Sensibilia: Sounding the Acoustic Image in Postwar France [electronic resource].

9781088315491

Ann Arbor : ProQuest Dissertations & Theses, 2019.

1 online resource (592 p.)

Access is available to the Yale community.

This dissertation demonstrates how the integration of sound transformed artistic practices across a range of media in the decades following the Second World War. With the commercial availability of new technologies like the portable tape recorder, artists could project, cut, glue, and layer sound as a raw material for the first time. Henri Chopin (1922–2008), Francois Dufrene (1930–1982), and Gil J Wolman (1929–1995) were pioneers in exploring sound as a creative material, which was vital to the innovation of expanded collage methods that may more accurately be described as "intermedia": encompassing film, video, performance, experimental "sound poetry", visual poetry created using typewriter symbols, and collage as well as decollage canvases. These complex intermedia practices demand a new kind of art historical methodology premised on mediality: the reciprocal relation between the technical apparatus and the social frameworks on which it depends. This study examines how Chopin, Dufrene, and Wolman used the tape recorder as well as the cinema projector, microphone, and typewriter against the grain, producing intermedia artworks that make us see sounds and hear images. This crossing-over of sound and vision produces what I call the "acoustic image".Comparative in nature and international in scope, this study spans 1948 to 2008, and examines the full range of artistic media in which Chopin, Dufrene, and Wolman worked, and considers intersections with the Italian painter Gianni Bertini, the American "cut-up" novelist William S. Burroughs, the theorist and filmmaker Guy Debord, and the electronic music composer Pierre Henry, among others. This account is the first to constellate these figures, whose work benefits from being seen together. Instead of codifying them under the banner of sound poetry, Lettrism, New Realism, and Situationism, the five chapters of this dissertation configure these artists by means of shared problems and concepts (the acoustic image) and questions of mediality and technology (sound recording and collage). More specifically, the diverse objects at the core of this study framed debates about the expansion of sensory perception; the limits of language and expression; the interface of human body and technology; and strategies for mapping experience, particularly in the context of the modern city and in response to the intensifying circulation of mass media imagery and information.This approach surmounts some of the core reasons these artistic practices have been overlooked by art historical analysis: because they defy categorization, work in ways that transgress medial boundaries, and because so many are difficult to transcribe or image. Attending to the relations between sound and image allows us to rethink familiar postwar categories, extending beyond the banner of artistic movements to aesthetic strategies like affichisme, decollage, derive, and detournement. This method is not an argument about priority, but about reconfiguring the kinds of terms, methods, and groupings used to think about sound and collage in the period after 1945.This dissertation also addresses the social dimension of these intermedia practices, deepening our historical understanding of the imbrication of technology and artistic innovation in the postwar period. By reading visual art in terms of sound, and sound through the prism of collage, this study accounts for the ways in which these artists probe the potential for the body and technology to be twinned rather than oppositional; it expands the art historical notion of collage towards intermedia; and it offers a sustained consideration of how artists after 1945 used sound to reimagine what it might mean to speak, to listen, to read, and to look.

Dissertations & Theses @ Yale University.

Books / Online / Dissertations & Theses

English

January 17, 2020

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2019.

Yale University. History of Art.