Situated in the Gallery

The majority of the Hood Downtown exhibition space was filled with works by Terry Adkins. Suggestive and sublime, his sculpture and video work brought issues of history, biography, and race to the fore. Adkins’s work often asks us to question received histories and narratives, drawing attention to figures that may be under- or misrepresented in American culture. It is precisely his preoccupation with such issues that made Adkins’s work so critical to Resonant Spaces. No other artist in the show dealt with the intersection of culture and sound. Adkins’s work has often been presented as a constellation of pieces and performances, which the artist called recitals, around a particular individual such as John Brown, Bessie Smith, or W. E. B. Du Bois. While all other artists included in Resonant Spaces produced site-specific commissioned works, Adkins died in 2014, so we selected works from a variety of his projects that were united by an engagement with sound. They were also distinguished by their strong visual, and often material, presence (fig. 21).

The most dramatic work in the gallery was Adkins’s Aviarium (Grasshopper Sparrow) (2014, fig. 22). Installed above the audience’s heads, its shiny silver surfaces glinted with tempting tactility. Made up of silver disks—including cymbals—strung on a pole and capped by a trumpet mute, Aviarium is the concretization of the call of the grasshopper sparrow, a small endangered bird. It is one in a series of five related works, each representing a different call. Here something natural and ephemeral, typically shown as something light, and often feminine (think of Cinderella’s relationship with birds), is made into a solid, heavy and fixed form, yet one that shines as it hangs overhead. It is a work about sound that references the notation of sound, yet that is silent. Adkins’s work bridges media. As he said, “I tried to make sculptures as ethereal and transient as music, and when I work with music I try to make it visceral and physical as if to suggest that it was matter.”¹³

In Aviarium the sound takes place in the audience’s imagination, in their reading of the waveform into the bird call. The physical structure of the work visually implies some sonic information—relative pitch, for example—but leaves out much, including tone and tempo. Adkins similarly allowed space for visitors to bring themselves to the work in Mute (2007, fig. 23), a video work featuring three soundless clips of jazz legend Bessie Smith from her only film, St. Louis Blues (1929). The imagery of her face, hands, and dress is deeply emotional, even as it is silent. The audience is asked to fill in the sound mentally, imaginatively. In a previous installation at the Syracuse University Art Galleries in 2008, Mute was presented as an interactive installation in which the audience could select different sounds to be played in the gallery. Mute seems to refer literally to the work, and also to the ways in which Smith was muted during her lifetime and in which her legacy continues to be silenced.

Three sculptural works, Tambour, Norfolk, and Vasculum (2013, 2012, and 2013; figs. 24–26), all come from Adkins’s project combining the historical and fictionalized interests of two men: George Washington Carver (1860s–1943) and Yves Klein (1928–1962). Adkins brings together the African American scientist and the French artist through provocative, allusive objects. For Resonant Spaces, the use of instruments (or an object that suggests an instrument—a hand drum, in the case of Vasculum) brings us to the hazy middle ground between music and sound art. Much as in Jess Rowland’s work, we hoped that the reference to music would feel familiar to the audience. But Adkins’s works are not musical per se—any sound is simply a reference, a memory, or an imaginative leap in the mind of the visitor.

The principal of juxtaposition is critical in much of Adkins’s oeuvre, particularly in the video work Flumen Orationis (2012, fig. 27). Here Adkins combines stereoscopic images of early flight and World War I with audio from Jimi Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” (Band of Gypsies, 1970) and Dr. Martin Luther King’s speech “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam” (1967). This work, part of the recital The Principalities, After Jimi Hendrix was inspired, in part, by Hendrix’s brief time as a paratrooper in the 101st Airborne Division in 1961. Adkins wrote of Hendrix’s influence:

Machine Gun, Hendrix’s unflinchingly brave rallying cry, valiantly proclaims that war is murder—that only love and the power of soul can bring about a peaceful end to the carnage for profit that was wrought in Vietnam then as it has been elsewhere with unbridled frenzy ever since.¹⁴

The flickering video, alternating between two stereoscopic images, creates a visual energy that speaks to the auditory experience. This work and Julianne Swartz’s Transfer (objects) are the only two in the exhibition that use legible outside texts. Here, sound merges with music and the visual, and in Swartz’s piece with the tactile, eroding the straightforward legibility of the spoken word into something richer, denser, and more affective.

