SOUND AND SIGHT IN BRUCE NAUMAN'S OEUVRE by Adi Louria-Hayon A thesis submitted in ...

280 Pages·2013·1.01 MB·English

FOLDING SPACES AND POROUS BODIES: SOUND AND SIGHT IN
BRUCE NAUMAN’S OEUVRE

by

Adi Louria-Hayon

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Graduate Department of Art
University of Toronto

© Copyright by Adi Louria-Hayon 2013
FOLDING SPACES AND POROUS BODIES: SOUND AND SIGHT IN
BRUCE NAUMAN’S OEUVRE

Adi Louria-Hayon
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of Art
University of Toronto

2013
Abstract
This dissertation is tuned to the sonic procedures, sculptures, installations and drawings
created by American artist Bruce Nauman (b.1941) from 1965 to the present. Probing the
move from making sense to making sensual-sense in the interstice between sight and
audition, my study traces and contextualizes Nauman’s works in relation to the modernist
hegemony of the visual and its contemporary interruption by sound. From sculpting ears
or making his body a sonoric instrument producing soundscapes in the gallery space, to
composing theatrical cacophonies for the visitor to occupy, Nauman’s oeuvre marks a
history of sound art cultivated within the San Francisco Bay Area during the 1960s. This
historical unfolding links new relations between music and the plastic arts and is induced
by experimental and electroacoustic music, such as the work of Arnold Schoenberg,
Pierre Schaeffer, John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Luciano Berio, and the innovations of such
Minimalist composers as Steve Reich, La Monte Yonge, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass.
My study contends that Nauman’s use of sound challenges both the production of
art and its reception profoundly. By importing sound into the realm of vision, Nauman
questions the praxis of making sense under the assumed superiority of sight. No longer
mute, sonic objects abrogate the hierarchy of the senses and mark the move from the
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spatio-temporal settings of passive spectatorship to the medial topologies of the sensuous
perceiving body. Reckoned as “arguably the most internationally influential figure of his
generation of Americans” by MoMA curator Robert Storr in 1995, Nauman’s work
anticipates the move to the multisensual practices of Augmented Reality and New Media.
By contrasting the tight, almost synonymous relations between knowing, thinking, seeing
and appearing with the turn to the sonorous and the tactile, my study places Nauman’s
sonic objects within the tense relation between philosophical ideas of perception
entrenched in systems of signification and logic and those that pertain to the superiority
of the senses.

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Acknowledgments

The opportunity to finally write an acknowledgment to all the people who have supported
me in completing this dissertation is a source of pleasure. I would especially like to thank
those members of the University of Toronto Art Department who have encouraged and
stimulated my thoughts: my advisor, Mark A. Cheetham, whose intellectual support
knows no limits and whose critical insights were a source of valuable inspiration for me;
and my committee members, Louis Kaplan, whose thoughts and contagious enthusiasm
have brought much inspiration to this project, and Barbara Fischer, whose unwavering
forethought and acute attention have increased my own faith in this study. I am also
grateful to Elizabeth Legge for keeping her door open for students interrupting with
uncanny thoughts, and to John Paul Ricco, who exposed me to the writings of Jean-Luc
Nancy—for this, my eternal gratitude. To my teachers David Moos, for insisting on
problems of fragmentation, and Andy Patton, for thinking historical moments in
dispersion, I am sincerely obliged. And finally, to Linda Safran, my sincere gratitude for
her acute comments.
The nature of my research required frequent visits to the music faculty, where I
was fortunate to find open ears and open minds. I thank Joshua Pilzer, Robin Elliott, and
Mark Sallmen, whose course on the analysis of Schoenberg’s composition methods was
key to my understanding of Nauman’s visual and sonorous compositions. I thank my art
history colleagues and friends for being here, for sharing thoughts, and, equally, for
sharing their spirits and their accommodating personalities: Miriam Aronowitz, Sara
Angel, Julie Boivin, Leanne Carroll, Jackie Ford, Erika Loic, Jann Marson, and Sarah
Stanners. I also want to acknowledge the unforgettable artists who made the university a
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stimulating environment, and who were the first to support my train of thought: Mimi
Gellman, Nicole Collins, Josh Thorp, Lorna Bauer, David Court, and Irene Loughlin.
A dissertation can never be written without support, and I would like to thank the
University of Toronto for providing the infrastructure for my everyday research at
Robarts Library and at faraway archives. From traveling to Venice and New York in
order to closely examine the artworks, to researching archival material, my journey was
filled with fascinating encounters. I want to thank the welcoming individuals at the
Archives of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; MoMA Archives in New York; The
Judson Memorial Church Archives at The Fales Library and Special Collections, NYU;
and Sperone-Westwater Gallery, all of whom allowed me access to Nauman’s work. For
assisting my way through the dread of bureaucracy I thank Gaby Sparks, Vicky Dingillo,
Louise Kermode and Joanne Wainman.
My special gratitude to Alon Kol and Martha Baum. Alon is a pianist and
documentary film maker, and Martha is a violinist; their dedicated spirits and tuned ears
helped me trust my intuition in delineating Nauman’s sporadic sounds into annotated
structures. Thank you for your laborious efforts in inscribing these soundscapes into
formal notations.
And finally, to my closest and beloved one, Igal, for sharing this journey, for
taking care of Aharonnie, for taking care of me, I dedicate this work.

