SOUND ART
ART-3375-TSAA: Special Topics in Art/Design
Students in this course will produce observational, performative, sculptural, and site-specific works of Sound Art, using sound, materials, and space as their palette. The class will focus its study on artists who primarily work with sound in the context of fine art and its surrounding discourses.
There are no prerequisites for this course, but if you are interested in experimental music, field recording, objecthood, sculpture, acoustic ecology, performance, sound walking, sound mapping, architecture, or conceptual art, you will likely enjoy this class.
More:
While the term “Sound Art” is not as old, the practice of using sound in the context of gallery-based visual arts as both material and concept stretches back over 100 years, and comes from various artists and art movements, such as Marcel Duchamp, the Futurists, Dada, and forward to the happenings of Fluxus, the Minimalists, specifically Robert Morris, and through to the procedural art making methods of John Cage and the countless artists he influenced. According to Alan Licht, the term “Sound Art” dates back to 1982 with the founding of William Hellermann’s Sound Art Foundation, which organized an early show of sound sculpture and other work at the Sculpture Center (NYC) in 1983. Around the turn of the 21st century, many more high profile exhibitions of sound art were mounted with varying curatorial approaches serving to further broaden the use of the term. We will examine the use of the term carefully and draw our own conclusions about its utility, while exploring the use of sound to unlock sculptural, architectural, material, and conceptual potentials.
Questions? Email jgfarrow@troy.edu
