Radio Break is not just an exhibition: it is a set of discrete embodied experiences in locales throughout Los Angeles. The project’s twelve artworks are presented through low-power radio transmissions and live performances that unfold in neighborhoods from East Los Angeles to Downtown to Hollywood, culminating in the Mid-Wilshire District. The audience is not only invited to attend the public broadcasts of these works, which may employ spoken word, narrative, ambient sound, or music, but also to travel to each of the broadcast sites using a different mode of transportation—the Metro, cycling (during CicLAVia), walking, or driving. Some of the artists selected for Radio Break have worked with sound in their practices, while others are primarily visual artists who were intrigued by the opportunity to experiment with radio. Their diverse contributions are contextualized by the curatorial team’s online essays and interviews, which explore the histories, politics, and phenomenology of radio.

The preparation for Radio Break occurred as part of a four-semester practicum at the University of Southern California Roski School. The first two semesters, aimed at providing a theoretical, historical, and practical framework for the exhibition, included Curatorial Practice and the Public Realm: The City as Platform, taught by Joshua Decter, followed by my own course, Interventions: Art in the Public Sphere that investigated various forms of interventions in art-making, exhibitions, and public projects in institutional and public spaces. During the final two semesters, students developed their curatorial concept for the content and context of this project. Their goal was to organize an exhibition that was experiential, not visual, with multiple modes of engagement in the public sphere rather than a traditional exhibition venue. In presenting works transmitted via radio, they were able to utilize an accessible, democratic medium as a space for artistic production.

The sprawling urban metropolis is the platform for Radio Break, while its audience consists of individuals who specifically seek out the works in a particular destination as well as a general public who may happen to experience them while passing by a given site. Ultimately, whether they are experienced while wending through the ubiquitous L.A. traffic, riding public transportation, or simply walking around, these works are a restorative remedy to the distracting soundtrack of urban space. As musician Elvis Costello has aptly written:

“Radio is a sound salvation,” particularly here in the City of Angels.

"Roy Cohn/Jack Smith," performed by Ron Vawter and directed by Gregory Mehrten. Adapted from “Roy Cohn” radio broadcast written by Gary Indiana.

Los Angeles has a distinctive relationship to radio. Its vast system of highways fosters a contained existence, one that is dependent on cars and treacherous to pedestrians. However, the city’s grid and its implications have produced an ongoing relationship of its inhabitants to radio, a medium that fosters connectivity across the endless roadways and regions and crosses socioeconomic conditions and educational boundaries. Radio has long established itself as a democratic platform that endures everyday experience, and it remains one of the most accessible mediums in public life. The return to radio in recent years is part of a larger impetus to pull away from sophisticated technologies and return to the basic experiences of life. Along with recent cultural slow movements, such as slow-food, slow gardening, and slow parenting, radio has a natural place in this shift. Harnessing the semiotic ambivalence of aurality turns a focus onto sensory experiences that can instill meaning into a fast-paced society; with slow listening. A brief history of radio art as it has developed in Los Angeles shows a consistent motivation for exploring sound as a way to subvert the complex grid of information culture.

Cover of catalogue for “Sound: An Exhibition of Sound Sculpture, Instrument Building, and Acoustically Tuned Spaces” at the Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art (LAICA), July 14-August 31, 1979.

Radio art is defined generally as whatever any artist from any medium happens to represent on the airwaves—whether experimental narrative, sonic exploration, noise, or performance, just about any aural strategy may be entertained.

The investigation of sound in the 1970s and 80s, energized by the development of a theoretical language for this “new” medium, was transformed by artists’ ability to access the equipment to produce and distribute audio works on cassette tape or through broadcast transmission. California, and Los Angeles in particular, was a fertile zone for radio broadcasts and the development of audio artworks. With increased access to public radio on the FM dial, artists produced programs for public radio, using it both as an alternative platform for art and as a means to subvert commercial radio. Jacki Apple’s Soundings radio broadcasts (1982–95) and Carl Stone’s radio show Imaginary Landscapes featured content that came to be classified as radio art. The experimental program Close Radio (1976–79), organized by John Duncan, Neil Goldstein, and Paul McCarthy, aired weekly on KPFK and is one of the few radio projects to be documented as part of a group exhibition on performance at the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2007.

By the beginning of the 1980s, Los Angeles art spaces were increasingly accepting of sound art, as exemplified by the 1979 exhibition “Sound” at the now-defunct Los Angeles Institute for Contemporary Art. However, it was not until 1984 that a Los Angeles art institution utilized radio as the medium for an exhibition.

In 1984 an ambitious program of radio events called “Territory of Art” was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Produced by curator Julie Lazar with the support of chief curator Richard Koshalek, the program expanded on a previous collaboration between Lazar and Koshalek at the Hudson River Art Museum in Yonkers, New York. The MOCA exhibition, conceptualized shortly after the museum was created in 1980, was part of an initiative to establish it within the Los Angeles cultural community, especially because of its then-removed location at 1st Street and Temple near Downtown.[1]

Airing on KUSC (L.A.’s classical music station) and KCRW (a local public radio station), “Territory of Art” comprised free and accessible half-hour broadcasts that involved collaborators from the United States, Canada, Australia, Germany, and Austria.

