Sons & Lumiéres - A History of Sound in 20th Century Art

This is a show which you don't get to see (and hear) too often - a show about one of the key issues of contempopray art: the relationship between SOUND & LIGHT, between hearing & seeing. Annick Bureaud of IDEA Online has seen it. Read her report in the commentaries below which she submitted originally to the DASH mailing list. And don't miss the very nicely done little javascript animation promoting this exhibition on the Pompidou's website. Let it play a little and explore the different dimensions of it, it's fun!



Thomas Wilfred, Untitled. Opus 161, 1965-1966
Composition de lumière évolutive (une phase)
Durée totale: 1 an, 315 jours, 12 heures
Machine lumineuse, 132 x 87 x 66 cm
Coll. Carol and Eugene Epstein, Los Angeles, Etats-Unis
© Copyright 2004 By Eugene Epstein

Sons & Lumiéres exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is the largest event devoted to the relationship between music / sound and 20th century art since the "Vom Klang der Bilder" show in Stuttgart In 1985.

In his poem Correspondances, Baudelaire wrote that "scents, colours, and sounds commune", and the 20th century, often considered the era when the Arts converged and entered into dialogue, provides countless illustrations of this notion. After the rise of Abstraction around 1910 and painting's strivings to commune with music - the abstract Art par excellence - the new electric media kept up the pursuit of this ancestral myth. Down through the century the arts of light, cinema and later video, were fertile ground for experiments in bringing image and sound together, while at the same time other approaches drew extensively on theories running counter to the possibility of any match between sight and hearing: using processes involving notions of chance, random noise and silence, new performance-art musical gambits challenged the "correspondences" ideal. To the question raised by the Romantics and then by the Symbolists - "Can images be translated into sound and vice-versa?" - the century came up with a host of different replies, some of them utopian and others emphasising the purest sensory pleasure.

The 2100 square metres of the Sons & Lumiéres exhibition are divided into three areas, with over 400 works - many of them on show for the first time - providing an enormous range of sensory experiences and highlighting the crucial moments of the interaction between music/sound and the visual Arts.

Sophie Duplaix, curator of the exhibition
Marcella Lista, associate curator

CENTRE POMPIDOU
75191 PARIS CEDEX 04
00 33 (0)1 44 78 12 33