1983.03 AUDIO
review of
Peter R Meyer's "Audio"
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - February 29, 2024
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6305397167
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/115923350-audio
Recently, I was thinking about exhibits I've been part of in museums. I was a bit surprised that there've been a substantial amt. I've never been that oriented around conventional 'artist' exhibits - preferring an approach to creativity that's more career-demolishing than career-building. This retrospective thinking led to my remembering being a part of an exhibit in a museum in Scandanavia, I cdn't even remember exactly where. This stimulated me to look thru my aRCHIVE to try to find the poster from that show that I knew I had.
Finding the poster, I discovered that the exhibit was entitled "Audio - Ljudkonst med Peter R Meyer och radioprogrammet Nattövning" & that it was at the "Moderna Museet - 12 Mars - 10 April 1983" - 41 yrs ago! "Nattövning", "Night Exercise" in English, was a Swedish radio program, a sound art program that had been broadcast one Saturday a mnth for 10 mnths before it was pulled. Apparently, it was too experimental for the Swedish people or radio admiistration to support it for longer. Still, the Modern Museum presented an exhibit of materials from it & I was part of that.
Looking at the fine print of the poster I saw quite a few names that I was familiar w/ who I was honored to be in the same company as - such as Yoko Ono. I did a little internet-searching & found that there was a catalog, this bk, so I bought a copy. Reading thru the catalog I realized that being in the same company as Yoko Ono didn't amt to much b/c while Ono's work had been played on Nattövning mine hadn't been. I was part of the program b/c Rod Summers, in the Netherlands, who'd published a fantastic tape series called "V.E.C." (Visual Experimental Concrete - if I remember correctly), had pointed Meyer in the direction of the people whose work he'd published. I'd been lucky enuf to be in that category.
Therefore, what happened w/ the exhibit is that Meyer had solicited audio work from Summers's contacts to be made available at listening stns in the museum - probably something like places where there were tape players & headphones & tapes provided by a somewhat international community that included me - many of them mail artists. This, in itself, was pretty fantastic - I doubt that there've been many exhibits like this & I'm deeply honored to've been part of it. Alas, my participation is only hinted at in both the poster & the bk by a listing of my name as "Tentatively".
The catalog itself is mostly in Swedish, wch I don't read, but there are 3 essays in English. The 1st of these is an introduction presented in Swedish & then English:
"Audio,
"the imagination's own medium - is being presented for the first time in Sweden at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm March 12 - April 10, 1983.
"The term Audio stands for sound art, in order to distinguish it from ordinary radio and music. It is true that radio always reflected and afforded commentary on this art, but radio in itself has only been used artistically by a few.
"The radio program NIGHT EXERCISE was an exception of this kind. In 1982 and 1983 it was Sweden's narrowest programme, but paradoxically enough it was also the one to which most people listened (internationally speaking).
"The unique feature about Night Exercise was that 275 sound artists from the whole world were here given an opportunity for using the medium's inherent attention, and this led to broadcasting stations in Canada, the United States of America, Italy, Japan, France etc. starting to broadcast this Swedish-produced audio programme.
"It is estimated that several million listeners have had contact with Night Exercise."
& this wasn't even my 1st 'Sound Art' exhibit in a museum. That was in the MD Biennial at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1980 when some friends of mine & I had a sound sculpture (well, sortof) in the exhibit.
Anyway, again, thinking back, I didn't take this very seriously at the time both b/c I wasn't interested in being considered an 'artist' & b/c I wasn't interested in exhibits or museums. Now, I'm very grateful to've been part of this, albeit a very small part.
Meyer writes:
"Many radio companies are run today by lawyers, journalists and bureaucrats. People with an artistic turn of mind are broken or stifled out on recruitment, during training or meetings. The results are clearly noticeable in the radio programmes. History teaches us that it takes many years to establish and perfect something 'new'. When the car was invented it resembled the stage coach."
He goes on to provide descriptions of the programs, one of wch I'll give as an example here:
"NATTÖVNING NO 1 - Spirits in the air, was a strange mixture of recordings. The lonely man with his hidden microphone, John Amott, desperately tried to establish contact with his fellow humans. Pierre Schaeffer, the father of concrete music, made a radio comeback with a Bach paraphrase, while Curt Hilfon and Jan Danielson droned away about crows etc. The individual inserts were exciting but the overall structure was not entirely satisfactory. "Spirits in the air" limped slightly in its tempo and at times resembled a magazine programme."
Listing all of the participants in Audio & their countries of origin is more than I want to get into here, but I will list the people whose work I'm either familiar w/ or who I've corresponded w/ thru Mail Art networking. As an exhibit of Sound Art at the time, I'm sure there're many people who shd've been a part of things who were left out. The Sonic Arts Union wd've been good to be included, eg (although Alvin Lucier was).
Edgardo-Antonio Vigo
Moniek Darge
Godfried Willem Raes
Paulo Brucsky
Leonhard Frank Duch
Hank Bull
Gerald Jupiter-Larsen
David Keane
Lubomyr Melnyk
Murray Schafer
T.T.P.
Niels Lomholt
Steen Möller Rasmussen
Marina Abromovic
Bob Cobbing
Ivor Cutler
Morgan Fisher
John Lennon
Julien Blaine
Henri Chopin
Pierre Schaeffer
Willem de Ridder
Rod Summers
Vittore Baroni
Maurizio Bianchi
G. Achille Cavellini
Nicola Frangione
Ubaldo Giacomucci
Ruggero Maggi
Enzo Minarelli
Adriano Spatola
Masami Akita
Andrzej Dudek-Dürer
Tadeuz Kantor
Pete Horobin
Peter R. Meyer
Beth Anderson
Laurie Anderson
Eleanor Antin
Johanna M. Beyer
Jean-Paul Curtay
Brian Eno
Wild Man Fischer
Kim Fowley
Terry Fox
Allen Ginsberg
Malcolm Goldstein
Alex Igloo
Ray Johnson
Allan Kaprow
Harry Kipper
Alison Knowles
Richard Kostelanetz
Timothy Leary
Alvin Lucier
Scarlatina Lust
Jackson MacLow
Moondog
Charlie Morrow
Yoko Ono
Carlo Pittore
Bern Porter
Arleen Schloss
Michael Smith
Lon Spiegelman
Tentatively
Hannah Weiner
Hannah Wilke
Peter Below
Klaus Groh
Ferdinand Kriwet
Henning Mittendorf
Jürgen O. Olbrich
Zev
People interested in a history of Sound Art wd do well to know more about Nattövning & this Audio exhibit.
- March 2, 2024EV notes from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
idioideo at verizon dot net
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