Lynch and Sound
Earlier this y ear one of the world’s true ex:centrics, David Lynch, was showcased in a major exhibition at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. The show, brilliantly curated by Jose da Silva, presented the largest collection of his artworks ever assembled in one place and a complete retrospective of his work for the screen. Given the brief of ex:centrics, Lynch of course cuts an interesting figure, because whilst he is in many ways the very embodiment of an ex:centric, the kind of canonisation that a major international show like this signals throws the whole idea of centre and margins into a state of flux. If previously, especially in musical circles, this kind of recognition may have been figured as indicative of an artist “selling out”, my suspicion is that phenomena such as this speak more now to the ways in which the culture industry is changing.
The Spectacle of Listening
By Paul Hegarty
There’s a lot of listening happening today. A lot of attention paid to hearing, to sound, to openness, to empathic communication, to shared soundworlds. Some of this attention happens in the zone of sound studies, pleased that at least some part of the world around it has finally grasped McLuhan’s sense that the future would be full of sound, and that the acoustic would be the privileged way of imaging space and social interaction. Without wishing to distinguish too much between listening and hearing, can we say that hearing more sound is better? Presumably, as writers never tire of pretending, the ears cannot be closed, so so react passively, even submissively to sound produced by someone else. Acoustic ecology tries to rectify this terrifying presence of McLuhan’s allatonceness, and restore the measure of listening, in place of unwilled hearing.