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Table of Contents

Introduction
The Orphic Interval
1—32

Chapter One
Echotechnicity: From Mute objects to Sonorous Bodies

From painting to performance sculpture – The techné of Bodies – Echoing my neighbor
– Nauman and instructive scores – Aspen: the magazine as medium – Improvisation
and Process – The medium is the message – How to grow sounds in visual
compositions: the visual doesn’t know it ……………………………………….34—80

Chapter Two
Acéphal Topographies: The Production of Indeterminate Instruments

Forced Perspective; And Again, Why Painting? – Nauman After Cage: Interrupting
the Ground; Producing Organs – Loosing My Mind: The New York Scene – Impeded
Vision – Deleuze After Boulez: The Striated and the Smooth – The Forgetting of
Ground.................................................................................................................82—159

Chapter Three
Topologies of the Interval; Touching Sound

Of Organs and Machines: Touching Upon Aristotle – Streaming Doubles: Sound and
Language – Mispronunciation – Music as Sculpture – Importing Fonologia Muiscale:
Berio in America – In-Between Reels: Reich’s Phase Shift – The Mechanics of
Language – Interruptive Tangibility – Compendium of Hands: Signing
Blindly/Singing Deafly – The Battle of Language with the Senses – Signing Chorda;
Sounding the Tabula Rasa …………………………..…..……………………161—244

Coda
Untying Sound Under Rule
246—257

Bibliography
258—274
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Introduction
The Orphic Interval

How can one get hold of a body?
I am already speechless

Jean Luc-Nancy, Corpus

For the 53rd International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, American multimedia
artist Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) composed two distinct yet corresponding installations:
Gironi and Days. Seven pairs of speakers in Days, and six pairs of speakers in Gironi,
were suspended behind two rows of white square sheets creating sound passageways for
the visitor to walk through. Veering between minimalist visual sensibility and sonic
spaces, Nauman’s installations exchanged visual contours for sounding bodies.
Reverberating the liminal framing of site perception, sonic intervals agitated
chronological measure. As the seven days of the week were spoken in random order over
the speakers, linear time became transposed. The sheets, marking prosaic and textual
spacing, became sonorous objects and brought forth the quandaries of creating musical
worlds and sounding bodies in a visual space.
Gironi and Days were displayed at the Università Iuav di Venezia at Tolentini and
the Università Ca’ Foscari respectively. In addition to the show at the United States
Pavilion, the three venues comprised a mini-retrospective of the artist’s work and
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celebration of his receipt of the Golden Lion Award. Curated by Carlos Basualdo and
Michael Taylor and entitled Topological Gardens, Nauman’s Venice display referenced
the complex relations between perception and creation.
Daniel Birnbaum, chief curator of the Venice Biennale, who bridged the many
pavilions and shows with a grand gesture of titling the entire exhibition Fare Mundi/
Making Worlds, also showcased the role of creation in thinking flexed multiplicities. Fare
Mundi/ Making Worlds reflects the quandary of multiplicity and creation as it appeared
on street posts, catalogues, and brochures in multiple languages. “It is interesting,” said
Birnbaum, “that Fare Mundi, Making Worlds, Weltenmachen, sounds very different in
different languages… in French Construire des Mondes sounds rather technical or
architectural, in English Making Worlds is very craftsman related, so it’s about making
things, in German or Swedish it is very grand, a little bit bombastic almost, in Swedish
[Skapa Världar] it is almost theological, as if it was about divine intervention. The
ambiguity about all these translations captures a lot when it comes to grasp what an artist
does… A world does not have to be a whole cosmology… but in all the languages it is
about creating things.”1
Creating things, or creating worlds, is making sense of the praxis. For Nauman,
creating a world requires making a spatial experiment out of sensuous perception. He
illuminates the difference between constructing concepts that dominate passive
perception, to activating percepts that untie the discrete senses from the tyranny of the
visual. My study is dedicated to exploring Nauman’s use of sound and his turn to the

