SEE THIS SOUND. Promises in Sound and Vision

28 August 2009 - 10 January 2010 Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz

The quiet halls of the museum are a thing of the past. Instead, music and sounds are heard everywhere, as visual artists today take for granted the integration of the world of sounds in their works. The former hegemony of the visual has meanwhile given way a diverse interplay of image and sound.

The first pioneers in this expanded field of artistic work already emerged during the 1920s. The alleged hierarchy of the senses, reflection on perceptions, and the search for synergies were the greatest challenges. "Media Art" later became a means of socio-political engagement and a topos of the avant-garde. Major technical changes in media, audio-visual experiments and the charged relationship between narration and abstraction led again and again to new ways of working.

The exhibition See this Sound aims to make several important aspects of this manifold and diverse relationship between image and sound accessible in an interdisciplinary way. The exhibition also conjoins exemplary artistic works and cultural-historical perspectives. Cooperation with the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute Media.Art.Research makes it possible to integrate specific issues of media history and research perspectives in the exhibition in so-called interdisciplinary "information spaces". The exhibition thus presents not only technical, perceptional and media-reflexive aspects of the coupling of image and sound from the beginning up to the present, but also poetic conceptual aspects that are important to contemporary visual artists today. These are intended to mutually contour one another and illustrate differentiations.

In addition to the research focal points of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute, which will be given an extensive scholarly treatment within the framework of an online platform, there are variously focused brackets to present the issues of contemporary visual art and developments in everyday culture. These can be regarded as differently "tuned" spaces, in which the themes of the works result in a joint "sound". The topical fields of reference range here from pop culture to the theory of perception and media technology. See this Sound is an exploration of the present and the past of the conjunction of image and sound in art, media and perception.

Artists:
Laurie Anderson, Martin Arnold, Atelier Hopfmann (Judith Hopf und Deborah Schamoni), John Baldessari, Gottfried Bechtold, Jordan Belson, Manon de Boer, George Brecht, Mary Ellen Bute, John Cage, Ira Cohen, Tony Conrad, Kevin Cummins, Josef Dabernig, Jeremy Deller, E.A.T. - Experiments in Art and Technology, Einstürzende Neubauten, Viking Eggeling, VALIE EXPORT, Oskar Fischinger, Andrea Fraser, William Furlong, Kerstin von Gabain, Jack Goldstein, Douglas Gordon, Andrew Gowans, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Granular Synthesis, Brion Gysin, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Gary Hill, Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, Heidrun Holzfeind, Derek Jarman, Jutta Koether, DIE KRUPPS, Peter Kubelka, Louise Lawler, Bernhard Leitner, LIA, Alvin Lucier, Len Lye, George Maciunas, Christian Marclay, Norman McLaren, Jonas Mekas, Michaela Melián, Robert Morris, Christian Philipp Müller, Wolfgang Müller, Max Neuhaus, Carsten Nicolai, Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Nam June Paik, Nam June Paik & Jud Yalkut, Norbert Pfaffenbichler & Lotte Schreiber, Rudolf Pfenninger, Adrian Piper, Mathias Poledna, Hans Richter, Jozef Robakowski, David Rokeby, Constanze Ruhm / Ekkehard Ehlers, Walter Ruttmann, Peter Saville, Michael Snow, Imogen Stidworthy, Matt Stokes, Nina Stuhldreher, Atsuko Tanaka, Test Department, TeZ, Throbbing Gristle, Tmema (Golan Levin und Zachary Lieberman), Ultra-red, Steina Vasulka, Ryszard Wasko, Peter Weibel, Hans Weigand, Herwig Weiser, James Whitney, La Monte Young, La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela.