Hardback : £77.89
Sounding the Gallery explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music. Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images in a quick and easy manner. But video not only provided artists and composers with the opportunity to produce unprecedented forms of audiovisuality; it also allowed them to create interactive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. Early video's audiovisual synergy could be projected, manipulated and processed live. The closed-circuit video feed drew audience members into the heart of the audiovisual experience, from where they could influence the flow, structure and sound of the video performance. Such activated spectatorship resulted in improvisatory and performative events in which the space between artists, composers, performers and visitors collapsed into a single, yet expansive, intermedial experience. Many believed that such audiovisual video work signalled a brand-new art form that only began in 1965. Using early video work as an example, this book suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. Pioneering video work allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Shifting the focus from object to spatial process, Sounding the Gallery uses theories of intermedia, film, architecture, drama and performance practice to create an interdisciplinary history of music and art that culminates in the rise of video art-music in the late 1960s.
Show moreSounding the Gallery explores the first decade of creative video work, focusing on the ways in which video technology was used to dissolve the boundaries between art and music. Becoming commercially available in the mid 1960s, video quickly became integral to the intense experimentalism of New York City's music and art scenes. The medium was able to record image and sound at the same time, which allowed composers to visualize their music and artists to sound their images in a quick and easy manner. But video not only provided artists and composers with the opportunity to produce unprecedented forms of audiovisuality; it also allowed them to create interactive spaces that questioned conventional habits of music and art consumption. Early video's audiovisual synergy could be projected, manipulated and processed live. The closed-circuit video feed drew audience members into the heart of the audiovisual experience, from where they could influence the flow, structure and sound of the video performance. Such activated spectatorship resulted in improvisatory and performative events in which the space between artists, composers, performers and visitors collapsed into a single, yet expansive, intermedial experience. Many believed that such audiovisual video work signalled a brand-new art form that only began in 1965. Using early video work as an example, this book suggests that this is inaccurate. During the twentieth century, composers were experimenting with spatializing their sounds, while artists were attempting to include time as a creative element in their visual work. Pioneering video work allowed these two disciplines to come together, acting as a conduit that facilitated the fusion and manipulation of pre-existing elements. Shifting the focus from object to spatial process, Sounding the Gallery uses theories of intermedia, film, architecture, drama and performance practice to create an interdisciplinary history of music and art that culminates in the rise of video art-music in the late 1960s.
Show moreIntroduction
1 Composing with Technology: The Artist-Composer
2 Silent Music and Static Motion: The Audio-Visual History of
Video
3 Towards the Spatial: Music, Art and the Audiovisual
Environment
4 The Rise of Video Art-Music: 1963-1970
5 Interactivity, Mirrored Spaces and the Closed-Circuit Feed:
Performing Video
Epilogue: Towards the Twenty First Century
Index
Holly Rogers is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Liverpool.
"Video art is conventionally approached from the perspective of the
visual arts. By approaching it from a musical perspective--by
foregrounding its time-based nature--Rogers rethinks it as a
practice that drew on, synthesised, and transformed developments
already under way in? both visual and musical culture. In short,
she rethinks video art as video art-music. Drawing on art history
and media studies as well as musicology, this impressively wide
ranging and
perceptive study addresses fundamental issues of generic identity
and authorship, places video art-music both historically and in
terms of its sites of consumption, and reveals its indispensibility
to an
understanding of contemporary digital media." --Nicholas Cook,
University of Cambridge
"With the new audiovisual turn we need to think more deeply about
the relations of sound and image. Holly Rogers's magisterial
Sounding The Gallery covers the key early period of the 1960s and
70s, when vanguard artists brought their video-art music works into
new spaces, including the gallery (which often didn't know what to
do with them). No other monograph so precisely describes the labors
of practitioners like John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Nam
June Paik, Pipilotti Rist, and Bill Viola, nor provides such
provocative discussions of technological specificity,
genre-specific practices, reception studies and economic contexts.
Required reading for us
all." --Carol Vernallis, author of Experiencing Music Video:
Aesthetics and Cultural Context
"A lucid and thorough introduction to the very particular kind of
sound, image and technology that burst into being in the early
1960s." --The Wire
"Both comprehensive and immensely readable...The bibliography alone
is worth the price; anyone interested in video artwork during the
formative years of the discipline should start here. Rogers knows
the field inside and out, and she writes in an accessible style
that makes her book attractive as a course text. Authoritative,
concise, and extremely
well thought out, this is the key book on this subject at this
time...Essential." --Choice
"Sounding the Gallery offers an informative look at the context and
rise of video art...has great value for musicologists specifically,
even those less familiar with video...[Rogers's] breadth of
knowledge offers readers from various backgrounds a concise yet
insightful look at the beginnings of video art-music. With its
emphasis on the musical aspects of this genre, her work provides a
vital contribution to scholarship on video art-music of the
1960s
and 1970s." -- The Journal of Musicological Research
"Rogers' scope is head-spinningly impressive...Rogers deftly
handles all sorts of local details and narratives, whilst also
displaying an impressive theoretical take on this
work." MSMI Journal
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