The Sausalito weather this spring has been spectacular. So much so that I’ve lately been lured out of the rabbit hole that is my audio cave and into the cool refreshing air and clear blue skies of the weekend outing world. Me and seemingly everyone else in the Bay Area. Where did all these people come from?
The irony of my being an audiophile, arguably one of the more sedentary hobbies one could have, is that when I’m not sitting around listening to and / or blabbering about records and audio, I spend most of my time training other people to move better and encouraging them to do it more often.
About a decade ago I studied with a biomechanist named Katy Bowman. Katy is a wonderful teacher and a fierce advocate for humans having more movement in their lives. She’s also something of a life-hacker who berthed a concept she calls “stacking” whereby we do more of the important (generally health / movement oriented) activities we need and want to do more of by finding creative ways for these activities to overlap. IOW, we “stack” them onto each other.
Need to spend more time outside? Need to exercise more but can’t find the time because you have a lot of phone meetings for your job? Need to pick up some things from the store? Need to eat healthier food? Put on your headphones and walking shoes, strap on your backpack and have that phone meeting while you take the long way to and from the farmers market.
Last weekend I did a little stacking of my own when my wife and I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The day included strolling through the exceedingly pleasant Yerba Buena Gardens, eating a delicious lunch at the museum restaurant Grace, educating ourselves on the black, queer experience at the Zanele Muholi exhibit, inspiring ourselves with the work of some of our favorite modern painters, and infusing our 25-years-long marriage with some much needed quality time. Now if that’s not stacking your life, I don’t know what is.
Oh, and did I mention we also visited The Art of Noise, an exhibit currently occupying SFMOMA’s top floor that includes, among other things, the HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2 – an all analog audiophile system set up in its own room, designed and built by audio designer and multidisciplinary artist Devon Turnbull? How d’ya like them flapjacks, Katy?
SFMOMA describes The Art of Noise as a “a multi-sensory ode to how design has changed the way we’ve experienced music over the past 100 years.” In addition to the HiFi Pursuit Listening Room, which we’ll get to soon, the exhibit features a wall of more than 500, mostly 60s era psychedelic concert posters, 120 record jackets, 100 design objects and 3 other sound installations.
The design objects feature various devices made to reproduce music over the last century and include everything from the Victrola to classic 60s era consoles to the Sony Walkman to the Apple iPod and beyond.
If you’ve not experienced the exhibit yourself and you want to imagine what it’s like, conjure an image of one of the more remarkable old-school record stores you’ve been to over the years. You know, the one with the walls covered in some of these same vintage concert posters, some classic album jackets on display above the bins and a pile of old turntables, vintage receivers, a few tape decks and maybe the odd reel-to-reel sitting off in the corner somewhere collecting dust.
Now imagine much cooler electronics, not sitting off in a corner but prominently on display, complete with explanatory placards. And instead of all of this equipment in a dusty old record store, imagine it on some big tables on the top floor of a world class art museum and you’ve basically got the gist of The Art of Noise.
There’s a lot of nostalgia in The Art of Noise, and while I can appreciate that nostalgia can play a big part in our experience with music, it felt a little lazy to me to fall back on it for this exhibit. Concert posters and record jackets never seemed much like art to me when I had them up on my bedroom wall as a teenager. Does putting them up in a museum make them any more so?
In fact, I find the exhibit’s very title lazy. Why “noise”? Isn’t this about music? The title itself prioritizes a clever play on words over saying anything meaningful about the artistic medium at this exhibit’s center.
In fairness, The Art of Noise is more about how we engage with music than it is about the music itself. There is clearly artistry in these concert posters and record jackets, and I suppose one could even argue that a great design might bring someone to a record and the music on it who might otherwise not engage with it at all.
But at the risk of beating a dead horse, I find the word “noise” in referring to anything to do with music annoyingly problematic. Music by its very definition is NOT noise, even if the way it’s so often reproduced makes it sound that way.
In any event, the bar was set pretty high for Devon Turnbull’s HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2. As I saw it, it was up to Mr. Turnbull to demonstrate to the museum patrons that reproduced music was far from the “noise” coming out of the earbuds and computer speakers most of them are listening to these days. I felt it was up to the HiFi Pursuit Listening Room to show us that, when done right, a great stereo could even go so far as to elevate the art itself.
