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Endeavours of sound (Audio)
When we talk about a particular art format in terms of a historical perspective, throughout different periods we come across different perspectives and paradigms. Consequently, individual artistic practices are not lost. On the contrary, they continuously develop and expand the limits of the artistic canon on both, the formal and substantive level. In this context, it is certainly possible to talk about sound art, which, especially seen as multi-layered media, is entering both, the tangible and intangible space of contemporary visual art. Looking through the prism of history, sound began to enter the field of fine arts through the avant-garde movements in the early 20thcentury, primarily through the movement of Futurism and Dadaism. This was, when fine arts for the first time broke the canons of classical art and took the position of anti-art. It opened up to several completely new media structures and an integral part of them was the sound itself and sound art. The field of sound art, however, at certain times in the 20th century, sometimes more, sometimes less, took an ephemeral position in relation to a classical classification of fine arts. It was always a marginal movement; the status of remains unchanged even today.
The aforementioned fact was sort of a basic starting point for the selection of works for the Radio Arts Space project, which tries to focus on the relations between the visual and the audible. For more than a few decades now, we are continually confronted with a flood of visual information every step they make, which exerts a profound influence on our lives. We cannot help feeling that it is nearly impossible to take a moment of rest in all this visual rush, not to mention, to take a break and move away. Surely, this results in a complete apathy of our senses. Our mind and body became completely insensitive for all the gentle stimuli of our surroundings. Soon this may result in a total loss of sensibility in relation to the environment, especially the things that are not material. And sound is definitely one of them. The selection of individual art works seeks to unfold the possibilities of the ephemeral in the fields of fine arts. Each of the sound recordings operates with its own complementary "non audible" part which evolves its complexity in the relation to each individual/listener. The one, who listens becomes, trough critical and active engagement, the »listener«, which can be seen as a kind of paraphrase for Brecht’s transformation of the spectator into the observer. The sound recording and its "non audible” counterpart are entwined in a game of the ephemeral, which completely breaks with the traditional classification of the media and begins to reflect all the other positions that are normally found within the field of fine arts - social sculpture, space, installation, visual poetry and technology. And this is what inks together, in a very unobtrusive way, the personal poetics of the selected authors. Sound, which can always be found on the periphery of the fine arts context, becomes in the selected audio recordings the basis of the artwork. The ephemeral is moved to the centre and the interdependent relations between audible - "non audible", form the whole of an art work.
Thus, when selecting the art works, the main focus was not on a categorical disjunction between the audible and the »non-audible«. The focus was much more on establishing their interdependent relation, which points to their absolute equality, and so reaches beyond the ever-persistent question of what is and what is not considered as fine art. The selected art works want to engage the viewer in a double game: on one hand, they provide us with a sense of security as they are build on experience, derived from our basic activities and perceptions (visual and non visual), and on the other hand, through the active and critical engagement of the viewer, new questions about perception can arise.
- Tevž Logar