Exhibition
À bruit secret - Das Hören in der Kunst
Museum Tinguely
Paul Sacher-Anlage
1, 4058 Basel
The fourth in a series of five themed exhibitions at the Museum Tinguely, which explores the world of the human senses in an experimental way.
Event details
From February 22 to May 14, 2023, the show focuses on our auditory sense, which plays an important role in the multisensory experience of art. It offers a variety of art-historical, immersive as well as interactive encounters with sound worlds of this earth, both known and unknown to us. Historical works as well as works realized especially for this exhibition by around 25 international artists encourage the audience to listen closely and thereby also open up acoustic realms that normally remain hidden to the human ear. What does the soundscape of the Rhine in Basel sound like, or what does it sound like under the surface of the ocean? Can city noise or animal and human voices be used as visual-sculptural material? How do the sounds of the primeval forest change in the course of the influences of man and climate change? Can sound waves be perceived other than through the ears, and how can acoustic phenomena be represented visually? Sculptures, multimedia installations, photographs, works on paper, and paintings from the Baroque period to the present will be on display.
The acoustic world consists of a variety of sounds of the most diverse kind, which surrounds the human being like a universal "composition". Auditory experiences evoke subjectively and socio-culturally strongly different emotions, memories and associations, which are also subject to historical changes. Since the late 1960s, scientists such as the Canadian composer and sound researcher Raymond Murray Schafer have been concerned with the subdivision of our acoustic environment into so-called soundscapes: This basically distinguishes between three types of soundscapes: natural, technical, and human, which includes not only the voice but also music. Since the beginning of the 20th century at the latest, the acoustic landscape determined by machine and technology has become more and more predominant and has invaded the original sound of nature almost everywhere in this world. R. Murray Schafer called for a sensitization of our sense of hearing and also laid the foundations for so-called ecoacoustics, the recording and research of the sonorous changes in our ecosystems caused by environmental influences and human intervention.
The show À bruit secret draws inspiration from this call to perceive the diversity of sounds in a more nuanced way. With the help of multimedia artworks, the museum audience is immersed in various soundscapes of this earth. In the process, they encounter works in which the element of water, nature animated by plants and animals, language as the basis of communication, and the dissonant noise of large metropolises play a role.
Right at the beginning, the newly realized audio installation Il reno (2023) by German sound artist Christina Kubisch takes us into a fascinating world of noise. Hundreds of meters of blue copper cable form minimalist sound windows in the large glazed Passarelle la Barca overlooking the Rhine and the city of Basel. Only through the special induction headphones Kubisch has developed, underwater sounds of the Rhine can be heard while walking along and listening to the electric cables.
In the following room, exemplary works of the early avant-gardes of the 20th century are gathered alongside the readymade À bruit secret (With Hidden Noise) by Marcel Duchamp (1916/1964). The noise of motorized and industrialized everyday life, collages of word fragments and sound poems, as well as the destructive soundscape of World War I become important motifs in the art of Italian Futurists such as Fortunato Depero or Tommaso Filippo Marinetti and the Merz artist Kurt Schwitters. In 1913, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo pleads for using the shrill sound "...of the streetcar, the explosion engine, the wagons and the noisy people" as acoustic-aesthetic material.
Especially after the Second World War, musicians, composers and visual artists collaborate across disciplines. Any sounds of our everyday life, the diversity of our voices and languages, urban noise, but also silence become artistic material. Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, and Hermann Goepfert have defined found, fleeting, and usually dissonant sound as sculptural material, with which they experiment in space and simultaneously challenge our visual and acoustic perception. In addition to objets trouvés and electric motors that are part of their sound sculptures, devices that record and play back sound, such as the radio, also become artistic media.
For the first time ever in Switzerland, Robert Rauschenberg's Environment Oracle (1962-1965) will be presented at Museum Tinguely. A 5-part assemblage of various found objects from which cacophonous radio sounds resound and in which even water flows.
Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.
The acoustic world consists of a variety of sounds of the most diverse kind, which surrounds the human being like a universal "composition". Auditory experiences evoke subjectively and socio-culturally strongly different emotions, memories and associations, which are also subject to historical changes. Since the late 1960s, scientists such as the Canadian composer and sound researcher Raymond Murray Schafer have been concerned with the subdivision of our acoustic environment into so-called soundscapes: This basically distinguishes between three types of soundscapes: natural, technical, and human, which includes not only the voice but also music. Since the beginning of the 20th century at the latest, the acoustic landscape determined by machine and technology has become more and more predominant and has invaded the original sound of nature almost everywhere in this world. R. Murray Schafer called for a sensitization of our sense of hearing and also laid the foundations for so-called ecoacoustics, the recording and research of the sonorous changes in our ecosystems caused by environmental influences and human intervention.
The show À bruit secret draws inspiration from this call to perceive the diversity of sounds in a more nuanced way. With the help of multimedia artworks, the museum audience is immersed in various soundscapes of this earth. In the process, they encounter works in which the element of water, nature animated by plants and animals, language as the basis of communication, and the dissonant noise of large metropolises play a role.
Right at the beginning, the newly realized audio installation Il reno (2023) by German sound artist Christina Kubisch takes us into a fascinating world of noise. Hundreds of meters of blue copper cable form minimalist sound windows in the large glazed Passarelle la Barca overlooking the Rhine and the city of Basel. Only through the special induction headphones Kubisch has developed, underwater sounds of the Rhine can be heard while walking along and listening to the electric cables.
In the following room, exemplary works of the early avant-gardes of the 20th century are gathered alongside the readymade À bruit secret (With Hidden Noise) by Marcel Duchamp (1916/1964). The noise of motorized and industrialized everyday life, collages of word fragments and sound poems, as well as the destructive soundscape of World War I become important motifs in the art of Italian Futurists such as Fortunato Depero or Tommaso Filippo Marinetti and the Merz artist Kurt Schwitters. In 1913, the Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo pleads for using the shrill sound "...of the streetcar, the explosion engine, the wagons and the noisy people" as acoustic-aesthetic material.
Especially after the Second World War, musicians, composers and visual artists collaborate across disciplines. Any sounds of our everyday life, the diversity of our voices and languages, urban noise, but also silence become artistic material. Artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, and Hermann Goepfert have defined found, fleeting, and usually dissonant sound as sculptural material, with which they experiment in space and simultaneously challenge our visual and acoustic perception. In addition to objets trouvés and electric motors that are part of their sound sculptures, devices that record and play back sound, such as the radio, also become artistic media.
For the first time ever in Switzerland, Robert Rauschenberg's Environment Oracle (1962-1965) will be presented at Museum Tinguely. A 5-part assemblage of various found objects from which cacophonous radio sounds resound and in which even water flows.
Note: This text was translated by machine translation software and not by a human translator. It may contain translation errors.
Further information
www.tinguely.ch/de/ausstellungen/ausstellungen/2023/hoersinn.html
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