Between Image and Voice. Audiovisual discourses in the works of Adrian Piper, VALIE EXPORT, and Yvonne Rainer

The staging of vocal recordings has become an increasingly popular artistic strategy in the last five decades. Recent international art exhibitions, such as the past documenta 14 (2017) and Manifesta 12 (2018) biennials, have encompassed a broad range of works dealing with the voice and have thus shed a light on the progressive sonification of contemporary art. While some artists have applied the voice as a means to a more direct address of the spectator, others have made use of newer techniques surrounding the voice, including the voices of artificial intelligence. These works point to the questions of how the voice can be approached from an art-historical perspective and how this trend has affected artistic practices on a broader scale. Does the voice – a phenomenon that incessantly seems to resist material objecthood – facilitate significantly new ways of viewership? And if so, how does it constitute and give expression to new forms of subjectivity?

Against this background, my project traces the voice as a novel artistic medium from a historical perspective. The late 1960s and 1970s saw a surge of artistic experiments with voice recordings, particularly in connection with conceptualism and its new strategies. My research focuses on three artists working in this context, namely Adrian Piper (b. 1948), VALIE EXPORT (b. 1940), and Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934). While these artists worked in separate situations, they all explored the voice as a disruptive and subversive agent that challenged established modes of perception. Yet despite the growing interest in their works, previous research has largely revolved around visual aspects relating to the staging of the body in their performative and installation art. In contrast, my project seeks to highlight the central role of the acoustic dimension in these practices. This change of perspective gives way to not only expand established interpretations of the respective works but also to uncover the emergence of a shared artistic discourse dealing with the voice.

Furthermore, the three case-studies offer the opportunity to illuminate different facets of the voice’s self-differing as a medium in a time where newly available technologies started to shift traditional concepts of media and their relation to the subject. In this regard, Piper, EXPORT, and Rainer’s works sounded out significantly new approaches towards the voice and its potentialities, which in turn, has also informed the more recent popularization of the voice. Moreover, their vocal explorations relate to a broader contemporaneous philosophical and literary discussion surrounding the voice. Authors such as Jacques Derrida, Kaja Silverman, and Mladen Dolar have established influential frameworks regarding the voice which can be put in fruitful conversation with Piper, EXPORT, and Rainer’s strategies.