Voice as Art

From Theatre to Forensics

Richard Couzins

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000578171
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Art General

Voice as Art considers how artists have used human voices since they became reproducible and entered art discourse in the twentieth century.

The discussion embeds artworks using voices within historical and theoretical contexts in a comparative overview arguing that reproduction caused increased creativity moving from acting to creating phonic materials framed by phenomenological deep listening by early video and performance to the plurality and sampling of postmodernism and the multiple angles of contemporary forensic listening. This change is an example of how artistic practice reveals the ideologies of listening. Using a range of examples from Hugo Ball, Martha Rosler, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Janet Cardiff and Mike Kelley through to contemporary practice by Shilpa Gupta, The Otolith Group and Elizabeth Price, the voice is tracked through modernism and postmodernism to posthumanism in relation to speaking subjects, sculptural objects, documents, dramaturgical utterance, forensic evidence, verbatim techniques and embodied listening.

This book gives artists, researchers and art audiences ways to understand how voices exist in between theoretical discourses, and how with their utterances, artists create new dispositions in space by reworking genres to critique cultural form and meaning. This book will be of great interest to students and practitioners of sound art, visual culture and theatre and performance.

1 One hundred years of voice in art practice

DOI: 10.4324/9780429351266-2

This book listens and looks at how artists use voices, and this chapter introduces the historical and cultural contexts through which the voice emerged in modernism, and throughout the twentieth century, and how this has influenced the use of the human voice in contemporary art. Most humans have a voice, and we may have heard the voices of famous artists, but historically this was not usually a central aspect of their artistic practice. The aesthetics of the voice are more commonly associated with acting and singing, and otherwise, the voice can become something unnoticed in its familiarity. However, this situation is changing as contemporary artists find a wide potential for vocal practices. In some examples, the voice is exhibited like a sculptural object, but it is more the case that voices have become accepted into the wider perceptual logic of art practice. Whilst some vocal performances are in the category of the virtuoso, others might be everyday utterances, overheard, recorded, found or sampled. We are more familiar with the physical and conceptual frames provided for voice on stage, screen and media than with the many ways and places voices are heard in contemporary art as the voice has a more clearly defined history in media, theatre or cinema (where it was heard for the first time in 1927). All these different histories inform any history of voice in art practice.

The voice is paradoxical, for example, being both noise and meaning, or between object and subject, it is a separate entity but also integral to a system of communication. Thus, the voice is more than one thing at once, or in a state of ‘inbetween-ness’ as described by Macpherson and Thomaidis (2015: 3). The discussion in this book always keeps this in mind when considering artists’ work using the voice. The question becomes how artists frame the conceptual and physical aspects of the voice. This chapter looks at four disparate works by Hugo Ball (1886–1927), Martha Rosler (b. 1943), Charlotte Podger (b. 1974) and Forensic Architecture (founded by Eyal Weizman (b. 1970) in 2010) to assess how artists’ use of the voice developed through, and beyond, modernism. The introduction of these works in a historical context underpins further theoretical positions that emerge and are used throughout the book. Three of the four works are made at either end of a 100-year period (from 1916 to 2021) with Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) in the centre (although Rosler remains active in contemporary art practice through to the present). The voice is always the same and yet always different and the intention is to ask how voices differ across history by examining their presence in these artists’ works. What is different about the vocal utterances of Charlotte Prodger in 2016, Martha Rosler in 1975 or Hugo Ball in 1916 given that the artists are all placing their own voice in the work?

This introduction provides the historical background to the voice emerging within visual art practice alongside theatre, performance, cinema, radio and telephone voices; practices that eventually cross over within the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary art and culture. So the main arc for the voice in theatre may be the performance of actors, whereas art often appropriates existing voices using recordings. But these are not strict divides as can be seen in the case of performance art that privileges live performance, for example, Marina Abramović, or when theatre uses recordings, for example, The Wooster Group, or in contemporary examples such as verbatim techniques (vocal recordings exploiting the indexical quality of sound recording in similar ways to how a photograph represents the visual) used by artists, theatre and filmmakers, for example, Gillian Wearing, Alecky Blythe and Clio Barnard.

