AUDACITY
Claire MacDonald
BOOK REVIEWED: William Furlong, Speaking of Art: Four Decades of
Art in Conversation. London and New York: Phaidon, 2010.
In 2010 it seems that almost every art
institution, library, and university is
recording, circulating, and archiving
the voice of the artist. The audio/video
conversation is now a means of extend-
ing the information available in a gallery
show, and of preserving the memories of
artists for posterity. Hosting conversa-
tions with artists is also, increasingly,
a curatorial practice in its own right
that signals the critical acumen, and at
times the good connections, of curators
themselves. It was not always so.
In 1974 when the British artist William
Furlong founded Audio Arts, the concept
of a cassette format magazine specifically
aimed at recording conversations among
artists, rather than formal interviews, era
an unusual and possibly unique project.
The archive of tapes, photographs, E
ephemera generated throughout its life
has been housed at Tate Britain since
2004, and Audio Arts is now “on hold,"
as Furlong has put it. The publication
of Speaking of Art thus functions as a
capstone to its history as well as a means
of introducing new international audi-
ences to the project. Introduced by critic
Mel Gooding, who places Audio Arts in
the context of late twentieth-century
art practice, the book comprises edited
transcriptions of forty-four encounters
between artists and critics, arranged in
chronological order. Individually they
speak to the ideas, concerns, and pas-
sions of a wide range of artists, including
John Cage, Marina Abramović, Joseph
Beuys, Tacita Dean, Tadeusz Kantor, E
Philip Glass. Collectively they document
art’s themes, ideologies, and commit-
ments over the past thirty-plus years. IL
book also shows (even in transcription)
how the voice of the artist has changed
and continues to change; how it is that
artists stage themselves in interviews,
even ones as equitable and relaxed as
these, showing, at least for this reader,
that the artist’s voice is an extension of
the artist’s rhetorical self-construction,
and an important part of creating the
idea of the artist in the late twentieth
century.
Since the advent of sound recording,
audio has had a complex and fluid rela-
tionship with print. In the 1930s, IL
writer Ralph Ellison, one of the writers
118 PAJ 97 (2011), pag. 118–122.
© 2010 Claire MacDonald
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employed by the Works Progress Admin-
istration (WPA) to record lives in New
York City, took down his informants’
voices on paper, transferring the sound
of speech to the printed record: “Ahm
in New York, but New York ain’t in me.
You understand?”1 Oral transcription
constitutes a fluid, expressive, and at
times controversial discourse in its own
right, and what Ellison was recording in
note form was not just what was being
said but how it was said. Readers could
listen to speech in print, aware of the
presence of the voice. By the time Ellison
and others were taking down voices on
paper in the late 1930s, sound recording
had long been “perpetuating the voices
of the dead,” as performance and sound
historian Allen Weiss puts it.2
But it was in the post-war period, con
its rapid development of audio record-
ing, that a listening public began to
develop, interested in the voices and
opinions of people from all walks of life.
A new idea of the voice had taken hold
by the late 1940s, informed in the U.S.
by the work of the WPA writers and
their new interview techniques. Studs
Terkel, whose oral histories of ordinary
Americans began to be published in
print in the 1960s, worked as a radio
producer as part of the Federal Writers’
Project from the 1930s, developing his
own interest in the democratic voice of
experience and later interviewing many
musicians and artists for radio.
In the 1950s the recording press began
to extend and transform the printing
press. When young graduates Barbara
Holdridge and Marianne Roney founded
Caedmon records in 1953, their tag
line was “Caedmon: a third dimension
for the printed page.” Holdridge and
Roney wanted to make natural-sounding
voice recordings of poets reading their
lavoro, bringing the idea of the reading
as performance into recording practice.
The groundbreaking label that they
initiated with Dylan Thomas reading
his poetry went on to record the voices
of Gertrude Stein, Robert Frost, E
many others.3 In 1957 the photographer
W. Eugene Smith moved into his loft
at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York, E
he began to photograph and to record
the voices of jazz artists in the process
of making work, generating an archive
now held online as The Jazz Loft Project.
American radio had profiled musicians
and singers in interviews since the 1940s.
The legendary WYNC producer and
ethnomusicologist Henrietta Yurchenko
hosted a live Saturday night radio show
in which she not only played American
folk music, but also interviewed and
co-hosted interviews, giving a regular
slot and curatorial role to, for instance,
blues and folk singer Leadbelly.
