notion of the kinetic precisely because of its explanatory power for the electromechanical sound works he discusses. Analysing historical as well as contemporary examples of such electromechanical sound works, he comes to distinguish between a ‘robotic’ and a ‘process-driven’ approach to automation in the realms of sound art. While the robotic approach strives for complete control over musical reproduction, so reproduction without a performer, a process-driven automation focuses on the agency of non-human materials as performers (Pigott Reference Pigott2017: 282). Both of these approaches are represented in the exhibitions discussed here; for example, in the robotic pneumatic mechanisms of von Huene and the process-driven magnetic systems of Takis. In line with this distinction, these artists also describe different fascinations as the driving forces behind their artistic endeavours. While von Huene points to the supernatural referencing the idea of God breathing life into a sculpture, Takis aims for his pieces to evoke the invisible energies of nature (Anderson Reference Anderson1968: 23; von Huene in Newmark Reference Newmark1972: 72).

Our hunch is that the curators of the exhibitions co-displaying kinetic sound art with musical automata draw on their understanding of the historical connections between automata and experimental art, as well as on their expectations of a continuing fascination with the remarkable capabilities of self-moving machines. We would suggest that by staging the kinetic as a connecting element between the two realms of arts and crafts, curators not only brought together different cultures of making, traced technological developments or stirred visitors’ curiosity, but also suggested possibilities for sensory engagement. By allowing visitors to engage with and reflect upon a variety of musical and artistic mechanisms, these curators evoked various dimensions of fascination with the kinetic that appear to have been successful in opening visitors’ senses to the contemporary artworks. The fascination for music played without a player thus provides a sensitising context for the visitors to develop patterns of interaction, modes of perception and ways of interpretation based on their listening habitus.

4 VISITORS AND THE SENSITISING POWER OF THE KINETIC

The ‘habitus of listening’ is a concept developed by anthropologist Judith Becker (Reference Becker2011) on the basis of Pierre Bourdieu’s writings about the sensory acculturation of the body. Bourdieu coined the term ‘habitus’ to refer to acquired and learned yet internalised and individually embodied repertoires of social actions (Bourdieu [Reference Bourdieu1977] 2013: 72–95, 214). He emphasises that the habitus is inscribed in the body, so it is not just something that we know, represent or own, but something that we perform, enact and hence are (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1992: 72–3).

Judith Becker has elaborated Bourdieu’s notion of the habitus into a ‘habitus of listening’, constituted by the social and cultural background of listeners, the object of their listening, and their listening situation. She suggests that

Becker explains that a mode of listening depends on the kind of sound involved, the understanding of the sound situation, as well as the kind of subjectivity that a culture fosters in relation to the sound event. This listening mode then takes hold of listeners’ attitudes, their feelings, their expectations and their bodily gestures.

We argue that the curators’ display of the kinetic appeals to various dimensions of fascination with the kinetic, but in order to provide audiences with something to hold on to and effectively open their senses to contemporary sound art, it also has to resonate with visitors’ listening habitus (see also Landy Reference Landy2007: 24). In what follows, we will analyse how visitors’ fascination with the kinetic played out in relation to rehearsed repertoires of listening in the Für Augen und Ohren exhibition in Berlin.

Many of the visitors to Für Augen und Ohren set out to compare and contrast the music automata with the contemporary artworks, mostly focusing on the works by Stephan von Huene and Joe Jones. For professional visitors, von Huene’s works appear to have played a major role in bridging the gap between the historical music automata and the contemporary artworks by invoking different dimensions of fascinations in relation to their listening habitus. They describe the humanoid features of the Tap Dancer with its ‘rattling leg action’ (Kotschenreuther Reference Kotschenreuther1980; also Göpfert Reference Göpfert1980) just as elaborately as its ‘electric-pneumatic mechanism’ (Göpfert Reference Göpfert1980) which are ‘operated by microprocessors, and no longer by traditional cardboard or leather tapes’ (Herbort Reference Herbort1980) to evoke ‘Ragtime-, Jazz- as well as Slapstick rhythms’ (Ohff Reference Ohff1980). In these descriptions, we see the magic invisible dimension of fascination come together with a mechanical emphasis on technological progress, and a listening habitus that allows visitors to make sense of the sounds on the basis of musical genres they appear to be familiar with.

