Found Sound

Went to the opening last Tuesday of Found Sound, an exhibit of work by GAINES (my buddy Shelby and his brother Latham) at Think Tank 3 until January 22nd. The show features found objects converted into playable, amplified musical instruments. My favorite was the doctor's bag theremin (I'll try to discover the actual title and, hopefully, an image), among a number of works that were both visually and aurally evocative. With quite a few musicians in attendance, including the artists themselves, periodic outbursts of ethereal noise, delayed mbira-esque tones, and more than one searing Bic-lighter-slide blues lick (the stringed instruments, formerly a broom and a barn door, were evidently tuned to an open chord) punctuated the standard New York conversational din--along with, for a few sublime minutes, a guest wringing a pitch-perfect "Over the Rainbow" from the doctor's bag, tastefully-applied vibrato and all.

It is the visual strength of the works, though, that ultimately makes this show succeed. Given that all the pieces produce sound largely by means of amplification (and therefore depend very little on body shape for resonance), the original, pre-transformed objects could have easily taken on a purely decorative feel or come across as an afterthought, mere surfaces on which to mount strings on one side and electronics on the other. But the iconic weight with which GAINES have imbued that broom, that barn door, and that doctor's bag enables a true dialogue between the seen and the heard.

This is the case with what I think of as the readymades-plus-sound in the show. Two more elaborate pieces, which could be called constructions-plus-sound, don't supply the same frisson of cognitive and sensory dissonance. Alexander the Great and Hands on Her (pictured above) are intriguing objects but ones in which sight and sound, rather than set in opposition to one another, coexist in a unified and apparently predetermined narrative.

"Found sound" is a term generally used to refer to sound itself--that arrived at by chance, as in the compositions of John Cage or the ambient noise and decontextualized music and vocal recordings used in sample-heavy genres such as industrial and hip hop. By taking this phrase as the title of their show, GAINES suggest another way of seeing their art--as visual manifestations of those waves of sound floating through the gallery space, the unexpected projections of one sensory realm upon the screen of another.