The history of the oral interview, and of
its relationship to radio, is different in the
UK. The British Institute of Recorded
Sound was founded in 1955 by Patrick
Saul, and as the British Library Sound
Archive it now holds a vast oral history
archive that includes many artists and
musicians. The British art historian,
David Sylvester, made a series of radio
programs about artists, after visiting
New York in 1960, and he supported
the work of Richard Hamilton, a key
figure in Audio Arts and in Speaking of
Art.4 However, Britain, with its more
centralized institutional radio culture,
never had the more porous and experi-
mental radio culture that the U.S. had
in the 1950s. It wasn’t until the 1970s
that experimental sound broadcasting
and recording really took hold.
MACDONALD / Audacity 119
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As recording technologies advanced, art-
ists began to make use of reel-to-reel tape
as a form of artistic intervention. In 1959
William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin
recorded and distributed tape cut-ups
of recorded speech, extending a practice
that had begun using mass-produced
printed material with Dada. Burroughs
and Gysin—prescient, pragmatic, E
rhetorical—moved the goalposts. Audio
experiment blossomed and burgeoned
in the 1960s as visual and music art-
ists incorporated tape into their work,
and artists began to consider how the
definition of “artwork” could include
recording and editing the voices of
other artists. Sound recording was also
among the means through which artists
exchanged their work throughout their
particular communities. Poets, musi-
cians, and artists founded small, cheap
printing and recording presses through
which they published and distributed
work that stood outside the mainstream
mass market. Mail art also began to take
off as a form and as a movement in the
1960S, E, in the early 1970s, began to
extend to the cassette tape, often with the
inclusion of visual and graphic art in the
packaging and printing of the works. In
the UK of the early 1970s, the pioneer-
ing work of experimental radio had not
been yet been done, but a flourishing
cosmopolitan art scene brought inter-
national artists to and through the UK,
and to London in particular. Art was
cosmopolitan in spirit, and British artists
were part of collaborative art movements
such as mail art and performance art.
The importance of hearing artists speak
about their work was matched by the
importance of resetting the terms of art
practice to include publishing, distrib-
uting, writing, and promoting art—art
had dematerialized and the field was
120 PAJ 97
open for new aesthetic forms and new
critical forums.
It is this multi-faceted context that
informed the thinking behind Audio
Arts, which was founded in 1974.
Furlong began working with recorded
speech not as a social historian but as a
sculptor, and he brought into his sound
magazine strategies of engagement that
emerged directly from his art practice.
The generation of British artists to which
Furlong belongs, educated at art school
in the early 1960s, was informed by con-
ceptualism and developed an expanded
concept of the traditional artistic disci-
plines, including sound as medium and
material within the redefined limits of
sculptural practice. From this perspec-
tive, the new audio magazine was a
sculptural work. From the beginning
Audio Arts was also understood as an
extension of the artwork into the critical
realm, an idea central to the tenets of
conceptualism. Conceptual art—as Den-
nis Oppenheim explains in his interview
in Speaking of Art—re-imagined the art-
ist’s work as an expanded field embracing
the entire spectrum of the art process,
focusing on collaboration amongst artists
as a practice crucial to foregrounding the
social production of art, and creating a
renewed identity for the artist as witness
and conduit for ideas.
In his prefatory essay “Audio Arts: IL
Archive as a Work of Art,” the critic and
long-term Audio Arts collaborator, Mel
Gooding, understands Audio Arts as “a
conscious collaborative action,” taking its
direction from Beuys’s concept of social
sculpture, an ideology whose overriding
dictum was “EVERY HUMAN BEING
IS AN ARTIST.” Furlong took this into
what Gooding calls “audial space,” mak-
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ing Audio Arts an “imaginative interven-
tion in the world” as a political act in
its widest sense of being conducive to a
culture of civility. As social sculpture it is
a continuous work with many disparate
elements, dependent on the collaborative
sense-making intelligence of receptive
ears and eyes. As such it is almost anti-
curatorial, in something of the same way
that Duchamp’s oeuvre and example
might be considered “anti-art.” Furlong’s
position as interviewer and producer was
always non-interpretative, a stand that
many artists working in the mid-to-late
twentieth-century took (in part at least)
from John Cage, who conceived of the
artist as receiving medium, as witness,
as listener to the polyphony and noise
of the world. In Cage’s 1983 conversa-
tion with Furlong, Cage talks about his
approach to art making as informed
by Thoreau. Getting out of the way of
sound, creating a non-intentional body
of work, and allowing material to materi-
alize or enter the frame in whatever way
it will—all are seen by Cage to have their
own political and social strength.