Strikingly, the dimensions of fascination described by visitors to the Für Augen und Ohren exhibition also merge in their accounts of the historical automata. A pianola is perceived to play ‘as if by magic’ (the literal German translating to ‘as if by the hand of a ghost’), and a singing birdcage falling silent is considered to have ‘run out’ (visitors in Lang Reference Lang1981). If anything, the merging of these dimensions of fascination appears to have intensified visitors’ enchantment with musical automata. There was only one music critic who felt tricked rather than bewitched by efforts to conceal the mechanisms that automate movement in musical instruments and artworks alike. When listening to a barrel piano, an orchestrion or some of the contemporary artworks in the show, he feels deceived by a ‘trompe l’oreille-effect’ that conceals the relationship of the ‘initiator’ and the ‘initiated’ (Herbort Reference Herbort1980). To him this suggests a kind of pretence he does not appreciate in either historical music automata or contemporary art.

Some visitors reflected more broadly on historical developments that resonate with the dimensions of kinetic fascination. One music critic was under the impression that ‘the contemporary ideals come much closer to the music machines of the 19th century that were driven pneumatically and operated with punched paper or cardboard tape’ than to the ideals of music machines of the twentieth century. To him the contemporary ‘“concealment” of the production processes, the sound sources, is a sign of [a] new sensitization’ (Bachmann Reference Bachmann1980). Whereas he thus observed an emphasis on concealing the mechanisms in contemporary art, a culture critic claimed precisely the opposite, suggesting that ‘while instrument builders have almost obsessively pursued their goal of constructing sound apparatuses that emit music of a kind that does not allow you to notice the absence of man, the visual artists represented here have their minds set on making automatic functioning explicitly visible or at least intelligible’ (Göpfert Reference Göpfert1980). According to this critic, contemporary artistic practices make an effort to make the mechanisms particularly transparent. A leisure visitor described a similar transparency, which he or she appreciated, because ‘you can tinker with this [Joe Jones’s Music Store] at home … it is more interesting than the old stuff, that is too complicated, somehow the new things are easier to follow; I cannot understand how an organ functions if it is just standing there, like the big one over there, but this is something I can understand’ (visitor in Lang Reference Lang1981). There are thus different views as to whether the contemporary automation mechanisms are particularly concealed and therefore appealing to the senses, or particularly transparent and therefore cognitively accessible, but both these views articulate earlier dimensions of fascination for the kinetic.

The articulation of normative, philosophical and aesthetic boundaries may be the dimension of fascination that recurs most emphatically in visitors’ responses to the show, marked as they were in particular by comparisons between the historical automata and the contemporary sound art works, popular and high art, or craft and art (Rhode Reference Rhode1980; Schaaf Reference Schaaf1980). In a letter to the director of the AdK, an art historian criticises the suggested historical continuity from industrially manufactured musical instruments to autonomous artistic creations, and ridicules the implication that a workshop-crafted street organ could be listened to as if it were an autonomous artwork (Art historian Reference Art historian1980). In the ears and eyes of a renowned artist who refused to participate in the show, the fairground organs and pianolas have turned the entire endeavour into mere entertainment. He disappointedly recounts how the presence of the lower arts and crafts have effectively diminished his experience of the artworks in the show (Artist Reference Artist1980).

Quite a few high school students were also sceptical about the combination of arts and crafts, yet they expound a lack of skill in the contemporary artworks. One student described how she did not feel particularly intrigued by Dennis Oppenheim’s ‘music boxes placed on metal towers. However, I felt that the barrel machines were not out of place [in an art exhibition], as these are a masterstroke of mechanical skill’ (Anon. Reference Anonymous1980). A fellow student exclaimed that his or her favourite organ in the show ‘is in my opinion really art. In this masterpiece you could see that real artists have worked on their parts for years, a true lifetime achievement’ (Anon. Reference Anonymous1980). While some of the professional visitors criticised the lack of autonomy in the music machines, some of the school visitors thus denounced the lack of craft in the contemporary artworks.

The boundaries between popular and high art were further pointed out by journalists who criticised the absence of ‘industrial entertainment electronics’ in general or a ‘Music Express’ [a kind of amusement ride] in particular. In their view, these would be the more appropriate contemporary counterparts to the fairground organs of the past (Geitel Reference Geitel1980; Sattler Reference Sattler1980). Several newspaper articles evoked this popular dimension when they borrowed their titles from a salacious Marlene Dietrich song about Lola and her pianola (Göpfert Reference Göpfert1980; Nicol Reference Nicol1980). A recurrent line in the song is that Lola does not let anybody touch her pianola, which leads us to another important dimension of fascination: the activation of the music automata and sound art works.

