For the late composer Pauline Oliveros, listening was a catalyst for change and healing. She referred to “deep listening” as the practice of being fully present to sound, consciously experiencing it with your body. In response to the Vietnam War and her own emotional unrest, she developed her Sonic Meditations, playing sustained drones on accordion, first in the context of a women’s group and later in public performances. After over a year of feigned alertness on Zoom, I welcomed the opportunity to take Oliveros’s introspective activism to heart while viewing the group show Seeing Sound at KADIST San Francisco. The three works on view take up our perception of everyday environments, reminding us that we experience the world through our senses—and not, say, screens.
KADIST’s first exhibition since a brief by-appointment reopening last fall was produced by Independent Curators International (ICI) and curated by Barbara London, founder of the video exhibition and collection programs at MoMA and among the first to exhibit experimental sound work. KADIST is the first stop on Seeing Sound’s multi-year tour.
London sought to create a show that is international in scope—Aura Satz is based in the U.K., Marina Rosenfeld lives in New York, and Samson Young is in Hong Kong—and permits visitors to encounter the artworks together, without the isolating experience of putting on headphones. The works in Seeing Sound consider the questions of who and what we listen to. Foregrounding the hum of daily life, the show counters art history’s tendency to prioritize the visual over the less-defined spaces between installation, performance and visual art.
Seeing Sound opens with Satz’s 2014 installation Dial Tone Drone, featuring a conversation between Oliveros and her friend and electronic music contemporary, Laurie Spiegel. (Both women are included in the highly recommended recent documentary Sisters with Transistors, on the female pioneers of electronic music.) In the KADIST installation, two modern red armchairs flank a table with a black rotary phone; viewers can either call into the piece with their mobile phone or pick up the vintage handset. The audio is an edited conversation between the two musicians. A dial tone sounds in the background, merging into excerpts from Oliveros’ 1975 accordion-and-vocal composition Horse Sings from Cloud and Spiegel’s 1975–76 piece The Expanding Universe.
“When you enter into the realm of the sound, your mind changes,” Oliveros tells Spiegel, noting “the subtle, fine gradations of change” that exist in a single tone. Sound doesn’t simply pass into our brains, it draws us into memories, feelings, daydreams. As the artist and theorist Micah Silver writes, “Our attention moves with our senses, we don’t just mindlessly digest aurality, we build on it with ongoing analysis.” The pleasure of visiting Seeing Sound is noting how we physiologically locate and integrate the artworks, both aurally and visually.
In the second gallery space, Rosenfeld’s 2019 installation Music Stands displays three metal armatures that support a set of microphones, speakers and foam. A bundle of wires snake across the installation, recalling the exposed workings of a Bruce Nauman piece. The artist’s clipped utterances and breath intermittently interject, sometimes punctuated by the slam of a high or low piano key. These sounds take on a feminist valence; they mark the marginalized and incidental. Rosenfeld’s fragments of “so,” “long,” “around” amidst glitches announces that yes, oops, hello there is a person here (or, given that it’s a recording, the impression of a person).
