Alvin Lucier (b. 1931, USA)
Sound on paper, 1985

documenta 14, Kassel, Germany / Visited 05/08/2017

I’ve been making some lame attempts to combine painting and sound. And here it is – a brilliant minimalist solution, made some thirty years ago, with a perfect title.

Anyway, I still keep thinking about various ways to combine sound with other artistic practices. “Combine” is a wrong word perhaps, as sound is always already there. Thus it is more about finding ways not to ignore it, not to filter it out as inconsequential side-effect or ambient phenomenon, but rather acknowledge and appreciate it as a part of the work. Why? I don’t know. Maybe I will have a better answer once I have a solution. But my curiosity may be driven by the fact that we often pretend as if it is not there, and that becomes suspicious when you know it’s there.