Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde

ArtForum, Dec, 1993 by Sarah Vowell

Never fails--every time I read tales of avant-garde culture, I get sucked in for minutes at a time by the utopian possibilities of what art could be or do, like a six-year-old orphan waiting for parents who are never coming back. In the childhood of radio, Kurt Weill predicted an independent "radio art." In Petrograd in 1916, Dziga Vertov celebrated the photograph's capability "to organize sound, to listen not only to singing or violins, the usual repertoire of gramophone disks, but to transcend the limits of ordinary music." But radio reality became the commercial abyss parodied with monotone brilliance by Steven Wright's dj in the film Reservoir Dogs ("where the sounds of the seventies just keep on truckin'"), and combated only by a few college stations and National Public Radio; and NPR, being both national and public, can hardly present much truly adventurous programming. Laments for what might have been are irrelevant, considering that the examples of sound art created or suggested in this century have been largely ignored.

Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde aims to add sound to the visual and literary legacy of Modernist discourse. Audio artists Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead have compiled an anthology of critical writings focusing on Thomas Alva Edison, Raymond Roussel, Marcel Duchamp, Surrealism, Russian Sound Creation, Antonin Artaud, Futurism, German radio art, John Cage, and the cut-up tape experiments of William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Also, the addition of five historical documents (many of them translated into English for this volume), including Artaud's 1947 radio broadcast "To Have Done with the Judgment of God" (which would fail to meet FCC standards) and F.T. Marinetti and Pino Masnata's "La Radia," deepens the collection by offering some of sound art's roots in this "deaf century." An important audience for the book are current working artists, who, lacking a link to any tradition, "will remain deaf to the sound of reinvented wheels," according to the editors.

While Kahn's introduction successfully whets the appetite for the courses of artists and the ideas they follow, no conclusion is served at the end to aid in the digestion of the onslaught of provocative information. Each essay stands as a desert island scantly linked to the others. For instance, French novelists Roussel and Auguste Comte de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam--discussed at length in separate chapters--profoundly influenced Duchamp, yet no connection is made among the three.

In fairness, the anthology form itself is inherently fractured. This, coupled with the severed, unexplored nature of the subject, causes Kahn and Whitehead to acknowledge that they "have come to appreciate why uncharted wilderness so often remains uncharted." They add that the assemblage should be considered "not as the Last Word but rather as a collection of first utterances still looking for an autonomous language." If the portrait of the ideas and outputs of avant-garde audio art is sketchy and incomplete, a portrait is nevertheless painted.

In the article on his cut-up tapes, William S. Burroughs is quoted recalling his fondest moments as a reader: "I can remember a chapter, a paragraph, maybe just a phrase, that really shines . . . with the writer's gift of life." Wireless Imagination, its language frequently too academic to describe wild screams and blistering noise, has few such shining sentences. It is a book I will return to, for facts, for bibliography, for ideas, but not for love.

Sarah Vowell is a freelance writer living in Washington, D.C.