1 Tim Griffin, “New Beginnings: Tim Griffin Talks with Daniel Birnbaum About the
Upcoming 53rd Venice Biennale,” Artforum International, 47.9 (May 2009), 162; Daniel
Birnbaum on ‘Making Worlds’ in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAAmglU-L00.
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sonorous. His preoccupation with hearing and making sounds in the gallery space is
intimately tied with problems transposed from the traditional dominancy of sight
perception, the mute viewing spaces of displaying art, and the artistic practice of making
objects, into an open process of untying sensuous perception.2 Nauman’s turn to the
sonorous provides a proposition for thinking about the role of the senses in the creation of
the world. At times, the sonorous in his works weakens set signification ingrained in a
united ground. In other instances, Nauman uses sound as a groundless medium to carve
out performative actions that determinedly avoid telos. Both trajectories maintain a tense
separation between the visual and the sonorous to yield unpredicated and unpredicted
results. Yet, the tension between the visual and the sonorous is hardly new and is
permeated by two opposing conceptual histories. The first stems from the harmonies of
the Pythagorean world-soul emanating from Plato’s philosophy through the modern
Cartesian subject; the second calls for structure without measure and is generated from
the myth of the Orphic sensual interval.

2 While several commentators undermined the dominancy of the visual in relation to the
modern subject, importing sound into the realm of the art historian, which still is
predominantly visual, I will address the tension between sight and sound in artistic
practice arguing that such tension is rooted within the encounters of rationalism and
empiricism, as within the slippages found in rationalist thinking alone. Penelope Gouk
argued for the separation of a Pythagorean-Platonic cosmology from music in the
seventeenth century’s move to a materialistic cosmology where soundscapes were
constitutive of physiological models that pertained to modern objectivity and culturally
neutral representations of both music and human nature. Veit Erlmann drew “the ear’s
intimacy with reason and modernity,” proving the Cartesian self-aware subject as an
experienced hearing subject tuned to resonant waves. See Gouk, “Raising Spirits and
Restoring Souls: Early Modern Medical Explanations for Music’s Effects,” in Hearing
Cultures: Essays on Sound, Listening and Modernity, edited by Veit Erlmann (New
York: Berg, 2004), 87-105; Erlmann, Reason and Resonance, 307. I will show how the
Cartesian mechanics of vision is a complex account that cannot be dismissed as mere
metaphor.
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Two early works, Robert Fludd’s Monochordum Mundi and Antonio Canova’s
Eurydice and Orpheus, serve well to exemplify these differing ontologies. In both these
works lies an interval of the sense of the world—the creation of the world is displayed in
between philosophy and myth. In 1617 English Paracelsian physician Robert Fludd
illustrated the cosmic world as a divine chordophone whose spherical body is disclosed
by the intervals of the planets (figs. 1, 2). Following the Pythagorean Music of Spheres,
the world’s body is determined according to the close association of music and
mathematics. The intervals between the planets’ orbits correspond to the distance
between pitches on one string. Pythagoras’ harmonious cosmos recurs in the dialogue of
the Timaeus in which Plato describes the creation of the world in mathematical
technique. The world is created by the Demiurge who sculpts the universe into a
harmonious structure consisting of seven scales made up of intervals. The physical world
as complete structure is derived from perfect forms, that is, ideas. As the world is based
on whole and perfect ideas, it references the intervals of musicosmology that measure
space and time.3 Pythagoras and his followers noted that the relation between musical

3 In Plato’s Timaeus, Critias explains the forging of the world to Timaeus Hermocrates
and Critias: “He began the division thus. First he cut off one portion from the whole, next
another, double of this. The third portion he made half as great again as the second, the
thrice as great as the first, the fourth double of the second, the fifth three times the third,
the sixth eight times, the seventh twenty-seven times the first. Then he proceeded to fill
up the intervals of the double and the triple, still cutting off portions as before and
inserting them in these intervals, so that in each interval there were two middle terms, the
one exceeding and being exceeded by the same part of the extremes, the other exceeding
and being exceeded by an equal number. These links gave rise to intervals of three to
two, four to three, and nine to eight within the old intervals. So he filled up all the
intervals of four to three with the interval of the nine to eight, leaving in each case a
fraction such that the interval determined by it represented by the ratio 256 to 243. And
by this time the blend from which he was cutting off these portions was last exhausted.”
See Plato, “Timaeus,” in Plato: Timaeus and Critias, translated by A. E. Taylor (London:
Methuen & Co. LTD, 1929), 35b-36b, 31-32. For commentaries on the harmonious
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