L'exposition revisitée par le sonore : l'émergence de nouveaux régimes d'écoute au musée d'art
Sound art and music have appeared in art museum programming with increasing regularity since the turn of the 21st Century and have caused major shifts in the exhibitory practices. However, no exhibition model has so far been able to properly account for the multifarious issues raised by sound in the museum space. There has been a failure to adequately address both the technological and audible opportunities of sound and, concomitantly, an inability to re-evaluate the intrinsic limits of oculocentric models that have guided the discourses and practices of museum institutions. This thesis revisits the exhibition practices of the art museum—the set of discursive and physical spaces that interact within these locations. It demonstrates the limits of a logic built on codes reminiscent of the white cube and the black box, proposing instead the idea of the sound studio and the music concert as new exhibition models, which are related to the production and distribution models of the music industry. To do so, this research initially argues that the development of sound in an exhibition context depends on the recorded sounds of reproduction and distribution technologies as well as the practices—individual and collective—of listening in everyday. The study is based on a series of exhibitions that reveal variations in the relation between the museum discourse mapped out above and the organization of the exhibition spaces according to sound-specific pieces: the exhibition of sound art Soundings: A Contemporary Score (2013) at the Museum of Modern Art; Ragnar Kjartansson (2015) and Anri Sala (2011) at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal; the electronic music of Sonic Process (2002) at the Center Pompidou; and finally, popular music in the David Bowie Is exhibition (2013) developed by the Victoria & Albert Museum. From here, the thesis will demonstrate—based on the theories derived from both sound studies and listening phenomenology—the ways in which the sound within the exhibition space raises specific issues, how mixing encourages regimes of listening in the art museum and how the visitor's posture is transformed by the possibilities of wandering through the museum space. Beyond the sensory dimension, sound in the art museum context brings about a shift in theoretical and disciplinary models; abolishing hierarchies and reconfiguring how we understand the idea of the museum from the concept of resonance.
sound studies exhibition art museum sound art music sound studies space sound technology