Peter Clothier
Michael Brewster
LISTEN, FROM DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW: Acoustic Sculpture
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions
Sponsored by the Fellows of Contemporary Art
February 2002
Where am I? What is the nature of this place I occupy in space, so strangely present? This body that transports me here and there? What am I doing here now? And where do I go next?
These are amongst the fundamental questions that challenge us at the deepest level of our consciousness, once we strive to get past those seductive-some would say illusory-surfaces of the material world that so easily distract us. They are the questions, too, with which Michael Brewster uncompromisingly confronts us in his acoustic sculpture, if only we can clear our heads for long enough to pay attention.
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A visit to the studio can sometimes yield unusual insights into an artist's work. Visit Brewster's, and you'll first pass through the remarkable forest of his bamboo garden, now twelve years old and growing. He has planted more than twenty different species, from gleaming, ebony-stemmed giants to soft, green, sensual stems that are velvet to the touch. The visitor can hardly walk through the quiet setting of this abundant grove without being aware how alive it is with subtly shifting sounds-a luxuriant, natural, outdoor counterpoint to the interior studio space, austerely artificial, in which he creates his art-works. Bamboo plants are surely amongst the most eloquent in nature: they click, and clack, and whisper constantly in the breeze, chatter quietly amongst themselves, and sometimes orchestrate whole symphonies of shimmering, a-rhythmic sound.
Step inside the studio and you'll soon be equally sensitive to sound amidst the silence-but in a quite different way. In contrast to the lush, green growth outside, it is pristine, white, and the sound is controlled by a concealed stereo stack and a Juno 106 synthesizer. Brewster has always been intrigued by the artifice of art, and since the 1970s his work has played on that essential quality. There may be metaphorical references for individual viewers-the whistle or chirp of birds, for instance, or the throb of a human heartbeat. But the actual sounds he works with are insistently artificial, calling our attention to the created quality of the experience. They could not be described as precisely "musical", however, and certainly not melodic. They have no standing outside of the specific, spatial environment they define. They are simply the physical medium he employs, as others might use stone, or wood, or bronze, to create the three-dimensional entities that he appropriately calls sculpture.
Nothing in art appears in a vacuum, and Brewster's radical concept for his acoustic sculpture is no exception. Back in the late 1950s and early 1960s already, there were pioneers searching for alternatives to traditional art forms that seemed at the time to be in danger of exhausting their potential. In France, Yves Klein evolved the concept of art without form or substance, selling "zones of immaterial sensibility" in exchange for gold which was thrown into the Seine, leaving nothing but a spiritual record of the transaction. In the United States, artists like Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson, and Walter de Maria were investigating spaces other than the gallery or the public plaza as locations for the three-dimensional sensibility, and exploring the media of the phenomenological world. In California, Robert Irwin led the way for a group of artists soon to be known under the rubric "Light & Space"-artists as diverse as James Turrell, Michael Asher, and Eric Orr, whose primary medium was light itself; and Mowry Baden, an important precursor for Brewster, was pioneering work in which viewer participation and body-awareness played a significant role. The purpose, for artists such as these, was no longer to create an aesthetic object, but rather to awaken the observer's consciousness to the nature of actual experience.
It was in the context of this ferment of experimentation that Brewster came to believe, as a young artist, that his own sculptural sensibility was not well served by its traditional visual qualities. His mission then was no less than to save sculpture as an art form. "You never really see a sculpture," he explained in a recent interview. "Sight is frontal. What you get is a sequence of frontal views. You can't perceive it all at once, like a painting. I wanted [the viewer] to see the inside of things, and sculpture showed only the outside." Abandoning the figural efforts with which he had started out, he began to experiment with installations of small lights, flashing in sequenced patterns out in the desert, defining fields of space. But this in turn proved disappointing. "It was always less than what I wanted," he comments, from this distance in time.
The transition from light to sound came in part on the inspiration of a single moment. Brewster recalls hearing, from the dinner table, the unmistakable, quirky sound of a friend's old VW bug as it shifted into third gear on the street outside, and the sound brought with it a flood of simultaneous information about the world out there-from gearbox problems to marital disputes-in a quasi-Proustian epiphany: "It all came to my ears at once," he remembers. And that continuum of information, that all-at-once quality of lived experience, was precisely what he had been reaching for in his art. Prompted by this awareness of the holistic embrace of sound as a sense perception, he began to speculate about its potential as a medium for sculpture, and to experiment with the effects it could create.
The first outcome was a piece that involved thirty-five clicking devices-Brewster's MFA exhibit at Claremont Graduate School in 1970. This was the first of a series of increasingly refined investigations into the possibility of creating lines in space by activating the directional extensions of sound, in a white-walled, three-dimensional environment that was otherwise devoid of stimulus. A simple click from a concealed device in one location, answered by a second click from an opposing wall, would prompt the observing mind to follow the path of its own imaginary line. Producing clicks from a number of sources, whether at regular or irregular intervals, would thus set up a complex, though invisible "drawing" that would encompass the attentive viewer, engaging his full consciousness. The experience was one of being inside the drawing and of finding oneself, as one moved, in a different spatial relationship to different lines. The viewer could then, in a real sense, participate in the creation of the drawing at each instant by the simple act of changing his own location.