A shared characteristic of music automata and contemporary artworks relying on automated motion is that they have to be switched on. Once they are switched on, however, they move all by themselves without any human intervention. Similar to the musical automata, the von Huene sculptures in Für Augen und Ohren were either on timers (e.g. Rosebud Annunciator) or switched on by staff upon request (e.g. Totem Tones) (Anon. Reference Anonymous1980; Label Reference Label1980; Ohff Reference Ohff1980; Stepken Reference Stepken1980). Joe Jones, however, installed his Music Store as a replica of the original New York storefront with doorbells that activate the playing mechanisms of musical instruments behind a shop window. A journalist described how ‘bizarre musical instruments [could be] set in motion by pushing the bell’ (Busche Reference Busche1980). There is hardly any mention of Jones’s work without an explanation of how it was meant to be activated. It seems as though the few kinetic artworks in the show that could be activated by audience members have thus functioned as an important bridge between the music automata that could not be activated by visitors and the many interactive sound art works in the show (Die Wahrheit Reference Die Wahrheit1980). However, it also seems to have resulted in widespread disappointment about the impossibility of activating the historical music automata, among high school students in particular (Anon. Reference Anonymous1980). Also with regard to the contemporary exhibits, the students tended to get bored by ‘only having to observe things to find out that something is changing’ (Anon. Reference Anonymous1980). As one culture journalist noted: ‘you cannot experiment for yourself everywhere, because many of the more or less sounding exhibits (some are just to be looked at) only respond when they are set in motion’ (Nicol Reference Nicol1980).

Once the kinetic exhibits are set in motion, they appear to create considerable momentum in the exhibition space. One journalist described how, at the sound of Stephan von Huene’s Rosebud Annunciator, every 20 minutes, ‘the audience congregates just like with the Pied Piper of Hamelin to be enchanted by the xylophone, drums, cymbals, reeds, and other kinds of sound in the collage’ (Dieterich Reference Dieterich1980; Ohff Reference Ohff1980). She describes how his work put visitors ‘under a spell’, making them ‘pause as if it was a toy with magic powers’ (Dieterich Reference Dieterich1980). However, especially in terms of momentum, there appears to have been considerable competition from the historical front. Rather than paving the way into the main contemporary art exhibition, it seems that for some visitors the historical music section turned out to be the most interesting part of the show. Another journalist recounted that whenever ‘the “Hupfeld-Orchestrion”, built in Leipzig around 1920, resounds with its “Hupfeld-Sinfonie-Jazz-Orchester”, all those that have only just been … looking around the “Music Store” of Joe Jones, rush over to indulge in the well-known tunes rendered by punched tape, tubular bells, and wooden drum’ (Stone Reference Stone1980; see also Lang Reference Lang1981 and Die Wahrheit Reference Die Wahrheit1980). In this direct confrontation, the historical music automaton appears to have been a bigger attraction than the contemporary kinetic artwork. One critic gave a more personal account of how in his view the show presented ‘the sonic dream of automated music, of a non-human sound production … The bliss of a musician comes together with the joy of tinkering … The sounding environments of our days just bleat at the listener, and do not please the viewer aesthetically either’ (Geitel Reference Geitel1980). These visitors appear to have appreciated their encounters with the historical music automata more than those with the contemporary kinetic artworks.

A culture journalist suggested that this predilection for the historical may have to do with different experiential accessibilities. She argues that in contrast to the contemporary artworks, and the interactive ones in particular, ‘a pianola or a fairground organ, a music box decorated with figurines and an old gramophone are … easy to listen to and understand’ (Nicol Reference Nicol1980; see also Flemig Reference Flemig1980). However, it may be a matter not only of accessibility, but also of a certain nostalgia that draws people into the historical section, where fairground organs remind them of youthful experiences on fun fairs or childhood memories with the family music box (visitors in Lang Reference Lang1981). Another music critic described how ‘you can set these music automata in motion, operate a switch, remember a childhood – not just your own’ (Bachmann Reference Bachmann1980; visitors in Lang Reference Lang1981; also Ohff Reference Ohff1980 and Egelkraut Reference Egelkraut1980). This nostalgia also comes to the fore in a leisure visitor’s statement about the changes that recording technologies have meant to his or her music listening. This visitor appreciates

While this visitor appears to harbour a certain scepticism towards the mechanical, he or she is truly resentful of the loudspeaker as the epitome of the popular music industry of his or her time. Quite a few other visitors referred to their predilection for the romanticism, the volume and the cheerfulness of the ‘mechanical instruments from the “good old times” making music without musicians’, in contrast to the coldness, the ‘plinky-plonky’, or the absurdity of the contemporary artworks in the show (Anon. Reference Anonymous1980; Brenken Reference Brenken1980; Sattler Reference Sattler1980; visitor in Lang Reference Lang1981).

