Emergency Noises: Sound Art and Gender(4 German Visual Culture)

Art history traditionally concentrates on the visual. Sound has either been ignored or has been appreciated in a highly selective manner within a different discipline: music. This book is about recent attempts by artists trained in (West) Germany to provoke listening experiences to awaken the senses. Their work is revolutionary in artistic terms and in what it reveals about human relations, especially concerning issues of gender. The main focus of the book is to explore a gendered reading of the unity between the visual and the aural, a strand most prominently expressed within sound art in the period from the beginning of the 1960s to the 1980s. The book juxtaposes sources that have not been considered in conjunction with each other before and questions sound art's premise: is it a separate field or a novel way of understanding art? The study also opens up sound art to gender considerations, asking if the genre possesses the capacity to disrupt conventional, gendered role models and facilitate alternative possibilities of self-definition and agency across genders. Emergency Noises brings to light the work of underrepresented female artists and explores new intersections of sound, art and gender.

About the Author :
Irene Noy is an art historian and a curator exploring twentieth-century aural and visual culture in Germany and Britain, particularly in relation to gender and the senses. She holds a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Previously, she received her education from the University of Edinburgh, University of Bonn and University of British Columbia.

Review :
«Gerda Nettesheim's stainless steel kitchen sink with piano pedals, transformed into a sound box ... ! Noy's feminist reading of German-based women sound artists is an interdisciplinary wake-up call and superbly well written: a visually and aurally powerful book.» (Sarah Wilson, Courtauld Institute of Art) «Irene Noy's book Emergency Noises: Sound Art and Gender makes a very eloquent and necessary intervention into the male-dominated canon of sound art and unavoidably demonstrates through the bias of history the reality of a present condition. Recognising within even the most progressive institutions the shadow of sexism, Noy drags gender inequalities back through art history in the immaterial shape of sound to address the exclusion of what remains unheard. Poignant case studies sound the silences of the past and illuminate the causes and consequences of what is still left outside canonical value today. In this way Noy opens the reader and other than reason and the norms of masculine networks.» (Salomé Voegelin, University of the Arts London, author of «Sonic Possible Worlds») «A highly original, informative and enlightening study ... Having been an active player in the contemporary music and sound art scene and a collaborator of Mary Bauermeister in Cologne in the 1960s and 1970s, I can attest to the importance of this very well written comprehensive study and am compelled to recommend it not only for its many elucidating arguments in the area of gender issues but also for the light cast on the outstanding work of a number of outstanding women sound artists and related theorists.» (Rolf Gehlhaar, Professor Emeritus, Coventry University) «Dr Irene Noy successfully uncovers an untested area in research that traverses art history, music, German history and feminist theory. This publication effectively situates sound and listening at the core of twentieth-century .» (Professor Wulf Herzogenrath, Director of Visual Arts at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin) «Emergency Noises is an important contribution to the study of sound art and feminist art.» (Florence Feiereisen, German Studies Review 41/3 2018)