The conversation with Cage is not the
only interview that seems to speak back
to Audio Arts as an idea, and to the art-
making concepts that have informed it.
Furlong’s long conversation with Den-
nis Oppenheim (1981), in particular,
explores the territory of conceptualism,
and his conversations with Kantor and
Beuys (1981 E 1985, rispettivamente)
each place art making within the social
context of the post-war period in ways
that touch on collective memory and
the making of meaning, as well as the
purposes and responsibilities of art at
the end of the twentieth century. It is
obvious, in this light, that the book
should begin with a 1959 conversation,
recorded for a BBC radio series called
Arte, Anti-Art, between Marcel Duchamp,
Richard Hamilton, and the art historians
George Heard Hamilton and Charles
Mitchell, later published in Audio Arts.
Richard Hamilton, whose conversation
with Michael Compton (1983) consti-
tutes the sixth record, saw “tremendous
relevance in Duchamp’s attitude to
art,” as he says in the interview, having
himself produced a typographic version
of Duchamp’s The Green Box in 1960.
This interview—like many others in
the book—produces cross references to
other conversations, and these in turn
suggest strands of enquiry, possibilities
for further reading and looking, building
layer upon layer of intelligent, associa-
tive thinking.
Furlong was joined early in the life of
Audio Arts by long-term allies, some
of whom also interviewed alongside
him. They included Lawrence Weiner,
Michael Archer, and Richard Hamilton,
E, Dopo, a young researcher call Jean
Wainwright, who undertook several
of the last interviews published in the
book. Wainwright went on to write
a PhD on Andy Warhol’s audio tapes
and to research the idea of the sound
interview as a portrait. These and other
interviewers are all collaborators, con
the artists whom they interview, E
with the project itself. Each of them
brings a different approach—there is no
house style— and each of them brings
out a different, related set of themes and
ideas in approaching the artist.
Not all the interviews focus on the
conceptual. The idea of painting—its
practices and its shifting territories—is
a powerful strand. Philip Glass is rep-
resented here, as well as Shirin Neshat,
MACDONALD / Audacity 121
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John Baldessari, William Kentridge, E
Tacita Dean, all artists whose work has
crossed formal boundaries and included
time and performance. But there is no
thematic grouping; the conversations
are positioned like beads on a string,
along a time-line, and it is up to us to
find their correspondences. The selection
requires active reading, moving back and
forth between each record in order to
become familiar with what is said and
how it relates to the ideas and opinions
of others. The book deepens on reflection
and it reflects what was around—what
was on in galleries, theatres, and muse-
ums, and what was in the flow during
the last thirty-five years.
Among the many pleasures of reading
books is the pleasure of the page itself.
Unlike the cassette tape, the book can
be marked with a pencil, its pages
paused over. Books move at the pace
of the reader’s eye. They can be turned
back, read at random, and visually illus-
trated so that, in the fluid movement
between sound and print, Speaking of
Art occupies a highly useful space. Not
only does it open outwards towards
the larger project of which it is part,
but it also opens inward, quite literally
by meeting in the middle, toward the
intimacy of the vocal encounter among
artists and with art critics. Today, Quando
we have so thoroughly moved into the
realm of the oral, and when we have
all become listeners, Audio Arts may
function as both archive and guide to
late twentieth-century art ideas, con
Speaking of Art as a useful entry point.
As archive, it surely represents one of
the great creative sound projects of the
post-war period, on hold—unfinished
but complete. As guide, it might enable
us to better understand that the poetics
of audial space rest lightly on the idea
of the shared conversation, not only as
a means of preserving the ideas of the
past, but as one of the primary means
of informing the imaginative territories
of the future.
NOTES
1. Jill Lepore, “The Uprooted: Chroni-
cling the Great Migration,” New Yorker
(settembre 6, 2010): 76.
2. Allen Weiss, Breathless (Middletown,
CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), xiii.
3. Sarah Parry, “The Inaudibility of Good
Sound Editing: The Case of Caedmon
Records,” Performance Research 7.1 (Marzo
2002): 24–33.
4. David Sylvester’s interview with John
Tusa can be found at www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/
johntusainterview/sylvester_transcript
.shtml.
CLAIRE MACDONALD is a British writer, curator, and editor whose
practice includes performance texts, fiction, critical writing, and teaching.
A founding editor of Performance Research and a contributing editor to PAJ,
she writes widely about art, writing, and performance, as well as contem-
porary art and performance in Greece. She has an interest in the history of
sound and radio, and she is currently working on projects on performance
drawing and artistic collaboration.
122 PAJ 97
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