5 KINETIC NOSTALGIA: CONCLUSIONS

By staging the kinetic, as our argument underscores, curators of exhibitions that showcase historical music automata alongside contemporary sound art allow their visitors to draw on a wider cultural fascination with automated movement to guide their explorations of the contemporary artworks. The curators of Für Augen und Ohren, Ballet Mécanique and Art or Sound specifically staged the kinetic by activating music automata, by emphasising the kinetic in their art historical narratives and by placing sculptures relying on automated movement throughout their exhibitions. They thereby put the kinetic at the service of establishing links between the cultures of ‘high art’ and of ‘popular art’, if not seeking to overcome this distinction altogether.

Obviously, not all visitors to Für Augen und Ohren were convinced of the sensitising power of the kinetic. While several art world professionals were concerned about the autonomy of ‘high art’ in an exhibition also showcasing ‘popular art’, several leisure visitors complained about the lack of skill in the artworks presented. Most of the professional and leisure visitors, however, embraced the combination of music automata and sound art. The curators’ staging of the kinetic appears to have appealed to a range of cultural fascinations in line with visitors’ personal listening habitus, and this shaped their approach to the contemporary artworks. We have shown how the kinetic appears to have spoken to visitors’ fascination with the magic of hidden automation, the wondrous workings of mechanical systems, and the challenging of aesthetic, normative, and philosophical boundaries. Taking into account the listening habitus of the visitors, we found that personal experiences with fun fairs, music boxes and popular music in the age of large-scale musical reproduction may have evoked a certain nostalgia for the historical music automata as well.

In 1968, curator Willoughby Sharp suggested that the major function of kinetic artworks ‘is providing information about how to adapt our extended faculties to technology’ (Sharp Reference Sharp1968: 6). Kinetic artworks may indeed help our senses to process experiences generated by new technologies. Our research also shows, however, that visitors’ experiences of kinetic artworks have themselves also changed due to the proliferation of recording technologies and the transformations these have brought about in popular culture. This has led visitors to romanticise the mechanical ways of music-making in opposition to the electronic music industry of the 1980s. Our findings suggest that this nostalgia has reinforced some visitors’ fascination with historical music automata to shape their approach to contemporary kinetic sound works. For other visitors, however, their nostalgia appears to have gotten in the way, precluding a more substantial engagement with the artworks. The curatorial strategy, then, may backfire when these visitors prove to be so fascinated by the historical music automata that they are no longer willing to demonstrate or capable of demonstrating an interest in the contemporary artworks on display. In other words, instead of providing sensory openings, the staging of the kinetic also comes with the risk of limiting visitors’ room for imagination.

Even though the curators have made quite some effort to prepare their audience’s senses, not all of the visitors could get access to, let alone appreciate, the kinetic artworks’ sounds. This suggests that there are limitations to sensitisation strategies in which sound does not play the leading role. For many visitors, however, the curators’ staging of the kinetic did provide an important experiential stepping stone towards the more contemporary artworks. Landy’s appeal to composers and artists to provide something to hold on to can thus be extended to curators and organisers. Moreover, Landy has already acknowledged in passing that the presentation strategies for electroacoustic music and sound art, or ‘the social placement of works of organized sound’ (Landy Reference Landy2007: 61, see also 28), also play an important role in access questions. We have shown that curators’ staging of the kinetic went far beyond providing listening instructions or information about the artists’ intentions, as they prepared visitors’ senses by letting their historical fascination come to life. It might thus be interesting for organisers in the field of electroacoustic music to dive into cultural history to carve out similar fascinations; for example, with the acousmatic listening situation. We believe that this could provide something to hold on to for listeners – something which is neither just about the context of the works nor about the works themselves, but about ways to quite literally make sense of the works.