A Space for Sound Art

At the Hood Museum of Art we often teach with an emphasis on the visual. One strategy, called Learning to Look, breaks the process into five parts (observation, analysis, context, interpretation, and criticism), all intended to slow viewers down so that they can better process visual information. This is a skill that we frequently practice and teach. Walking into an art museum, our audiences expect to engage with the visual in some way. Whether seeking education, delight, or challenge, they expect to see something on the walls or floors. This was the case with the works by Terry Adkins and Jess Rowland at Hood Downtown—they had an immediate visual impact. Once visitors learned the exhibition was about sound, however, some audience members engaged further, while others were put off.

In teaching with this work, we had to Learn to Listen. This is involved patience and developing a new vocabulary for describing our auditory experiences. Because much of the work was time based, we also had to identify and discuss moments that had passed seconds before. The sound from some works could be treated as a coherent whole, while others might be broken down to specific and nuanced parts. The five steps of our strategy stayed the same, but the experience of applying them felt different, sometimes richer and more holistic, sometimes more fleeting and harder to grasp. Touring the exhibition involved a greater time component as well. Instead of walking into another room, experiencing the next work often involved a 5-to-10-minute walk across campus. This added time increased anticipation, and left more time for processing works of art as we transitioned, but sometimes led to movement when listening in stillness would have been more beneficial.

For incidental audiences (as opposed to those who sought out installations from the exhibition), the works sited in various campus spaces had to capitalize on or compete with what individuals were doing in that space. While sometimes those intentions fit seamlessly (Julianne Swartz’s book-like objects in the library, for example), at other times sound seemed to compete with students’ immediate priorities, such as studying. Like much of the public art on campus, which is primarily abstract sculpture, some works are noticed and celebrated, while others are unrecognized, criticized, or met with only a fleeting curiosity.

We don’t know the full impact of Resonant Spaces: Sound Art at Dartmouth on the communities that experienced it. It certainly broadened the museum’s reach across campus and allowed us to form and strengthen partnerships with some amazing colleagues. In some ways a college campus, with its emphasis on inquiry and intellectual risk taking, feels like the perfect place for this kind experiment. And most of our partners across campus agreed that the addition of art to their spaces was a benefit. As the field of sound art continues to grow, it will be interesting to see to what extent sound art continues to be integrated into the collections and exhibition programs of institutions traditionally dedicated to visual art.