Opinion

In 1917, French artist Marcel Duchamp submitted a factory-produced urinal to a high-level art exhibit in New York. ‘Fountain’, as he called it, was rejected by the exhibit’s committee on the grounds it was not art.

The incident was the Big Bang of modern and contemporary art. Duchamp derided traditional visual depiction and insisted that art should play not merely to the eye but to the mind as well. Thus he saw sculptural beauty and humour in a standard plumbing appliance. His conceptual breakthrough was that anything – individually crafted or mass-produced – could be taken out of context and viewed anew as art.

Playing to the gallery

Anyone who’s been to an art exhibition and come away baffled by a ladder alone in a bare room, or a paving stone on a wooden stool, should understand that all such artworks point directly back to Duchamp. Context – or lack of it – is everything in contemporary art.

Which leads, somewhat abruptly, to Brooklyn-based artist and audio fanatic Devon Turnbull, star attraction at last year’s summer-long ‘Art Of Noise’ exhibition at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. An ambitious undertaking that occupied the entirety of the museum’s seventh floor, it included displays of hundreds of concert posters going back many decades, an entire wall decorated with iconic album covers, and another with memorable audio-centric commercial art such as the classic Maxell advert of singer Pete Murphy, his hair – and presumably, his mind – blown by what was blasting from the loudspeakers in front of him.

The exhibit also included an enormous display of audio products spanning the past century, from a 1912 Edison Model B cylinder player whose great advancement was four-minute playing time, up to the present, with a massive current-production Swiss-made DaVinci Audio Labs Reference MKII turntable, a cost-no-object vinyl spinner some HFN readers may have ogled at audio shows, but undoubtedly a once-in-a-lifetime experience for most museum visitors.

Between these two extremes were samples of everything from table radios and antique headphones to mainstream products from manufacturers worldwide – a nice sampling of eras and brands both well-known and obscure. There were also quirky one-off creations, such as sculptor Tom Sachs’ Model Thirty-six Boombox, a ‘portable’ player made from a cinder block – an idea extended by London-based Ron Arad’s ‘Concrete Stereo’, a system made of cast concrete. Rock on!

Rapt music

Turnbull’s ‘HiFi Pursuit Listening Room Dream No. 2’ occupied a huge dedicated room – all in blackout paint, acoustically neutral, and accommodating maybe 100 visitors seated on the floor and on three levels of risers in the back. There they faced what was unquestionably the biggest audio system any of them will ever encounter, with a central subwoofer housing two 600mm drivers, flanked by two equally gigantic full-range speakers featuring what the soft-spoken creator described as ‘TAD drivers’ and multiple compression tweeters.

Front-end gear included a 1970s-era Studer pro tape machine, two big custom turntables, and ‘cotton-covered copper wire, tube amplifiers, autoformer volume control, a digital signal processor, and multichannel Class D amplification’, according to the wall tag at the entrance.

Playback material was all analogue. Not the ultimate in resolution, but certainly the ultimate in enormity. Turnbull cued up Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue in D minor’ with a wry disclaimer (‘this is just for fun’). The visitors sat in rapt attention right to the closing notes, then burst into spontaneous applause. When was the last time jaded audiophiles did that?

Turnbull had taken the hi-fi demo into the realm of performance art.