This essay was produced in conjunction with the exhibition Steve Parker: Futurist Listening, curated by Marcela Guerrero, on view at CUE Art Foundation from January 9 – February 12, 2020. This text is included in the free exhibition catalogue available at CUE.
Steve Parker, War Tuba Recital exhibition view, Big Medium, Austin, TX, 2018. Photo by Colin Doyle.
In her 2006 essay, scholar Claire Bishop states, “physical involvement is considered an essential precursor to social change.” [1] To expand upon Bishop’s ideas, physical involvement with an artwork can transform an experience in an art gallery from passive viewership to active participation, shifting the arts from an elite experience into a source to prompt social action. [2] With a practice combining sculptural and auditory elements, Steve Parker’s exhibition Futurist Listening reimagines the role of sensory audience participation as a social interruption, blending the sculptural and the sonic in an environment that offers respite from the chaos beyond the exhibition’s walls. Parker’s use of repurposed instruments and early sonic technology links the loud, tumultuous history of the early 20th century, as expressed in the music of brass bands, to the noise of everyday life. His work builds upon the mid-20th century legacy of participatory art (such as Fluxus, Happenings, and Performance Art) and takes it into new, technology-driven territory. [3]
Throughout Futurist Listening, the participant must look, move, and listen. Assemblages like his 2018 sculpture, Sirens, use repurposed brass instruments of all sizes—the trumpet, French horn, tuba, and trombone, amongst others. Separated from their mechanics for individual performance, Parker welds and bolts these instruments to a central plastic body to produce brass constructions that appear monumental, if not totem-like, at the center of the gallery space. At this scale, the sculptures evoke the overwhelming sea of musicians and brass instruments that perform at modern-day sporting events, visually suggesting the power of collective action. Parker’s assemblages invite the viewer to step closer—the first stage in participatory action explored throughout his practice.
Parker’s wearable sculptures further immerse the viewer through two opposing functions of sound: the incitement of political violence and the healing of trauma. He explores the potential of ambient recordings, such as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR)—a whispered, ambient noise often used as a treatment for anxiety, PTSD, and insomnia. In ASMR Étude, created in 2018 and reworked for Futurist Listening, the participant hears the whispered sounds of ASMR through headphones attached to brass instruments. The sounds and volume of the healing noise shift depending on the wearer’s position with regard to a gallery wall that has been outfitted with acoustic insertions. ASMR Étude produces movement-activated sound using acoustic locator technology originally intended as a military air defense tool, which detected the noise of enemy aircraft engines during World War I and World War II. Despite the public nature of a gallery environment, the viewer is isolated by the physical and sonic envelopment of Parker’s work, which, with knowing irony, mimics the healing effects of sound through a medium designed for warfare. In the same vein as experimental works by renowned performer Pauline Oliveros, who composed sonic performances of environmental sounds called “Sonic Meditations,” [4] ASMR Étude unites music to bodywork as a remedy for the stresses of society. [5] Like Oliveros, Parker sheds light upon the calming potential of experimental listening.
Steve Parker, Ghost Scores, 2018. Paper, ink, map pins, wire, 11 x 17 inches each.
Wall works such as Ghost Scores, 2018, also offer a moment of meditation through the manipulation of everyday chaos. In this series, Parker references the visual notations of the Ghost Army, a United States deception unit that used sound, amongst other tactics, to impersonate other Allied units during World War II. [6] Each work in the series is composed of intersecting wires of various colors placed above rectilinear abstract notations in red and black ink. Multicolored pins dot the colored wires, suggesting destinations on a map or markers for musical change. Two staves, referencing sheet music, run along the bottom of the paper. The looping wires are reminiscent of Anni Albers’ drawings of knots, while the colorful pins are akin to avant-garde trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith’s color-coded musical scores.
