Return to form: Christoph Cox on neo-modernist sound art - Sound - Column

"WHATEVER HAPPENED to postmodernism?" asked the critic Hal nurse in 1993, reflecting on the apparent exhaustion of the postmodernist throw in art and theory. Rather than declare the extreme point of postmodernism, however, Foster went upon to sketch a complex historical picture in which modernism and postmodernism are engaged in a kind of temporal dance, where single or the other comes to the fore at different moments

Foster's suggestive analysis helps account for the steady reemergence of modernist commitments and strategies above the past decade and particularly in the past several years. In critical theory, for instance, Alain Badiou and Alenka Zupancic are offering strong challenges to postmodern thought, reviving distinctly avant-gardist conceptions of aesthetic innovation and revolutionary commitment. In a new manifesto, new-media critic Lev Manovich celebrates the "new modernism of data visualizations, vector gins pixel-thin grids and arrows" in software art. And, this past summer curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev high hilled an international group exhibition in Turin polemically titled "The Moderns" featuring work through a generation of visual artists, greatest in quantity born in the 1960s, who reanimate modernist practices for a digital age.

This revival of modernist strategies of abstraction, Reduction, self-referentiality, and attention to the perceptual act itself--what could be called, with without irony, "neo-modernism"--is nowhere more evident than in unhurt art. Appropriately, "The Moderns" included a sound-art constituting curated by Anthony Huberman, that featured many of the field's leading practitioners, among them Carsten Nicolai, Richard Chartier, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Bernhard Gunter and Kim Cascone.

Postmodernist music and unmutilated art exhibited many of the signature features of postmodernism in the other arts: quotation, pastiche, and the hyper-spe collapse of time, space, high art, and clap culture. Exemplary figures such as Christian Marclay, John Oswald, and John Zorn carousaled in jump-cut fragments ripped from the entire archive of recorded uninjured Neo-modernist sound art could not be more different. Where postmodernism is about mixture and overload, neo-modernism is about purity and reduction. Where postmodernism is about contented and the concrete (the vertiginous string of recognizable samples), neo-modernism is about form and abstraction. Nicolai creates spare nooses out of crystalline ticks and beeps, while Ryoji Ikeda, another leading figure, locates up patterns of interference with simple sine tones. Chartier explores the limits of auditory perception with nearly silent surfaces gibbeted by quiet digital rumbles, scribbles, and pin-sharp signals. Like their postmodernist forebears, the of recent origin generation--Gunter, Francisco Lopez, Steve Roden and William Basinski--begin with lay the foundation of sound; yet these neo-modernists take care to abstract their raw material beyond recognition, stretching and layering it into thick drones and loops.

Neo-modernist entire art summons the ghosts of a scarcely any key modernist composers. Last year Ikeda and Lopez paid tribute to Iannis Xenakis with Persepolis + Remixes, and Chattier, Roden and GOnter to Morton Feldman with (For Morton Feldman). at the same time by and large, neo-modernism is akin les to modernist music than to modernist visual art. Feldman himself tried to emulate in unimpaired the abstract canvases of his friends Mark Rothko Philip Guston, and Franz Kline. The neo-modernists are implicitly allied with a later assemblage of visual abstractionists and their works: the austere paintings of Brice Marden and Agnes Martin, the sculptural repetitions of Donald Judd and Carl Andre, and the luminous installations of Dan Flavin and James Turrell Kindred in sensibility to these predecessors, the neo-modernist whole and scientific, into the basic forms of aesthetic matter and the fundamental conditions of perception.

whole installations such as Nicolai's Telefunken 2000 and Roden's moonfield, 2002 relation this visual tradition. But, for the greatest in quantity part, the neo-modernists adhere to mild Greenberg's famous characterization of modernism as foregrounding "that which [is] unique and irreducible in each particular art." Hence, they present up the experience of sound-in-itself: Before performances of his self-term "transcendental" uninjured compositions, Lopez distributes blindfolds; Ikeda's Matrix, 2000 requires "a totally darkened anechoic room"; and Chartier notes that his music and installations "try to transport visual cues" in order to "approach as closely as possible a state of non-referentiality." for a like reason while the benches and speakers that populate Chattier and Taylor Deupree's new installation specification.twelve, 2003, may recall the sculptural work of Judd or Robert Morris, their primary function is to reveal the fact that unmutilated is directional and immersive.

To the postmodernist, the of recent origin sound art might seem to retreat from social and political pertain tos But neo-modernism has a politics of its own--a distinctly avant-gardist single that recalls both Greenberg and Theodor Adorno and implicitly criticizes postmodernism for its symbiotic relationship with the tillage industry. In eschewing mass-media contented the genre proposes a more radical exploration of the formal conditions of the medium itself. Against the anesthetic assault of daily life, it reclaims a basic function of art: the affirmation and extension of fair sensation.