Installation view, With Hidden Noise
Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design
Photo: Chuck Spangler

Sound is a fugitive object. We live in a muted cosmic universe – the big silence – where aural comprehension is confined to only certain molecule-rich atmospheres of planets supporting species of living things with an evolved ability to hear. We’re just damned lucky to be one of them—and even luckier to know of our own good fortune.

Without volume or mass (at least not the kind that succumbs to gravity) sound on Earth is weightless, fleeting and ephemeral—certainly not the solid we think of when contemplating the form of a physical thing. And yet sound is described in just those tangible terms, as having color, weight, body or texture. It isn’t that the material world just happens to offer us a robust set of analogies; it’s also because sound is, to our comprehension, very much like an object—a transient form of object, one that moves through time. Its shape, it might be said, is something we sense fourth-dimensionally.

Marcel Duchamp
With Hidden Noise, 1916
Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, 1950
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris / Estate of Marcel Duchamp

In 1916, the paradigm-bending Marcel Duchamp did a curious thing that blurred the dimensional boundaries between things, time and sound. He clamped a ball of nautical twine between two brass plates, asking his friend and patron, Walter Arensberg, to first place a secret object inside the spool of the twine. An object that would make a sound when the little sculptural assemblage was shaken. Duchamp instructed Arensberg to never reveal the nature of the object, not even to Duchamp himself – and thus it remains a mystery to this day, securely safeguarded in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Among the ironies generated by Duchamp’s little “assisted readymade” is the confusion it provokes between object and sound, as reflected by its title With Hidden Noise. The noise is only hidden and unknown until the sculpture is shaken — at which time its sound is revealed while the object inside remains incognita. The actuality of either object or sound, whether as two existential entities or as a single conflated one, is shrouded (a la Schrodinger’s Cat and/or the unheard sound of a tree falling in the woods) in ambiguity and the dissonant aesthetics of uncertainty.

As part of its series of exhibitions exploring the poetic dimensions of art, science, and technology, With Hidden Noise is also the title of an exhibition currently installed in Art Center’s Williamson Gallery, through May 3, 2015. Insipired by Duchamp’s century-old creation (which is not on display), the exhibition’s only solid objects are the museum benches and bean-bag chairs, arranged for visitors to comfortably tune into myriad shapes and textures aurally presented by eight invited artists of sound. The tension Duchamp’s sculpture induced between its static visual presence at rest versus its animated pesence when shaken, is echoed by the Williamson Gallery as a stereotypical temple for visual contemplation and presentation of tangible objects, versus its current presentation of invisible sound fabrications.

Like its namesake, With Hidden Noise asks viewers to become privileged listeners, and to contemplate the exquisitely nuanced qualities of objects forged by sound – forms shaped entirely by artists’ disruptions to the big silence.

Stephen Nowlin is the director of Art Center’s Alyce de Roulet Williamson Gallery

With Hidden Noise features internationally noted artist and Art Center alum Steve Roden, as well as distinguished participants Taylor Deupree, Jennie C. Jones, Pauline Oliveros, Andrea Parkins, Steve Peters, Michael J. Schumacher and Stephen Vitiello.

With Hidden Noise is produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York, and is part of ICI’s Exhibition in a Box series. The exhibition is curated by Stephen Vitiello, and made possible, in part, by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the visual Arts; the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation; the Robert Sterling Clark Foundation; and the ICI Board of Trustees.

Williamson Gallery exhibitions are made possible in part through the generosity of the Williamson Gallery Patrons, and a grant from the Pasadena Art Alliance.