The final video work in the show, Synapse (2004), from Black Beethoven, carries the potential for a moment of surprise similar to the experience of “playing” Rowland’s piano roll for the first time. An image of the composer changes from an older white man to a younger black man (figs. 28 and 29). The timing is slow, almost imperceptible, so one might notice one image on the wall, and then turn back a few minutes later to see it completely transformed. In this work Adkins raises the question of the composer’s possible Moorish ancestry. Beethoven’s blackness was something Adkins heard about frequently as a child, growing up in Washington, DC, in the fifties and sixties, as a kind of “alternate history.”¹⁵ Synapse is accompanied by a low sound that plays in the background. The video gives space for visitors to question their own responses to the work and, by extension, their assumptions about race and classical music, and changing cultural canons.

Adkins’s work seduces through the varied textures and patinas of its surfaces, whether physical or digital, the flickering of film or the layers of lace. It intrigues with its suggestion of narrative, of biography, of the potential to reveal some essence of historical ghosts. And yet often the work questions more than it answers. It introduces the viewer to someone new, or newly reimagined, and then leaves it up to us to get acquainted. It works on a variety of senses—hearing, sight, touch (at least imagined)—and though I don’t believe the work had a distinctive smell, it feels as if it ought to. Visitors to Resonant Spaces responded to this, listening, looking, and discussing the work. The gallery space made this a familiar exercise for many. Simply by entering in they were prepared to engage with Adkins work.

The other gallery-based installation in Resonant Spaces was located in the Hopkins Center for the Arts along a busy hallway. A wall of windows allowed many to have visual access to the work, but only a fraction of these entered the gallery to study it further. This seemed an appropriate place for Christine Sun Kim’s Grid of Prefixed Acousmatics (2017), a work composed of fifteen ceramic sculptures and fifteen accompanying drawings (figs. 30 and 31). Visually appealing, the sculptures and drawings were arranged in neat grids on a table and wall, respectively. At first glance the work seemed deceptively straightforward: sculptures in relatively recognizable shapes, such as a vase and a pearl necklace. However, the work was highly conceptual in nature.

Each sculpture and accompanying drawing referred to an experience Kim has had with a type of acousmatic sound, or sound without a visible source. These types of acousmatic sounds were delineated by prefixes—hence Prefixed in the title—written on the corresponding sculpture and drawing. For example, an-acousmatic, meaning without acousmatic sound, showed a cup of water. For Kim, who is deaf, this captures the moment when her ASL interpreter pauses to take a drink of water (figs. 32 and 33). Without an interpreter (or closed-captioning), acousmatic sound is unavailable to Kim. Melding both the impersonal (the terminology) and the highly personal (the imagery), this work posed some difficulty for many viewers. It was about sound, yet silent. Conceptually unfamiliar, and truly accessible only through anecdote, it required some effort on the part of the visitor to truly understand, either through reading the wall text or listening to an instructor. One student wrote:

I really started to connect with the exhibit in the HOP a lot more the more I walked past it and went into the gallery. The more I thought about and played with the concepts the more I began to really enjoy it. I feel like it grew into the space over the course of the term.¹⁶

In many ways Kim’s Grid of Prefixed Acousmatics is the perfect counterpoint to Alvin Lucier’s 5 Graves to Cairo. Both were highly conceptual works that required some outside knowledge to fully appreciate. They also spoke to the histories and oeuvres of their artists quite directly. While one was predominantly visual, the other had no visual component at all. Indeed, Lucier’s 5 Graves to Cairo exemplifies acousmatic sound. The sources are buried underground, undetectable to the eye.