Sound policy

Frédéric Moffet, Jean Genet in Chicago: Preserving Disorder, 2006.

When most of us think of art, we probably picture a painting by Da Vinci or Picasso: something we stare at for 20 seconds in the museum before heading to the gift shop to purchase the postcard version. So, what should we make of the art in the Experimental Sound Studio’s (ESS) Creative Audio Archive (CAA), most of which is meant to be heard and not seen?

Now based in Ravenswood, the ESS was started in 1986  to provide Chicago artists, musicians and composers with production facilities and networking opportunities. Executive director Lou Mallozzi, one of its founders, recently co-curated “Signals Crossed Across Borders” with former CAA manager Farris Wahbeh. The exhibition is on view in the Audible gallery at ESS, which opened last November and presents five to six shows each year.

The six audio works in the current exhibition were created between 1992 and 2006, offering visitors an intriguing introduction to what Wahbeh describes as a “visceral” medium. He believes that sound art yields a completely different kind of aesthetic experience: we not only listen to these works—and spend extended time with them—we feel them in our bodies, he explains.

Until the CAA was founded in 2003, Wahbeh says, “hundreds, if not thousands of hours” of sound art created in association with the ESS were in danger of being lost, which would have wiped out a significant chapter in Chicago’s art history. “[The CAA] is a treasure trove of amazing work from [both] people who are now quite famous, such as Guillermo Gomez-Peña or David and Amy Sedaris, and artists who are still ‘underground,’ ” he says.

According to Mallozzi, the archive is anything but “a mausoleum of the avant-garde.” By digitizing and cataloging its sound art, using a system that complies with strict Library of Congress standards, ESS intends to keep this work alive and accessible. “Signals Crossed Across Borders” proves that the organization is succeeding.

Each piece addresses the exhibition’s theme of “border crossing” in a different way. Frédéric Moffet’s phenomenal Jean Genet in Chicago: Preserving Disorder (2006) ventures into the realm of video. Dominated by narration from Genet’s writings about his visit to Chicago during the 1968 Democratic National Convention—when he palled around with Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs—the piece also features vintage footage and sound bites and contemporary images of an actor in a Genet mask touring the city. Mallozzi notes that the ironic 19 Alternative PSAs (1993) recorded by the Collective Radio Workshop—a group that included himself, Gomez-Peña and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle—“intervened in everyday life” when the works played on local radio stations. Bill Talsma Works Lucky Pierre’s Bullitt (2001) requires visitors to traverse the gallery between two pairs of speakers, each blasting a different fragment of Talsma’s deconstruction of an action movie’s car chases. Olivia Block’s Transgenesis (2003), commissioned for the ESS’ Florasonic series, and the Glowbug Theatre of the Air’s True Bugs in Chicago (1994–95) subvert the boundaries between what is natural and artificial. George Lewis and Douglas R. Ewart’s Rio Negro (1992/2007) raises related issues as software written by Lewis randomly activates Ewart’s low-tech chimes and handmade rainsticks. Even the oldest of  these works still seem fresh.

The diversity of these projects “speaks to the eclectic, exploratory approach” ESS promotes, according to Mallozzi, who concludes, “There isn’t a party line about how to experiment with sound.”

For more information about the CAA, visit creativeaudioarchive.org. “Signals Crossed Across Borders” runs through October 28. See Galleries, North Side.