How have the ideas of modernism developed through Hugo Ball’s Karawane (1916), Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), Charlotte Prodger’s BRIDGIT (2016) and Forensic Architecture’s Killing in Umm al-Hiran (2018) and do these works show the influence of historical modernism during this 100-year period? In these works, all the artists use voice to engage politically within the historical and cultural milieu in which the works were made: Karawane is a sound poem performed at the Cabaret Voltaire in response to World War One; Semiotics of the Kitchen is a videotape in which the artist faces the camera to deliver a list of kitchen utensils as a sarcastic feminist critique; BRIDGIT is a contemporary essay film in which we cannot see who is voicing a series of thoughts, including around the everyday inequities of queer identity; and Killing in Umm al-Hiran provides a forensic looking and listening to documentary evidence of an attack on a village. The voice is paramount in politics for both those who hold power and those who do not. Philosopher Giorgio Agamben uses the philosophical terms zoe (bare life) and bios (political communal life) to think about how everyday situations move into larger political power structures. This can be seen in the duality of voices between bodily sound and language and can be applied to the political aspects of how these artists use voices. Law, religion and politics require the sound of the voice for their rituals and procedures, and the use of voices in these artists’ works exist within and against such contexts; the governments of 1916, the television and media in the 1970s, contemporary Middle Eastern politics and the disconnect of queer identity in the contemporary world.

Because vocal utterance is so inculcated with communication, it is primarily received as a form of direct address, where the phatic sound of a voice opens up a line of communication. However, this is questioned across artistic and philosophical discourses. For example, in daily experiences, intonation changes the meaning of any word spoken, or philosophically Mladen Dolar points to the contradictory approaches of Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, where ‘for Derrida, the essence of the voice lies in auto-affection and self-transparency’ and ‘Lacan tries to disentangle from its core object as an interior obstacle to (self-) presence’ (2006: 42). When we listen to the voices of Ball, Prodger and Rosler, and the voices of the victims in Killing in Umm al-Hiran, how direct is the address, and therefore, what factors are physically and conceptually framing voices?

Karawane (1916)

When Hugo Ball took the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire, he used his voice to deliver a ‘sound poem,’ the sounds of which were not recognisable as the sounds of any particular language. Whilst this conforms to the shock of the Dada method, scholars have suggested many ways of reading this work. Ball worked amongst a group of artists involved in the construction of modernism and was influenced by the ideas of poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and painter Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky’s work indicated the beginnings of abstraction and non-objective art, as well as experiments with writing, which relate to the sounds Ball made with his voice. Ball problematised the conduit of meaning provided by the voice and just as Kandinsky withdraws depiction from his visual images, Ball spoke of his voice as a plastic medium like paint:

Figure 1.1 Hugo Ball, Karawane, 1916. Courtesy of akg-images.

We have now driven the plasticity of the word to the point where it can scarcely be equaled. We achieved this at the expense of the rational, logically constructed sentence and also by abandoning documentary work.

(Hugo Ball, 1996: 67)

Kandinsky influenced Ball in the way he spoke of a unifying crossover of form between linguistic and visual realms,

Language no longer functions as a keyboard, the word frees itself from the stock-taking of reality, and a combination of words … Materialises into a thing that approaches painting and thus returns to the material form with which the painter is familiar.’

(1981: 4)

In formulating his ideas, Ball was also influenced by Marinetti’s futurist experiments with ‘sound poetry’ producing ‘words in freedom,’ such as Marinetti’s poem ‘Zang Tum Tum,’ and also by Tristan Zara’s ‘simultaneous poetry,’ which was also devised at the Cabaret Voltaire, in which several speakers recite poetry in different languages at the same time. Ball’s work is contemporaneous with modernist breaks in visual art, such as cubism breaking the picture plane out of renaissance perspective; on the other hand, his performance is framed by the history of the cabaret performance in which he participated in Berlin with his partner, the cabaret performer Emmy Hennings. In this sense, the cabaret stage is less like a blank canvas but is rather a suggestive palimpsestic space even before the performance begins. This relationship that voices have with space is developed through this book—how artists shape voices produced and performed by the mouth and the body, but also by the space in which voices are received, including the screen and gallery.

The Cabaret Voltaire, jointly founded by Ball, was a performance space rich in antecedents such as expressionist theatre, cabaret performance and Futurist experiments, and importantly these were transgressive spaces. Ball was an immigrant displaced by the political background of World War One, having left Germany for the neutrality of Switzerland, as a pacifist, to avoid being conscripted. In Zurich, he was amongst many similar thinkers who came together in devising the Cabaret Voltaire. In the first instance, his performance is most obviously read as a protest against the war using a vocal performance outside of language; the world was breaking down, therefore, language and logic were breaking down:

Every word spoken and sung here says at least this one thing: that this humiliating age has not succeeded in winning our respect.

