Sound art garden coming to Blanton Museum of Art thanks to $5m donation from Austin philanthropists Ernest and Sara Butler
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For another sound art project, the artist Bill Fontana attached an accelerometer to a tree along the Mur in Austria to record the noises a tree “hears”.
The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas opens the first museum exhibition space entirely dedicated to sound art. Named for Austin-based art philanthropists Ernest and Sarah Butler, who donated 5Mft to the museum for the project. Campus, located adjacent to the famous Austin Ellsworth Kelly-designed Chapel. The sound garden is part of a campus-wide revitalization project led by the Norwegian architecture firm Snøhetta and is expected to open to the public in 2022.
For the site’s first assignment, Bay Area sound artist Bill Fontana is working on a project that will examine a number of “interesting and significant ecological and ecological situations in this region of Texas.” Led by experts from the University of Texas at Austin, Fontana will travel to nearby locations to take pictures. “The process of building a language for this piece involves a huge amount of field recording,” he says. “Once all of these recordings are processed, they become a musical vocabulary for the piece that will live in this garden of sound.” Buildings installed.
Fontana is scheduled to begin recording in Texas this July, and his first trip will include the use of a microphone that can pick up ultrasound frequencies to capture bat echolocation. He plans to manipulate the sound in such a way that these noises, which are otherwise imperceptible to humans, can be heard by the human ear. “The work will have a lot of different colors and sound vocabularies,” he says. “I want the visitors there to have the feeling that there is always something new to hear, but all sounds are interconnected and part of this large tapestry.”
Fontana notes that the opening of the world’s first major museum gallery dedicated exclusively to sound art marks a “historic turning point” and notes that “sound art was really on the verge of acceptance in the art world. I hope this is the beginning of something that will affect other museums. ”Fontana’s work is expected to remain installed for two years, and the Butler’s donation will also create a foundation for future commissions for site-specific sound projects for the space.
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