Blog Post (Week 5)

This portion of the class was one of my favorites thus far, particularly because I think that our generation is at a very interesting time socially and politically. Specifically, I believe that the nation is divided among aspects of race, sexuality, and political identification – among all other things. While these issues definitely divide our nation and conversations may be unproductive as people remain overly staunch in their opinions, art offers an opportunity to breach this disconnect and allow individuals to explore art on their own – hopefully coming to a better understanding of this national and world-wide separation and acting on it in a positive way.

In observing the several pieces in this week’s artist studies, one of my favorites was Terry Adkins. After viewing his work in the Hood Museum recently, I was able to gain a newfound perspective on racial identity and subjugation throughout American history. Specifically, he had one piece titled Black Beethoven in which he took a portrait of Beethoven and slowly transforms it into a “black Beethoven” via digital art. The process is largely symbolic because many believe that it is quite possible that Beethoven was black, and yet our history shrouds this idea perceiving him as a white individual.

In doing so, society has placed him under the umbrella of largely classical and predominately “white” music, implicitly stating that a black person could not have produced such quality music and would not be “fit” for it. To me, Adkins’ piece opens our eyes to the tendency of white individuals to hide aspects of history that make them uncomfortable and the inability of white individuals to cope with racial equality. Today, we are thankfully in a society that welcomes all races to any type of music, but this piece opens our eyes to a painful notion of our past in which this liberty was not the case and issues of race (such as Beethoven’s) were swept under the rug.

In a similar vein, through artists like Christine Sun Kim, we learn about the notion of “sound etiquette,” which is the societal norms that we have formed around sounds in general. For Sun Kim, a deaf individual since birth, we see a different approach to sound – one in which sensory aspects of the body become a pivotal player in the appreciation of sound. Further, she appreciates sound not as an identifiable sound, but as an object, which she was able to display in a piece at dartmouth titled The Grid of Prefixed Acousmatics. In the piece, she used clay to fully understand how she visualizes various sounds. To me, the piece helped me understand that sound is not something that can flow through our ears; rather it is something that can be portrayed in a tangible and tactile way. Too often do we close off our perspective to the notion of “sound etiquette,” and Christine Sun Kim shows us that this is both unfortunate and only scraping the surface of sound possibilities.

This section of the course was great and gave me a new understanding of how sound and art can function as a medium through which we can defy societal norms – whether that be race or “sound etiquette.”