Interview with Sarah van Sonsbeeck
Tomorrow, Dutch artist Sarah van Sonsbeeck will give guided tours through the silence of IJburg for the Stedelijk Museum in the City project. This Cagean artist is interested in sound and questions about ownership and impact. For a series about the influence of music on visual artists, I interviewed Sarah recently via Facebook and e-mail. Here is the English translation of that interview.
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Juha van ‘t Zelfde: ‘What role does music play in your work?’
Sarah van Sonsbeeck: ‘This question for me immediately implies another one, by John Cage: ‘What actually is music then?’ Music in a general sense, whatever I thought that music was before I knew of John Cage, does not play a part in my work at all. I listen to it, I’ll dance to it but it has nothing to do with my art. Any role music might play seems to only make sense when using the word music like Cage does. Like in the YouTube fragment I sent you. According to Cage music is ‘the production of sounds’. So how long does the silence last?
Cage says:
“When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings or about his ideas, of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic here on sixth avenue for instance, I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking, I have the feeling that a sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound. What it does, is it gets louder and quieter, and it gets higher and lower. And it gets longer and shorter. I’m completely satisfied with that, I don’t need sound to talk to me.
We don’t see much difference between time and space, we don’t know where one begins and the other stops. (…) People expect listening to be more than listening. And sometimes they speak of inner listening, or the meaning of sound. When I talk about music, it finally comes to peoples minds that I’m talking about sound that doesn’t mean anything. That is not inner, but is just outer. And they say, these people who finally understand that say, you mean it’s just sounds? To mean that for something to just be a sound is to be useless. Whereas I love sounds, just as they are, and I have no need for them to be anything more. I don’t want sound to be psychological. I don’t want a sound to pretend that it’s a bucket, or that it’s a president, or that it’s in love with another sound. I just want it to be a sound. And I’m not so stupid either. There was a German philosopher who is very well known, his name was Immanuel Kant, and he said there are two things that don’t have to mean anything, one is music and the other is laughter. Don’t have to mean anything that is, in order to give us deep pleasure. The sound experience which I prefer to all others, is the experience of silence. And this silence, almost anywhere in the world today, is traffic. If you listen to Beethoven, it’s always the same, but if you listen to traffic, it’s always different.”
The beauty of it is that Cage still has not told us what music actually is. He just tells us what music ‘does’ to him. To him it can apparently be a background. A kind of personal background attaching him to a specific place, making it into a home. Not like a literal home but more like a home in the mind, meaning it has no walls and the same space (with the same sounds) might make him feel a certain way but might make someone else feel nothing. That’s what I hoped architecture would be like when I started working after architecture school. I’m still looking for that kind of architecture. It should be possible. A home just like your head.
As part of my ‘neighbours’ project (2006) I wrote my neighbours a letter asking them to pay me back an amount of my rent, accordingly to the space their noise took up in my house.
In writing that letter their noise became ‘material’ for art. I could think about their noise in a different way, without getting irritated by it. It even worried me when my neighbours - just a day before I decided to actually record the noise to make a sound piece - started to put extra sound blocking carpet on their floor. Your home doesn’t end with walls apparently, but is built from that which you feel is your house. In my case: the ’silence’ of my home. This silence to me could include the soft dripping noise of my water tap, the humming of the heating system, traffic noise outside, but definitely not my neighbours noise. My ideal home had no neighbours.
Our experience of space is strongly determined by what Cage calls ‘music’ and this experience, because of it’s nature, is most personal. A very personal architecture, in the sense that the same space is never the same for two different people.
In recording my neighbours noise and replacing it to the lowered ceiling of the Rietveld Academy, my neighbours became unknowingly and very probably without them caring the least bit, a piece of art. Their noise - a compilation called ‘the worst night of my neighbours in ten minutes’ was presented fairly low in volume. You could guess at hearing U2 (only the high sneering part), the doorbell, the stairs, chairs scraping, some bouncing sounds, a fight and it’s resolution in a love scene, quite loud and in sync with the rhythm of their favorite house-music.
Many people visiting the neighbours piece never even noticed there was sound in the room. The best moments were when someone suddenly looked up and wondered where in hell ‘that party’ was. Some visitors started to tell each other stories of terrible neighbours present or past. And I realized that’s why I wanted to make art. Art can bend your thoughts. The piece is just the beginning, but the art work has to be made inside your head. And in the back of mine John Cage says of course he knew this all along.’
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Article in VPRO Gids of 6-12 June 2009 (in Dutch)
Follow Sarah van Sonsbeeck on Twitter.