Ear to the Page - The Center for Book Arts

This exhibition explores the inevitable intersection between books and recorded sounds.

Indeed, music recordings like vinyl can be defined as written sounds being “read” by a needle and record sleeves can be seen as book jackets, or books’ contents can be listened as music.

Here the exhibition explores different categories: the sound work reflecting structure and aesthetic of books, packages entailing a book and CD and books with a sound component.

For example, with Touch, Listen, from 2007 by Dennis Yuen and Morry Galonoy, a phone number is printed in every pages of a book and calling the number will direct you to the voice of a man reading chapters of a book.

In the same range, The Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, in 1969, commissioned an exhibition with the challenge of having only telephone conversations to get the description of the artists’ works, all written descriptions being forbidden. Although the exhibition was never achieved, the excerpts of telephone conversations can be heard on the vinyl Art by Telephone, from 1969, by Jan Van Der Marck.

Christian Marclay, sound page, where you can find a vinyl as one of the page of a book or A sleeve to be read by Michael Snow, 1975 are others example of concepts presented in this multimedia exhibition.

As David Toop says in the latest issue of BOMB magazine, it is “about sound and listening without having the medium of music”. Thus sound art brings us in situation where the musical and the visual are merging, and unexpected sources for musical potential are emphasized.

Sonic events get expressed visually and visual information gets expressed sonically.

A concrete example is the French artist, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, in some of his works, translating fragments of language typed on the gallery’s office computers into a musical score played in real-time by an acoustic piano placed in the gallery.