Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body
Christof Migone
Press Review
The Wire, August 2012 / Daniela Cascella
On page 75 of Sonic Somatic, a new collection of texts by Toronto based artist, writer and curator Christof Migone, you will find a photograph from the turn of the century depicting a medium with ectoplasm oozing out of her mouth. Is she emitting something, or choking on it? On the book’s cover, you see a detail of Concrete Tape Recorder Piece (1968) by Bruce Nauman: a tape recording of a scream, silenced by the concrete block around it. At the end, the collection sees you off with a photograph taken from the back door of the Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York, where John Cage’s 4'33" was first performed in 1952 – a view from an uncommon vantage point, gaping in. Sonic Somatic takes shape among these pivotal marks: choking on its own material while oozing it out; where a scream meets a block of concrete, between literal meaning and bodily utterance, between the aural and the unheard.
“Sound art is unsound,” Migone argues. This is the first of many puns and neologisms such as “taciturntablism”, “depth charges”, “sound art for the hard of hearing” and “utter the stutter” through which he articulates his thoughts; his painstaking attention to language and his flair for deadpan word combinations glue the book together and make up a singular reading experience. Migone’s writing defies the long-winded traits of sonic theory by exhausting them, filling up and emptying out any reasoning, again and again. If sound art is unsound, then the discourse around sound is theoretically bulimic, and Migone captures this noxious state, scrutinising all the words devoured and expelled in the process.
Throughout these pages, words are excited or numbed by repetition until there seems to be no more to read or say. Is this book trying to push its readers away from its textual grip? Sonic Somatic is apparently focused on sound art, and yet its strength lies in keeping ‘sound art’ out of focus: the book exists on the edge of performance, installation art, sound works, literature and poetry, pursuing their sounding in absentia and seeking to achieve “a sonic state of silence”. Ultimately, the book operates as a critical prop for Migone the performer, the unseen taciturntablist; rather than trying to encage sound art in a core definition, he engages with the peripheries of sound. Likewise it does not prescribe a given set of works in order to define a canon: instead, it is through these that Migone offers his hearing, his silencing, his writing and thinking. From pieces by Alvin Lucier to performances by Adrian Piper, from texts by Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett to Herman Melville’s Bartleby, any preconceived ideas of sound art are thwarted by Migone’s words into an anticipation or recollection of their bodily other, into emblematic tropes such as stutters, saliva, bodily emissions, loops and silences.
“Every time, [art] takes a new breath with the same old lungs,” Migone writes, and the circularity inherent in this book prompted me to metaphorically hyperventilate through its pages, hearing inner voices in reading, phantom voices in listening. At first I ignored them and read Sonic Somatic as a linear text: it eluded me. I tried to reason through it and I was stuck at a dead end. Finally I looked again at the photograph of the Maverick Concert Hall on the last page. I looked from the outside at a place I did not belong to; I struggled to figure out the space between the sonic and the bodily; I was fully aware of its transient yet vital substance. This book moved me away from itself and left me in the space of my own listening – I found myself shaping it as I read. It is an uneasy space, constantly under siege by words: a space of conflicted recognition. The moment I stopped trying to sort out Migone’s words in a conclusive manner and experienced them instead as a bodily presence, as a form or as a cut, Sonic Somatic disclosed its inner functioning and finally revealead itself: not as a book on sound art, but a work of sound art – as stuttering, fickle, provoking and unsound as that might be.
