Supported by Mifal Hapais Arts and Culture Council.
Amnon Wolman is a sound artist, professor of composition and experimental composer active since the early 1980s. Wolman’s work is wide ranging and includes electro-acoustic works, pieces for various ensembles and soloists, operas, computer-based music, text works, sound installations, performance art and artistic collaborations with artists from various fields. His works have been exhibited in galleries, museums, concert halls, experimental spaces, clubs, street events, dance performances and films. A Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor was created specifically for the Israeli Center for Digital Art in Holon , and incorporates fragments of previous works alongside a newly created series composed especially for the exhibition. The exhibit’s name seeks to envelope the entirely of the works displayed as one single non-permanent work of art that functions throughout the acoustic space of the Center, as a non-linear acoustic composition.
The composition divides the Center’s space into two floors: on the first, a visual overload that produces sounds; on the second, which acts as a music box, an area with subdued visuals but overloaded with cluttered sounds. The apparent chaos created by Wolman on the first floor is intentional and orchestrated; to aid the visitor (who becomes a kind of a performer), a map is distributed in the lobby, acting as a score that the visitor may follow. Since the works are played together and share an acoustic space, the score enables the auditor a passage between the works according to a time and space map, thus producing a soundtrack that is always different, yet always in concordance with the composer’s intention. But in Wolman’s view, this map is not indispensable and he readily allows any improvisation of the route taken through the space. According to Wolman, this map exists in its own right – as a stand-alone piece – and exposes the two central issues that thread through all his works: mechanisms of power and time information. A perfect example of these concerns can be observed in the series SoundBook – Architecture(2014), which is displayed in the exhibition. In this series, Wolman perforated holes in several volumes of art and architecture books, placed the volumes on audio speakers and allowed sound to stream through them. The sound, consisting of recordings of the texts within the books alongside his own interpretations, changes when the viewer browses through the book in exploration of the cuts made in the paper. Putting the viewer as though in the depths of an archeological excavation, Wolman seeks primarily to point out what doesn’t exist in the common and acceptable narrative. He emphasizes what is not in a particular canon, and sheds light on what is forbidden or on what seems not important enough to attract the eyes of historians. Wolman’s books are intimate, their subdued voice searching for the listener’s attention, his touch, her proximity.
Another new series addressing the same subject is SoundTallit (2014). In it, Wolman embedded speakers into six prayer shawls (tallit) and hung them from the ceiling. The prayer shawls contain low-volume sounds contents that, in order to be heard, require listeners to wrap themselves in the tallit. While in Orthodox Judaism the prayer shawls are used only by men, in Wolman’s work anyone may wear them, including women, regardless of their religion. The SoundTallit series is part of a long study by Wolman about the speaker’s function as an integral part of the sound it produces.
Regarding that matter, Wolman quotes the American composer Henry Brant, who said (during a lecture in the ’80s that Wolman attended) that composers of electronic music should bring along to each and every one of their concerts their own speakers, in the same way that violin or flute players use their own instruments. According to Brant, this is directly linked to an intimate familiarity with the instrument, and in the case of electronic music composers, their performance tool is the speaker. Wolman agrees with him, believing that a composer should foster an intimate familiarity with the audio speakers that perform his work. A Piece for two floors and a Corridordisplays more objects that engulf their own speakers, such as a wedding dress (Speakers’ wedding dress, 2014), three petticoats (Speakers’ petticoats, 2014) and a military jacket (Speakers’ Army Jacket, 2006), each allowing the listener to be wrapped in the same way.
The presence of masculine nudity in Wolman’s work also functions as a tool in the artist’s investigations on time information and power mechanisms. His work The red but stops here, which is part of the exhibition and was premiered at the Tmuna Theatre in 2000 (Israel), serves as a good example. As is The Diaries of Andy Warhol (1994), a performance work that revolves around an eleven-hour techno party and includes sound, video and numerous participants. Warhol’s influence over Wolman can be seen not only in the gay sexuality foregrounded in the work, but also in his adoption of collaborative strategies from Warhol’s work with the Velvet Underground, where long sessions of improvisation and video projection took place. Wolman’s collaborations with other artists usually take similar forms: he defines the framework but leaves enough space for improvisation and personal interpretation. This open structure can also be seen in work from Wolman’s long association with Musica Nova Ensemble and in his diverse performance pieces.
Live performers (players, dancers) are also integrated into the first floor as part of the presented sound works. The surprise encounter with them, without preliminary notice that a “performance” is taking place, is a crucial element in the work itself. Performance art has long been positioned at the forefront of the contemporary museum by artists such as Marina Abramovich and Tino Segahl; by bringing sound-performance works to the space of a museum, Wolman seeks to investigate something new. Wolman presents the creative process and research elements as integral parts of the final work, and by positioning his performative sound act – without any changes made to it – inside the museum, he wishes to align the concert hall with the museum in order to examine ‘what will happen.’ The beginning of Wolman’s performance is not contingent on the arrival or ongoing presence of an audience; the performance will take place even without any museum visitor, in the same way that a sound installation will occur when no one experiences it. And the timings of these pieces is not predetermined; when they are not being performed, Wolman chooses to present their residue, not just as an object that signifies presence, but also as a presentation of the working process itself, in a move that blurs the limits between the artistic process and the final product.
