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 show itself used sound in a very interesting way, being entirely unafraid of the cacophony that can be created in large gallery spaces oftentimes not designed for sound (keep an eye out for our upcoming book on this!) in which a number of sounding pieces are on display. As well as “The Air is on Fire” soundscapes Lynch created for the Fondation Cartier show a few years ago, the sounds of telephones and the sound tracks of various shorts mixed together in the gallery spaces, seeming to travel impossible distances and through walls, to bring together different spaces in surprising ways.
Which leads me nicely on to this, which is a video of the talk I gave for the public program attached to the exhibition in which I think through the place of sound and noise in Lynch and in which I expand on a claim similar to this.
Maybe one day we’ll have a book on Lynch in the series. It’s undoubtedly warranted, because seeing the films in the Cinematheque attached to the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art which has a truly mind-blowing sound system that the projectionists are not afraid to play LOUD :) it struck me more than ever how important sound is in his work…. But for now….