The scene inside the listening room reminded me of a group meditation. As you might expect, we were not supposed to talk. At our disposal were a number of BackJack support devices to help those unused to sitting on the floor to be more comfortable. The room was dark and big and cavernous and the speakers sat too wide apart to image properly or give any presence to the vocals and instruments in the middle of the soundstage.
The low light in the room left an apparitional glow over everything and everyone in it. The sound of the system was somewhat distant and opaque. There were two turntables, 3 tonearms and a surprising number of electronic devices set up behind a low barrier off to the side. I fancy myself someone who knows their way around a stereo, but I had trouble figuring out what some of the boxes in Mr. Turnbull’s system were doing.
Inside the barrier, a person sat on a low seat and played selections from a stack of records they had with them, occasionally adjusting the volume. I only heard part of maybe 3 records, and I couldn’t tell you what any of them were. The music choices, while interesting, seemed beside the point. It was as though we weren’t really supposed to know what we were listening to.
With most people scrolling on their phones, it was hard to tell if anyone there was all that into it, although at one point there was one guy who was swaying enthusiastically. Mostly it felt like the point of it all was the equipment, the speakers and their mere collective presence in the room, rather than the music they were playing.
As you can probably tell by now, I wasn’t crazy about The Art of Noise. Going in, I was curious about the installation as a whole, but I was mainly there to find out if Mr. Turnbull’s system sounded any good. It did not impress me, and that was both unsurprising and disappointing to me at the same time. Where was the music? I wanted more from this exhibit than a wall full of record jackets, some nifty old audio gear and flashy stereo with barely adequate sound.
After we left the exhibit, my wife and I made our way downstairs to see SFMOMA’s permanent collection of modern paintings and sculpture, featuring among other things, several paintings by Agnes Martin. Her paintings occupy a small gallery space all to themselves. When you enter that space, you need only stand in the center of it and turn your body around to take each one in.
I’ve seen these paintings several times before, and every time I do I’m moved by them. They awaken something in me that only great art can, something which, as it happens, a great record played on a great stereo also can. But that “something” is not something that a concert poster or a vintage console is ever going to reach in me, and I seriously doubt in anyone else.
And like a great record with its beautifully designed jacket sitting in my hands while I’m spinning it on my turntable, the performance on it coming to life before my eyes and ears, these Agnes Martin paintings are a compelling and transportive interface between the artist who made them and the viewer / listener who experiences them. Is an old iPod or even a cool vintage Braun turntable somehow equivalent? Is a Matheiu Lehanneur music player in any way akin to a Jackson Pollock painting or a Miles Davis performance? This exhibit seems to suggest as much.
The Art of Noise strikes me as a missed opportunity. Featuring the designed objects through which we interface with music, however creatively made and beautiful they are, without featuring the music itself, is a little like curating a retrospective on modernist painters and displaying their old paint sets and easels alongside photos of their studios. All those pretty colored paints might be nice to look at and the photos interesting from an historical perspective, but is there any actual art there?
If only Mr. Turnbull’s system had delivered. If only it could have shown all of us there that the artistry that goes into making a great record is revealed most compellingly through the exceptional reproduction of the music that record holds. From the recording and engineering to the mastering and even the pressing, not to mention the performance of the musicians themselves, a great audio system can leave us in awe of music as an artistic medium and all that went into making it.
Would you rather wait in a massive line at the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa or just put a poster of it up on your wall at home to look at whenever you want? Fortunately none of us last Saturday afternoon had to wait in any lines to spend time in the HiFi Listening Room Dream No. 2, because I can tell you there would have been at least one of us pretty disappointed to realize that what we got for our efforts was the poster on the wall version of whatever the heck was spinning on Mr. Turnbull’s turntable.
On the bright side, The Art of Noise did get me thinking about art, what it is and what isn’t and what makes it so either way. So I suppose from a certain perspective, it’s fair to call the exhibit a “success.” And more importantly, it helped me up my stacking game!