The first iteration of “Territory of Art” focused on contemporary art, architecture, and a diversity of disciplines, featuring The Collectors, a piece on the new corporate and private collectors of the 1980s written by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and One Hundred Miles of Art, a conversation between Llyn Foulkes, William Brice, Ilene Segelove, Michael Brewster, JoAnn Callis, Suzanne Lacy, and the East Los Angeles Streetscapers.

As the program developed into second, third, and fourth iterations, its broadcasts became even more diverse and experimental, reflecting the complex issues of the mid-1980s, including gay identity and the AIDS crisis (Roy Cohn, written by Gary Indiana and performed by Ron Vawter) and immigration (Border-X-Frontera, written and performed by David Schein and Guillermo Gomes-Peña). Other works were more performative, such as Peter Sellers and David Warrilow’s rendition of Velimir Khlebnikov’s Futurist poem Zangezi. This small sample of audio artworks (the few currently available for streaming on MOCA’s online archive) conveys awareness on the part of the museum of the multicultural landscape and diverse audiences of Los Angeles. Moreover, the “Territory of Art” works exhibit the postmodern impulse of the 1980s to manipulate mass-media culture by offering art as an aural experience rooted in a commercial medium.

Promotional poster for “The Territory of Art” at MOCA. Courtesy of Julie Lazar.

One work in particular stands out for its ability to capture the distinctive characteristics of radio. In Snake Bride, written, produced, and performed by Marina Abramovic and Ulay, the artists narrate a story of traversing the length of the Great Wall of China. Ulay tells of their experience of the various modes of transportation they used to get across the Great Wall. He describes the chaos of the trains, the life of the passengers, and a scene where Chinese passengers carrying watermelons, a favorite food during the summer, share the slices with other passengers along their journey. When Ulay and Abramovic can find a seat on the train, all they can do is be still and listen to the sounds that envelope their reality: the ambient noise of street cars, a radio playing regional music, and the indistinct murmur of distant voices.

In the second part of the work, Abramovic recalls waking at dawn in a Peking hotel room to the very loud sound of birds singing. When the artists leave the hotel to explore the Temple of Heaven Park nearby, they discover elderly men have been carrying covered birdcages there. Unveiling their cages so their birds can sing, these men look for worms and bugs under the dewy morning stones, returning again in the evening. Abramovic then gently describes the Four Pests Campaign, which demanded citizens kill all the birds in the cities as part of a hygiene initiative instituted by Mao Zedong during the cultural revolution in China. The piece crescendos with the sounds of birdcalls, singing, and the ambient noises of the city, leaving the listener hypnotized.

In its strategy, Snake Bride shows the unique relationship that listening can create. In context, radio has managed to retain a significant alignment with a type of slow-paced consumption of information: listening. An artwork like Snake Bride functions on multiple levels to narrate the viewer into another reality, a kind of engagement that disconnects with the saturated image culture and reconnects to the self and the mind towards active listening.

Snake Bride by Marina Abramovic and Ulay

This distinctive set of broad-reaching exhibitions further established radio art as a new mode of performative, audience-directed listening experience. Even as the history of radio art continues to be uncovered, it has resurged in the last few years. Shortly after we conceptualized Radio Break, several radio events took place in Los Angeles with the artist collectives Neighborhood Public Radio at MOCA and KChung Radio in Chinatown. So why radio now? As technology is imposed onto our everyday existence, attributes of personal connection, communication, and interaction are further meditated or removed. Could it be that the fundamental act of listening can return a certain sense of slow order to our fast-paced culture? Alongside the return to radio as a medium for art is the return to other analog mediums and handcrafted or slow processes. Slow listening can generate an awareness of our state as humans to regain the sense of experience that may be lost in a predominantly visual culture.

The slow food movement (started in 1989) for example states in its manifesto, “May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.”

The need to return to a focused sustained experience of life informs these cultural movements, and it relates to the return of the analog in the arts as well. In some ways this focus on sensory experience attempts to compensate for a real or virtual loss of human experience, one we hope to temporarily recapture with the conscious experience of listening.

[1] Conversation with Julie Lazar, April 2, 2012.

“1990 by Guillermo Gómez-Peña,” co-organized with the Los Angeles Festival and coordinated for MOCA by Julie Lazar, and presented at the Temporary Contemporary. Courtesy of Julie Lazar.

Special thanks to Julie Lazar.

I. Valuation

A technology defined by an innate imbalance of power between speaker and receiver, the primarily validated function of radio is talk. In fact, even if two individuals speak via radio, their conversation is an alternation of talking at, because one cannot broadcast and receive on the same band at the same time. The exhibition Radio Break challenges this model: it prioritizes listening.

