As something that can be given or taken, that can be found, shaped, amplified or silenced, voice is an attribute of power; a tool for bringing contours to imaginary worlds, and even for bringing them into existence. Sometimes to speak means to do things with words, and voice is the pre-condition for such an Austinian, performative speech-act. But voice can also speak through a hum or an abstract, melodic wave, which another voice can join: an ambiguous but nevertheless powerful means to communicate, to establish a connection through the simple reality of doing something together; eschewing clear, fixed meaning but extending a sound-made hand outwards, to whomever cares to take it. Voice can be a stand-in for bodies of all kinds, an extension of them, enabled by the physicality of sound — whether produced by something with a head, lungs, a mouth and vocal cords, or by another material configuration.
Perhaps in its multiplicity voice is also something to tune in to; a tool for attuning, literally and symbolically. It might ask of us, human animals, to learn how to enjoy the messier environment of polyphony; to find harmony through negotiating tension and space, in the middle ground, with and around each other.
As song, voice becomes choreography. Essentially a form of movement — a vibrating wave propagating through a transmission medium — sound is then organised in space and time.
Performative practices that involve voice — sound, song and spoken word — connect to the very dawn of human societies. Darwin even wondered whether our language abilities began with singing, and the physical ability to hum a tune — relating to the actual throat physiology of the evolving human species — dates from 530,000 years ago. We share song and tune with other mammals, with birds and whales, insects, frogs and even shell-wind duets or lithophonicringing rocks, if we want to hear the sound of non-human or non-living others, and if we’d take time to listen to them.
Even the modern exhibition has been challenged as a silent space for ‘dead’, quiet objects long before the first performative turn in the visual arts in the 1960s and 1970s. Sound, play, and other voices, including those of visitors, resonated within gallery walls well before the recent advent of the event and attention economy, which sees museum spaces rushing to become ever more engaging, interactive and immersive — and inevitably not always for the better.
The avant-garde movement already introduced performative approaches to art making at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. In 1942, at the opening of the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in New York, the sounds and voices of youngsters were heard throughout the space, as artist and exhibition designer, Marcel Duchamp, asked a group of children to play a game of hopscotch, complicating the art experience for viewers who came to see the paintings on display. In 1955 Atsuko Tanaka’s Work(Bell) reimagined the exhibition as time, space and sound through the ringing of alarm bells laid across the gallery, and made to perform in a particular order. Willingly or unwillingly, the voices of visitors resting on a so-called ‘lovers’ bench’ within SHE/ HON – A Cathedral held at the Moderna Museet in 1966, were captured through a hidden microphone and transmitted to visitors to a different part of the exhibition.
Even beyond their broader cultural, political and existential meanings, in the specialised field of art, voice and sound are part of a long lineage of disruptive art and exhibition-making practices, which have constantly pushed boundaries, and complexified and enlarged the range of possibilities; of that which is worthy of listening to, and of experiencing. But in a contemporary environment defined by incessant stimulation, in which the imperative to express oneself is also ubiquitous and constant, could it be that voice is increasingly drowned in noise? And could it be that noise can become voice only through a capacity for listening?
To listen might be to renounce the use of one’s voice, at least for a moment. To hear another voice might first need a capacity for silence. And with the world an essentially polyphonic space, what might enable us and accustom us to listening to myriad voices at the same time? Where could we sometimes find a new quietness necessary for training such capacity?
Attempts to change the exhibition experience from individual time spent in a reflective and contemplative manner to a less ‘passive’ and more communal, louder experience enabled both substantial, enriching artworks to emerge, as well as shallow spectacles. Novelty, disruption and innovation might have more to do with the quality — that is, with the long-term and in-depth effect and affecting potential — of each gesture, artwork or exhibition in their relation to the contemporary world, than with the mediums and formats themselves. The difference might not be in the catchphrase and the business model but in the very approach to artmaking, culture making and education: in who voices what, from what position, earned or not earned; in what other voices does it bring together or does it alienate; in what does that voice do, to whom, why and what for, in the end.
The art space could be and should be a space for rehearsing and nurturing both the capacity for voicing something responsibly and for in-depth, expanded listening. Empathy can only emerge because of embodied experience; we might need to hear that other breath, hum or song live, in the same room, in order to recognise ourselves in others. And in the space of voice–and–quietness used responsibly, perhaps we can be asked to pay attention to a common breathing: to find a way of breathing together, even, of still sharing in the increasingly precarious feast of breathable air — that very beginning of our own voice.