Without a key or legend to assist the viewer, the compositions hover between maps, musical scores, and dance notations—all visual tools to spur physical action on the part of a viewer or performer. As with his sound works, Parker offers a participatory tool, but leaves interpretation open to the viewer’s aural or physical response. The ghostly presence of choice serves as a reminder of the participation that is necessary to complete each work. The scores remain static, yet they contain the potential for agency if someone were to read the notations and take action.
Bishop remarks that “shared production is also seen to entail the aesthetic benefits of greater risk and unpredictability.” [7] By inviting viewers to complete his work, Parker encourages an unpredictable outcome created through their participation in and interpretation of an arts experience. Functioning in a time of information overload and surveillance culture, Parker creates a moment of controlled choice for the participant, setting aside his control over interpretation. Moreover, the presence of sound and Parker’s encouragement to listen closely is a remarkable lesson and sonic break from the hustle and bustle of the outside world. Whether through sound, objects, or notations, Futurist Listening invites the visitor to imagine potential in what is heard, seen, and felt—a welcome shift from a cultural climate imposing a limited range of possible futures.
[1] Claire Bishop, “Introduction: Viewers as Producers,” in Claire Bishop, ed., Participation (Whitechapel Ventures Limited: London, 2006), 11.
[2] Bishop, ibid.
[3] From the late 1950s onward, artists around the world began to experiment with interactive and interdisciplinary art practices. The Fluxus movement, for example, involved international artists, composers, designers, and poets in plastic and performative works emphasizing the exchange between artist and audience. Likewise, Happenings, a term coined by artist Allan Kaprow, were performative events meant to include audience members as participants.
[4] Starting in the 1970s, Oliveros composed text scores and sound exercises, eventually adding movement activities into her scores. Originally produced for her women’s group, by the late 1990s her experimental “Meditations” grew to worldwide acclaim as a tool for healing. Kerry O’Brien, “Listening as Activism: The ‘Sonic Meditations’ of Pauline Oliveros,” The New Yorker, December 9, 2016.
[5] Parker has discussed Oliveros’ work as a source of inspiration for his studies of ASMR. Steve Parker, conversation with the author, September 18, 2019.
[6] The Ghost Army used creative tactics to deceive and redirect German troops, including the use of dummy inflatable tanks, amplifying the sounds of tanks rolling or troops marching, and broadcasting fake radio transmissions. Due to the skilled and cunning nature of the shadow unit’s tasks, many artists were recruited to participate. Steve Parker, conversation with the author, September 18, 2019.
[7] Bishop, 12.
This essay was written as part of the Art Critic Mentoring Program, a partnership between AICA-USA (US section of International Association of Art Critics) and CUE, which pairs emerging writers with AICA-USA mentors to produce original essays on a specific exhibiting artist. Please visit aicausa.org for more information on AICA-USA, or cueartfoundation.org to learn how to participate in this program. Any quotes are from interviews with the author unless otherwise specified. No part of this essay may be reproduced without prior consent from the author. Lilly Wei is AICA’s Coordinator for the program this season.
Lilia Rocio Taboada is an independent Austin-based writer and curator. Previously, she has held positions in the Education Department at the Hammer Museum and Curatorial Departments at the Blanton Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where she was an inaugural Andrew W. Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellow. Taboada earned her MA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin and her BA in World Arts and Cultures from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Mentor Thomas Micchelli is an artist, writer, and co-editor of Hyperallergic Weekend. His work has been exhibited at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, New York; Life on Mars, Outlet, Norte Maar, Studio 10, Centotto, and Schema Projects, all in Bushwick, Brooklyn; and Leslie Heller Workspace in Manhattan. He has written catalogue essays for Kunsthall Stavanger (Stavanger, Norway); ARoS Aarhus Art Museum (Aarhus, Denmark); The Drawing Center, Cheim & Read, Betty Cuningham, and Derek Eller (New York); and Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (Summit, NJ), among others. In addition to Hyperallergic Weekend, his essays, interviews, and reviews have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Art 21, Bookforum.com, and elsewhere. He is also the co-editor of the books On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators (DAP, 2009) and On Curating 2: Paradigm Shifts (DAP, 2016).