This discussion is inseparable from the discussion surrounding ‘What is Art?’, which began following the presentation of Duchamp’s urinal in 1917 and continued on from American composer John Cage’s revolutionary 1952 piece 4’33’’, which defined ’silence’ – or more accurately the noise that surrounds us – as music. Cage’s provocative move enabled the process of listening to silence, transforming silence into a compositional element in the world of music.[1] In fact, what used to be considered as ‘noise’ up until then, such as the sound of humming light bulbs or the sound of a car passing by a window, became music according to Cage’s definition. Wolman suggests a complementary, formulation to what has happened since then – an opposite configuration, in fact, that defines music as part of the ‘noise’ that surrounds us. Wolman also notes that music – music written as music – is perceived by us today as a form of noise: as when we hear music coming from a passing car, or from a house as someone practices the trombone, or even from someone’s headphones standing next to us. In this flood of music, music turns into a kind of noise – something that doesn’t require our full attention and thus can be overlooked. As far as Wolman is concerned, music as noise is also a material to use in the hands of a sound artist. As such, music becomes a form of sound not necessarily with a constant musical presence.
Wolman’s piece for the Center for Digital Art in Holon elaborates on these ideas and particularly on the concept of ‘Composition for Museum,’ introduced by Cage in a series of experiments he did during the last years of his life. The peak of these experiments was his piece from 1993 named Rolywholyover A Circus, a composition for museum he created for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MoCA).[2] Through such work, Cage confronted the question ’What is Art?’ Wolman expands on the discussion to include sound as material and as a museum-based medium. Whereas the space of listening in a standard musical piece is divided into two parts – the piece itself and the acoustic world surrounding it – Cage united these parts by observing art and life as one. Wolman continues with this observation while shedding new light on the non-linear dimension of time. He gives as an example the fact that, while a work of art can supposedly contain within itself a certain historical, social or intra-artistic discourse narrative, the action of looking or listening takes place in present time. A memory relates in part or whole to a different time, but looking, listening and recalling all happen in the present. Wolman claims that when Cage introduced the continuum between the creation and its surrounding, he also clarified the supremacy of the present experience over the remembrance of the past. In other words, he emphasized the idea that memories are not organized in a chronological, fragmented order. Everything takes place simultaneously. The artistic discontinuity introduced by Cage is crucial to Wolman’s work. His imaginary sound scores, which ask the listener to imagine ordinary sounds based on written instructions, serve as excellent examples. These sounds can’t be heard de facto in the exhibition space but nonetheless take place in the listener’s mind. Both popular music discourse and the art world share this linear concept of time and hierarchical perspective of near and distant memories. In the composition Wolman created for the Center for Digital Art in Holon, he wishes above all to destabilize this conception of time.
Wolman eliminated the standard model of the exhibition’s labyrinth of display and granted the listener with a complete authority over his work, with the ultimate understanding that passing the creative torch to the visitor is a result of a decision that the work, in its entirety, will take place in the visitor’s mind. This action, which signals the disconnection between the artist and his work, is augmented by Wolman’s encouragement of the listener/viewer to take up a personal interpretive action. In a text from 1957 called “The Creative Act,” Marcel Duchamp describes the role of the spectator, through the encounter with a work of art, as the revival of the creative act – what he called the ’art coefficient.’ According to Duchamp, who read this text at the American Federation for Art’s conference in Houston, Texas (where he presented himself as “just an artist”), the work of art is created with the help of its viewer who animates the artwork and enables its meaning construction. The composition Wolman created for the Center for Digital Art in Holon is based exactly on this idea; it disassembles the museum’s normative power structures, which usually ask the viewer to absorb the art but not be part of its creative process (we naturally need to distinguish here between ‘activation’ as in the case of interactive art and the creation of intellectual space that the work is situated within).
A Piece for Two Floors and a Corridor is conceived as a dadaist composition enabling anything from everything, simultaneously, without any hierarchy or concrete organization. In keeping with the dada aesthetic, Wolman’s work also makes use of the element of randomness. An excellent and amusing example is evident in the artist’s employment of phrases from road signs to name his pieces. ’No U Turn,’ ’Slow Down,’ ’Junction with minor side road’ and even ’Israeli, if you got to that point – you are wrong’ (the latter can be seen along the Israeli borders).
Wolman’s interests are always grounded in the personal: in his private experiences, and from his own point of view. Even his political and critical works don’t fall into traps such as generalization or didacticism. An exemplary instance of this can be observed in Falling Rocks – Tel Aviv, which was presented in Tel Aviv in 2011 (in the framework of the Loving Art series of events) as a version of a performance that he made in Chicago in 1997. At the core of this piece is a performance of four small cranes along with electronic sounds, which were recorded during a tour through the city, and later processed by the artist. The sound in Chicago differs from that of Tel Aviv, not by the urban noise each city generates, but by the political sphere it contains. In its Tel Aviv version, Wolman’s crane dance ended with a poem lamenting a blind Palestinian boy, whereas in its Chicago version it didn’t. The main difference between both versions of this piece may initiate a discussion on the influence of Israel’s politics on Wolman’s sound, but this is a discussion Wolman rejects or simply finds it irrelevant to his work. Wolman, who lived outside Israel for most of his adult life, returned to Israel ten years ago. This fact did enable the Israeli space to penetrate his work; however, the attempt to define what can be considered ’Israeli’ in Wolman’s work, forces an analysis that positions his practice in the middle of a common political-aesthetic discussion, and Wolman, who positioned himself at the artistic margins many years ago, refuses to follow common artistic discussions, even truly ’important’ ones. In Wolman’s practice everything is equally non/important and not/allowed, as long as its the product of an interesting experiment.
Liora Belford
[1] In Paris, at more or less the same time, the French composer Pierre Schafer did a similar move when he incorporated recordings into his pieces. Schafer called his new music ‘Concrete Music’ and was the first composer to mix such recordings.
2] Cage’s composition for the Museum of Contemporary Art was presented after his sudden death in 1992 by the museum’s curator, Julie Lazar, who had worked with him on this project since the end of 1989. The composition included four movements and revolved around a chance-operation computerized score which displaces canonical works alongside ordinary objects throughout the museum.
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