The Sonic Turn: Sound and Idea in Contemporary Art

(Hardback)

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The Sonic Turn explores the genesis of sound art in John Cages encounter with Marcel Duchamp, and follows it through Fluxus and minimalism to the installation practices of Max Neuhaus, liane Radigue, La Monte Young, and Alvin Lucier. It presents a philosophical genealogy of sound art since the 1950s, situating it as an alternative to the conceptual art practices that have dominated the art world for the past half century. The book goes on to consider the tensions between conceptualism and materialism in contemporary sound art, examining non-cochlear and materialist tendencies in the work of Maryanne Amacher, Jennie C. Jones, Carsten Nicolai, Mattin, Toshiya Tsunoda, Peter Ablinger, Emeka Ogboh, and others. Alongside minimalism, postminimalism, and conceptualism, sound art challenged modernisms celebration of opticality, instantaneity, and autonomy, advancing Marcel Duchamps demand for a non-retinal art. Yet while conceptualism pursued the dematerialization of the art object by way of the concept, the idea, language, and discourse, sound art explored an expanded notion of matter understood as a profusion of energetic fluxes. Conceptualism was readily linked with theories of discourse and textuality that dismissed or foreclosed any notion of a nondiscursive reality. Within this theoretical paradigm, the material and phenomenological concerns of sound art were regarded as nave or retrograde, and, for decades, sound art was relegated to a minor status. The resurgence of sound art in the late 1990s, the book argues, was enabled by the waning of the linguistic turn and the renewal of realist and materialist theoretical projects.

Author Bio

Christoph Cox is Professor of Philosophy at Hampshire College, USA. He is the author of Sonic Flux: Sound, Art, and Metaphysics (2018) and Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (1999), and co-editor of Realism Materialism Art (2015) and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Bloomsbury, 2017; Continuum, 2004).