Go straight to the main content



murmurART

art advisory - looking for something specific or help in finding work by early career artists. contact info@murmurart.com
Review Jan 27 2009 « | »
Visual Music at the Tate Modern Art has the power to inhabit a space in a way that can feel more than visual. A friend......

Jon Openshaw

Art has the power to inhabit a space in a way that can feel more than visual. A friend who went to see Rothko's Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern on a deserted mid-week morning described a low hum filling the rooms. When I went on a weekend soon after and all I got was the hum of reluctant children and determined parents, but even at Tate-rush-hour the bold and enigmatic canvasses gave off something extra-visual.

An article by Caroline Briggs yesterday provided an interesting reminder of this, also in relation to Rothko. It focused on the work of Jim Aitchison, Henry Moore fellow at the Royal Academy of Music. He has previously worked with Anthony Gormley on translating (if translating is the right word) the visual into the audio, and is now turning his attention to Rothko.

Aitchison acknowledges the fact that Rothko would have most probably seen his efforts as redundant (he was never only interested in the visual, and would not have seen his canvases as lacking other sensory impact) but Aitchison's work is none-the-less a fascinating process - creating sound-maps by using manuscript paper to merge visual image and musical notes.

It is a reminder that the five senses are semantic labels, not objective truths. Take a cross-cultural perspective and you find cultures that organise the sensory world in a very different way, or look back to the middle ages in Europe when the 'common sense' was quite literally that - a single unifying sense that collated, merged and interpreted the inputs of all the others. Even today we acknowledge sensory leakages in cross-sensory metaphors like bitter wind or loud shirt.

Synaesthesia is the phenomenon of stimulus in one sense causing sensation in another, and most often refers to those who get it involuntarily (where sounds are coloured, for example). It has a healthy tradition in art however, perhaps most famously in Kandinsky's musical paintings, and Aitchison's work brings attention to this. The Kreutzer Quartet performed his score last night at the Tate Modern, and recordings can be found here.

More on Aichison's visual music here.

    Comments

Add Comments

  • CAPTCHA Image