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Stop, look, listen

At USF's Contemporary Art Museum, the latest exhibition is a feast for the ears as well as the eyes.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published September 16, 2005

	[Images from USF Contemporary Art Museum]
	Christian Marclay, fluxmix, 2004, 16-channel audio and video installation.
	Stephen Vitiello, Wind in the Trees, 2005, 12 8-inch speakers.
	Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, harmonichaos, 2000, installation with vacuum cleaners, harmonicas and electronic tuners.

TAMPA - Years ago, my husband and I took our son and daughter to a local museum for a show of work by Keith Haring, a famous graffiti artist who went mainstream in the 1980s. It was the first time they saw something in a museum different from the traditional art they cut their teeth on. Haring's spare, vibrant, graffiti-based paintings were fodder for many dinner table conversations and transformed their ideas about what art is. Now in their 20s, they still refer to that show.

I see a similar opportunity for parents, or any adult wanting to stretch and grow, in "Audio Files," an exhibition at the University of South Florida's Contemporary Art Museum. It's a superb introduction to sound art, a medium that asks us to perceive sound in the same way we perceive an object visually. We don't "see" sound, of course, but we can feel its effects dimensionally, especially when it becomes a reductive collection of singular tones, chords or simple noise. That sounds pretty intellectual. But the concept is worth understanding in our multicultural world that introduces us to music galaxies removed from the Three B's (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms) of earlier generations.

Some writers compare sound art to the abstract movement, using examples such as Mark Rothko and Dan Flavin (the artist who uses neon light tubes) to help explain it because abstract art also distills and isolates a subject, laying bare an essence.

Knowing the conceptual underpinning of sound art can help you appreciate it more, but my sense is that young people will get it intuitively. The three installations are especially accessible because each has a strong visual component used like a witty rejoinder to the cerebral conceptualism of sound art.

In harmonichaos, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot positions 13 canister vacuum cleaners around a large gallery, hoses positioned upright with plastic attachments in which harmonicas are fitted, each modified to produce a single chord. The vacuums are hooked up to switching devices that turn them on and off, triggering blasts of air to the harmonicas, which emit minute-long, plaintive bleats. They react to noise, so the sound builds up until the tuner can't process it and everything slows down. Each vacuum has a small light that turns on whenever its harmonica plays, so the darkened gallery becomes a lively interaction of light and sound. The vacuums, with their mouthlike attachments and lights that resemble those on musicians' stands, become almost animate, an orchestral ensemble playing to its own beat.

Christian Marclay is a highly regarded composer-artist who has probably done more to fuse the visual with the audio into new forms of fine art than anyone else. When he was an artist in residence at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, he learned the museum had a large collection of objects used in Fluxus, a famous movement from the 1960s in which artists used everyday things to create a sort of anti-art.

He decided he wanted to work with that collection but in an iconoclastic way, as they had originally been used. Fluxmix was his response, an installation of 16 television monitors placed in a circle. Each has a looping segment of about 15 minutes in which we see Marclay's white-gloved hands manipulating hundreds of things. The gloves were both a necessity - all museum staffs wear them when handling art - and a funny reference to magicians who can make something from nothing or vice versa. He works with deliberation and dignity, giving each object a thorough physical once-over, exploring the aural possibilities in things generally not meant to have them. And there's a playful quality as he seems to discover these common objects for the first time, spinning coins, rubbing pots together, shaking a candy jar and a fake plant, turning pages of a book, taking toys from a box, cataloging all this stuff by creating an index of sounds.

You don't have to know about the Fluxus connection to delight in the way that "hearing" an object changes the way we see it, but it gives more meaning to the procession of random interactions.

Stephen Vitiello is another well-known sound artist whose Wind in the Trees is sort of the opposite of Marclay's and Boursier-Mougenot's installations. In it, we react to sound we can't hear. Twelve 8-inch speakers are strung from wires in a wavelike configuration. They're connected to a CD that plays at a frequency too low to be picked up by human ears. Instead, it creates an electrical impulse that moves the speakers. The center part of each speaker, its cone, bounces up and down at varying speeds as the music's sound level varies. Sometimes they pop slowly and ostentatiously, sometimes they thrum and whir in rhythmic motion. We're seeing sound.

With only three installations, you don't have to devote a lot of time to "Audio Files," though you might find yourself mesmerized by them for longer than you realize.

The Contemporary Art Museum is not as well-known to the public as it should be, mainly because it's a university museum that doesn't advertise. It consistently exhibits some of the finest contemporary art in Florida, maybe even the Southeast, and nearby Graphicstudio annually brings international art stars to create limited edition prints and sculptures, which make up the bulk of CAM's permanent collection. CAM is also the only area museum that's free all the time.

The USF campus is across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry, where the popular "Bodies" exhibit is on display, so a detour to CAM, located near the medical complex, is easy. It's an experience you could talk about over many dinners, lunches or breakfasts.

- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

"Audio Files" is at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa, through Oct. 21. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays and 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Closed Sunday. Free admission, but a $3 parking permit is required on weekdays. For information, call 813 974-2849 or go to www.usfcam.usf.edu

[Last modified September 15, 2005, 12:49:03]