This Is Not A Love Song [Radio] #6 - Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia

This Is Not A Love Song [Radio] builds on an existing field recording project by artists Joe Wilson and Chanelle Collier titled This Is Not A Love Song (Sound Archive): 200 field recordings, 200 countries; a collection of the ambient sounds of major art institutions around the world, created through recordings from a global community of contributors. The project appropriates sound to critically study the ambience of institutional space.

Each episode is presented in two halves: the original field recordings from the first half of each episode (A-sides), and the second half of each episode (B-sides) is a sonic response by invited artists, curated by artist and musician Jack Prest.

These responses take the form of deconstructed, remixed or re-recorded versions of the original field recordings and explore ambient electronic, contemporary classical, noise and other musical/sound forms conceptually connected to the practice of field recording.

CALL FOR CONTRIBUTORS: If you would like to contribute a field recording from an art institution to This Is Not A Love Song (Sound Archive), contact Joe and Chanelle at chanelle@chanellecollier.com

The artists would like to thank and acknowledge support from all contributing artists and arts workers who have offered recordings and advice.

The series is made in collaboration with Jack Prest.

A-Side Field Notes:
"Episode 6 closes this series with a recording of the MCA in our home town, Sydney, Australia. It is the very first museum at which a recording was made for this project. Here we tested if we could keep our bodies still and silent for 15mins of audio recording, while taking in the artwork and museum around us.

And it was here that we learned that though museums are places for looking at art, it is highly suspicious to look too much and too long. After standing still and looking intently at an excellent large scale wall piece, for about 10mins, staff were compelled to ask what was I doing? With some obvious concern. Perhaps for my wellbeing. Perhaps for the wellbeing of the artwork or the art-space. I couldn’t be sure. I could only assure them that “Everything is OK” – Chanelle Collier.

B-Side Notes:
"For ep.6, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, the B-side is by Ollie Brown. Ollie has presented a series of audio vignettes that drift over the Museum sounds. There is a kindness and beauty in these compositions that has prompted me to think of the soft collision between the personal and the institutional.

I think about the actualities of spaces, represented within these sounds. The huge halls of the MCA, Sydney; the digital; the territories of exchange; of Ollies's studio; the room he's in; his breath; and the space that reverberates his voice. Sound travels, it has many coordinates, multiple origins, it echoes, closes and is absorbed, multiplies and fades. It touches.

Every space is characterised by a system; is territorialised with its own authority and ownership, rights and regulation; each is occupied for specific causes and varied uses. These are made up of many bodies and personal stories that visit, inhabit, and relate to sound and space; the role Chanelle and I play by instigating this project, our travel and correspondence; each B-side contributing artist and their labour from within each individual circumstance; and of course, Milo, who is in London, caretaking and delivering this opportunity to ride the airwaves." – Joe Wilson.

From The Archive:

(THE POSITION OF THE IMAGE):

Eschewing traditional painting methods in favour of doing a recording in its place, is an engagement with the context of its placement. The sounds of an audience looking at paintings is an engagement with the context of viewing. This is an effort to engage the unspoken ideology of a painting and the spaces that painting occupies.

The position of the image is at once a physical set of parameters relating to its location, and an ideological position. A painting doesn’t only display from a singular vantage, such as a canvas surface or a wall, but instead displays within a system, that is also a network. Paintings move through multiple sites of agency and viewing. The handling of a painting changes hands between artist, handler, curator, dealer and collector which pertains to ownership and transaction. Paintings are in motion, travelling into differing contexts, from studio to gallery to home or storage. So the ephemerality of sound belonging to an origin is comparable to a picture in contemporary culture, to reproduction in particular.

Objects inevitably recur as images, sounds recur through recordings. They become multiplied heterogeneously into various digital devices, services and places simultaneously. The digital data travels onto screens and speakers at different resolutions and fidelity. At the same time the it travels electronically to remote physical locations to be stored on hard-drives and servers belonging to various entities. An original painting is more than likely to end up in a storage rack, while the data goes to a rack of hard-drives and storage device. In the end, as part of a multi-platform digital reality, the fixed singularity of the original is a highly suspect notion, distant, given that it departs from one singular network and origin.

An original is the locust of its copy as agent, becoming one amongst many in a network of competing agencies. The possession of agency and ownership, is transactional and ideological. Each having a familial relationship to the context of each discrete image. What amounts to a consideration of reproductions and originals is important when one weighs the possibility that the original also becomes a derivative of its own reproduction.

There is a shifting focus; into situational context, from the discrete to its counterpart, and its supposed position in the environment it aspires to, the Museum.

– Joe Wilson