Sound and Vision Collision: Two Current Exhibitions Explore Synaesthesia in Art

Words: Jesse Ashlock

Photo: James Whitney

Visual Music, the remarkable and engrossing exhibition that was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles throughout the spring, moves to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC from June 23 through September 11. The show (which is accompanied by gorgeous book Visual Music, reviewed in the current issue of RES) explores the intersection of visual art and sound throughout the last century, focusing on the recurring idea that fine art should strive for the same abstract purity as music. Visual Music traces a wholly unconventional path through twentieth century art history, one that visits the colorful abstractions of Kandinsky, Klee and Kupka, the photography of Alfred Stieglitz, the early and mid century experimental films of Oskar Fischinger and the Whitney Brothers, '60s and '70s pyschedelia, and contemporary installation art. As might be expected of an exhibit devoted to synaesthesia, Visual Music is, at very least, a feast for the senses. But it should be especially fascinating to anyone interested in music video and VJ performance, and it can even be interpreted as proposing an entire alternative history of abstract art.

Given the increasingly multimedia tenor of modern culture, it's no surprise that more and more curators have become interested in the phenomenon of synaesthesia, literally the cognitive process that allows us to experience stimuli through unexpected senses -- to "hear" a color or "see" a smell. The traveling exhibition What Sound Does a Color Make?, organized by Independent Curators International and currently on view at Eyebeam in New York through July 16, also looks at the intersection of sound and image through a diverse collection of moving image work, showing how new digital technologies have allowed artists to pursue the experience of synaesthesia in a more powerful, more fully immersive fashion. The show spans from pioneering video artists of the '60s and '70s like Nam June Paik and Steina and Woody Vasulka to a fascinating group of younger multimedia artists, including Stephen Vitiello, D-Fuse and Scanner. Both exhibitions offer provide remarkable documents of artists' attempts to mediate a world in which our senses are constantly overloaded with stimuli, and nothing is what it seems.

Visual Music: hirshhorn.si.edu/exhibitions/upcoming.asp
What Sound Does a Color Make?: www.ici-exhibitions.org/Exhibitions/WhatSoundDoesColor/WhatSound.htm