From this initial series of sound drawings Brewster moved on, in the 1970s, into the more richly textured field of acoustic sculptures. Given the way a sound travels through space, resonating and reverberating, bouncing off walls and ceilings in a slow process of decay, he found that it was possible to construct a kind of internal architecture that could be perceived by the human ear alone, without the limitations of sight. Starting first with single tones, then adding a second tone, and a third, he worked over a period of years to refine and expand the perceptual potential of his ear and his understanding of how sound works in space.
The resulting art works, exhibited in a number of museums and galleries, were evidence of this increasing sophistication. Most, initially, were site specific in that they were designed for particular locations. Visiting the proposed site in anticipation of an exhibition, Brewster would take along an oscillator-an audio frequency generator that projects one sound at a time anywhere along the range of the audio spectrum-and put it to work to identify the acoustic properties of the space. Returning to his studio with this scientifically-gathered information, he could then "build" his sculpture around the appropriate frequencies, and ready it on audiotape for eventual installation.
In the course of three decades of work, there have been a variety of technical improvements that have enabled Brewster to refine his capabilities. The purchase of the Juno 106 synthesizer in 1985 gave him the ability to work with several sustained sounds, for example-created by placing weights on the appropriate keys; and the transition from analog to digital sound technology in the late 1980s increased his capacity to produce the rock-steady sound that gives his works their authoritative "solidity" today. Computers played their part: first a tiny Commodore 64, and later a Macintosh 8600, gave him greater precision and flexibility in editing.
But Brewster's work, though generated by sophisticated technology, is not about the technology that produced it. Rather, it is about human perception and human experience. For a while-in line with the "cool" of Minimalism and the heady intellectual discipline of Conceptual Art-he chose to distance himself from any emotive associations, but more recently has come to value them as a part of the richness of the experience he offers. He refuses, however, to make things overly seductive for his audience, setting out to work with sounds that might at first seem provocative, even confrontational. Some will seem vaguely familiar, "like a vacuum cleaner," he says, "or an airplane taking off." Others will seem as alien as sounds from the far end of the universe.
Because these sounds may not be immediately appealing-and because he insists on viewer participation-Brewster typically uses an "On/Off" switch which is needed to activate the piece, and which he locates on a wall removed somewhat from the entrance, hoping to capture the viewer's attention before he can make too hasty an exit from the space. The sounds take time to absorb, and more time still to see how they build a perceptible structure. This strategy also makes it harder for gallery visitors to remain in one position, stationary, as they might in front of a painting or a sculpture. With Brewster's work, our movement is critical: "To 'see' an Acoustic Sculpture," he once wrote, "we must shift our viewing habits from the 'stand and look' behavior to an exploratory 'walk and listen' approach, slowly walking our ears instead of moving our eyes." On his compact disk, "All of Before: Three Acoustic Sculptures," he introduces each piece with the same quiet injunction: "Listen, from different points of view."
And this is quite simply what we are called upon to do. The experience, like all profound art experiences, resists all attempts to reduce it to the grasp of language. It is, in truth, indescribable. Brewster's work entices, rejects, embraces, puzzles, challenges-and eventually simply wins us over. If you listen, you are there. Thus, with "Oh So Pretti," a recent work completed for the 2001 faculty exhibit at Claremont, the viewer enters the space and finds himself in dimly suffused light, in silent emptiness. The small black box of a wall-mounted audio speaker is the single visible object, aside from the small button nearby that says simply "PRESS ON." Follow the instruction, and the space is soon suffused with a single, sustained note, joined moments later by a second, slightly lower, then by a third. A fourth note shortly joins the mix, setting up a rich, apparently constant tapestry of sound.
Step away from your first position, however, and you find that the sound is anything but constant. Here, in your new position, is a whole new construct: different qualities of sound are suddenly audible, whilst others drop away, or fade. Shift, even from foot to foot, swaying your body through the length of its natural arc, and you'll notice these subtle changes. You begin to get a sense of the architecture of the sound, its different volumes and spaces in between. Walk ahead a few paces to another area, and the audible world will be completely different again: what was a sustained, harmonic hum transforms into a surprising throb, taking your heartbeat along with it. Sound achieves human scale. And-as with all sculpture-you notice your own body now, the different weight and heft of it as it moves through the different volumes of pure sound. If you pay close attention both to the sound and to your body, simultaneously, you may notice how they begin to sing in harmony.
This is not easy work. It requires a willingness to drop out of our normal consciousness and into a state of heightened awareness. Adjusting to the work's peculiar demands, we are encouraged to slow down the usually frenetic pace of our lives, and pay undistracted attention to the here and now. Otherwise, the work will pass right over us, or through us, without affect. If we pay attention, though-as we might in nature to the subtle sounds of the breeze in a bamboo grove-we are rewarded with that great sense of the lightness of being, and of the awesome presence of what gives joy and meaning to our lives beyond the material. This is the eventual gift of Brewster's acoustic sculpture, and the one we can take home with us once we have seen it: to offer us a whole new way of apprehending sound and silence, and of understanding how this simple awareness can contribute to our sense of where we stand in time and space. It helps us to discover more about who we really are.
---Peter Clothier has written numerous non-fiction and fiction publications, poetry, articles, art reviews, art catalogues, book reviews, and essays.