The Japanese artists I am researching—Tanaka Atsuko, Nomura Hitoshi, Murakami Saburō, Hikosaka Naoyoshi, and Imai Norio—are not typically considered “sound artists.” Likewise, the period I’m investigating is the 1950s to the 1970s, before the term sound art came into use. So, these works occupy an exploratory and proto-disciplinary realm. To me, the importance of these artworks is in the sonic encounters they invite independently of provenance, genre, medium, or discipline, and in the implications of those encounters. This is not to discount the complex social, cultural, or historical contexts surrounding these works, but to unveil those contexts through an informed encounter with the materiality of the works themselves. It is an inherently incomplete and subjective study meant to invite others into a little-known realm that deserves a place in contemporary sonic arts discourse, to accumulate a body of information, exchange, and art-making that will allow others to dive further into...
Introducing the Special Series “Rekindled Present: Sound in Japanese Art, 1950s–1970s”
Lou Mallozzi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator in Chicago. He dismantles and reconstitutes gesture, sound, image, and language to poetically destabilize our relationships with the familiar through performances, installations, interventions, fixed media works, improvised music, drawings, and collaborations. He has exhibited and performed at many venues in the US and Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Smart Museum at the University of Chicago, Experimental Intermedia in New York, Radiorevolten Festival in Halle, and many others. Mallozzi co-founded Experimental Sound Studio in Chicago in 1986 and for the next 30 years facilitated the presentation of exploratory sonic art works by more than 500 artists. He is a professor in the Department of Art + Technology / Sound Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Since 2019 he has been researching nonmusical approaches to sound in the work of several postwar Japanese artists.
Lou Mallozzi; Introducing the Special Series “Rekindled Present: Sound in Japanese Art, 1950s–1970s”. Resonance 1 September 2024; 5 (3): 180–183. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/res.2024.5.3.180
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