(Ball, 1996: 61)

Rather than describe or enounce the problems of war, there is a radical break in language itself. A recurring theme in any study of voices is the problem of the reduction to a single material point or discourse and this becomes an issue for the universality of modernist ideas. The sound of spoken language is a noise that is considered differently to concepts that correspond to words, and this was theorised at the beginning of the twentieth century by Ferdinand De Saussure in his splitting of the sign into signifier and signified (the sound of utterance and the intended meaning). Marinetti was acknowledging such a split by placing ‘words in freedom’ whilst maintaining the spatial relationship of text to a page and provoking the question if, or how, the voice is released into freedom. Ball is engaged in such an endeavour, and this can help us consider how spaces frame voices. Ball describes the erosion of the sentence, but the sentence is more a structure of writing than speech (utterance is not defined by sentences) and this raises questions about the institutional dispositions that define and limit the freedom of voices. Artists and others have continued to explore this through to contemporary practice. Marinetti’s vocal sounds have a different logic to the recitations of Ball or Tzara. These works with vocal sound are all on the edge of recognisable language, but in tangibly different ways. To unpick this, it is helpful to reference Stephen Forcer’s (2012: 265) use of the term ‘glossolalia’ instead of nonsense when discussing Tristan Tzara’s poems, or Deborah Lewer’s discussion of iconoclasm in relation to Ball’s performance Karawane (1916).

When listening to voices we try to filter out noise that would stop the reception of a message. Ball’s intention is to emphasise this noise, a strategy that circumvents meaning in favour of vocal sound. Normally, the sound of a voice is the opening of communication, but Karawane is communication about the breakdown of communication. Although as Steven Connor notes, ‘[n]oise is accident, voice is intent’ (2014: 7), and Ball’s intentional refusal and breaking of language is part of Dadaist iconoclasm (for example, Marcel Duchamp advocated using the Mona Lisa as an ironing board). There is no recording of Ball’s performance, only a photograph and witness reports including Ball’s memoir. However, the event, and the photograph of Ball in his costume, has become iconic within art history. This has a certain irony as rather than producing iconic images, Dada was invested in iconoclasm, the need to smash images and instate new systems, and Ball’s vocal performance can be seen as iconoclastic. Deborah Lewer (2009: 29) has described Ball’s relationship to iconoclasm and states. ‘It can be argued that iconoclastic controversies are fundamentally about a conflict between the word and the image.’ She argues that Ball’s interest and knowledge of iconoclasm would come from its origin in theological texts whereby images get in the way of direct communion with God. Ball was not wholly secular in his thinking, becoming a catholic after the Dada period. As well as in religion, Mladen Dolar has noted the elevation of the primacy of the voice in other discourses such as politics and the law, and Ball’s vocal iconoclasm can be read in such terms.

democracy is a matter of immediacy, that is, of the voice; the ideal democracy would be the one where everybody could hear everybody else’s voice.

(Dolar, 2006: 109)

In the photograph, we see Ball next to music stands on which the texts of his poem rest. In his memoir Ball describes how he recited the poem.

I Zimbrabim. … The stresses became heavier, the expression intensified in the sharpening of the consonants. … Then I noticed that my voice had no other choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation, that style of liturgical singing, like that which wails in all the Catholic churches.

(Lewler, 2009: 29)

Ball’s comments on the vocal delivery of his poem raise questions about whether vocal sound can be received as a purely material noise divorced from other meanings. For example, does Ball’s adoption of a priestly performance make the importance of genre as fundamental as materiality? A similar example is the way in which modernist poet T.S. Eliot was said to recite his poetry like a ‘speak your weight machine’ to minimise his subjectivity in a modernist way. Ball’s performance encapsulates many questions that arise around the voice in reductive modernist experiments. Why do iconoclasts privilege the word over images? This all relates to the question of direct address posed by the artworks discussed in this chapter. The removal of the image by iconoclasm can also be related to the removal of the source of the voice as a visual image—the mouth, a speaking subject and so on.

Here, the four examples in this chapter diverge; we would have seen Ball speaking directly in 1916, Rosler is a recorded direct address to camera, Prodger’s voice is acousmatic (the source is hidden—a theoretical idea discussed later) and in Killing in Umm al-Hiran, the sound and image are directly present in confusing images of an attack with their meaning being forensically questioned. The most direct form of address is circumstantial and is found in the perceptual mix of existence rather than in pursuing a reduction to one perceptual aspect as is implicit in modernist methods. The metaphor of a machine for T.S. Eliot’s vocal delivery uses an outdated form of technology yet one that is prescient of the contemporary environment that is filled with such ‘machine voices.’ Eliot attempts to efface his own voice, just as Tristan Tzara was trying to be unsentimental in his utterance. This type of delivery is also found in Rosler’s deadpan delivery and is common for artists to speak in ways that are demonstrably something other than acting. Actual examples bring into relief the difficulty of pinning down the voice to a single discourse.

Ball’s performance has many nuances; it is personal, it is part of a critical mass and it is the product of a wider political situation, and these different registers comply with the polyvalence of voices emp...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 One hundred years of voice in art practice
• 2 Dramaturgical performances, documentary utterances and vocal objects
• 3 Art, emotion and the location of voices
• 4 Phenomenology of voice
• 5 Plural voices: Postmodernity, subjectivity and sampling
• 6 Listening to voice
• Conclusion: Voice and contemporary practice
• Index