Rush Limbaugh

II. Talk Radio

In the United States, talk radio—that programmed block of topical discussion, the domain of pundits, shock jocks, and, of course, concerned callers—was an invention of the 1950s. With the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987 and the end of the FCC-mandated balance of political viewpoints on air, however, the form became what it is today. The next decade saw a near-complete takeover of the AM dial by interests promoting a Republican Party agenda. Corporate radio’s blend of blather and bombast superseded radio’s anachronistic technology, in the face of cable TV and the emerging internet, by delivering an under-the-radar and symbolically undervalued rhetorical space capable of entertainingly distributing reactionary discourse. Rush Limbaugh talks. His audience—the so-called Dittoheads—responds, well, “ditto.” Limbaugh’s voice has been influential to a degree that is difficult to ascertain. (Witness only the immediate shift in Republican etiquette vis-à-vis criticizing the President after his 2009 on-air hope that the Obama presidency would fail.) Ed Schultz talks too, but he, along with his fellow ineffectual left revanchists, is only belatedly making a play for the now-occupied topos of politicized mainstream radio space. These days all radio sounds like talk radio. And all talk is political.

Title Card for Pump Up the Volume (1990

III. Nobodies

The critic Gregory Whitehead wrote, “For most of the wireless age, artists have found themselves vacated (or have vacated themselves) from radiophonic space—the history of radio art is, in this most literal sense, largely a history of nobodies.”[1] Whitehead was historicizing Velimir Khlebnikov’s and John Cage’s sonic broadcast experiments; they had no place on the air except the place they made. When, in 1994, Whitehead lamented that artists who worked in radio were nobodies, he managed to articulate the medium’s definitive character. In the 1950s, Frantz Fanon realized that French-language radio psychically bound the colonists of Algeria; in response, he proposed a radical broadcast and reception for those “nobodies” shunted aside. The colonized, he advocated in his essay “This Is the Voice of Algeria,” needed to listen to the words of their fellow oppressed and, in response to that listening, broadcast themselves back to each other again and to the world at large.[2] What talk radio did was take the historical nobody and repackage the figure into the “disenfranchised” middle-class white male speaking “truth to power.”[3] That this strategy succeeded does did not negate the place on air for actual nobodies. And considering the relative ease and low price of construction, a radio transmitter can be a great tool for the disempowered to take control of his or her voice and build some kind of alternative community. Here a mainstream twin to Fanon is particularly illustrative: Pump Up the Volume (1990) similarly potentiated a communitarian radio. While the Christian Slater alt-rock film pulls the truth-to-power shtick (via a high-schooler), its title prioritizes listening and its narrative illustrates the technology’s unique potential to knit together an exurban community.[4]

 ANSWER Coalition “Speak-Out”

IV. The 2000s

The last decade was for somebodies. To speak, we were often told, was to act. Indicative was Bush’s infamous and, from then on, seemingly mandatory avowal just after September 11^th: “Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.”[5] By 2005 the older left was haranguing the newer; we didn’t speak out like they did, we were made disparate by our technologies and our tastes, and when we did speak, we needed to say something different, something that actually worked.[6] On one hand, this is a plausible diagnosis of a generation told to stay indoors who did so.[7] On the other, we spent a lot of time saying a lot of things to little effect.

 An example of ‘Up Twinkles,’ a mode of assent in the Occupy Movement, on bottom-left.

Image by Ruben de Haas.

V. Tea Party/Occupy Wall Street

The old left’s fantasies of politically efficient mass protest were made manifest in 2009. Ironically, of course, those nobody protesters—mining the technologies and tactics of the 1970s antiwar left—were vociferously denouncing their Democratic president and his plans for the incremental socialization of medicine. If there was some indication of the increasing outmodedness of the standard twentieth-century mass-protest models, it was the Tea Party—in short, a lot of talking. Occupy Wall Street, in 2011, was different. Its logic wasn’t “speak out,” but “sit in.” Everyone could talk (and nearly everyone would), but the movement required that everyone listen (and most everyone did). The General Assemblies that facilitated decision-making and conflict resolution defined the collective not by voice, but by the wagging of fingers either up (to assent) or down (to dissent). It’s called twinkling. No list of demands was to be written; speech was to be provisional and flexible. Where there was speaking, there was failure—when an avowal was requested, “I am the 99%,” the phrasing, both cumbersome and unrepresentative, became a central lightening rod for the reactionary.[8] To Occupy is to listen.

VI. A Critique of the Passive Listener

One best articulated by Hakim Bey: “To speak too much and not be heard—that’s sickening enough. But to acquire listeners—that could be worse. Listeners think that to listen suffices—as if their true desire were to hear with someone else’s ears, see through someone else’s eyes, feel with someone else’s skin….”[9]

VII. Deep Listening

If done right, to listen is to learn how to talk, and vice versa. Figuring generative reception constitutes the bulk of composer Pauline Oliveros’s efforts. She crafts experiments in Deep Listening, “a practice that [intends] to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible.”[10] Sound carries intelligence, Oliveros maintains, and careful listening can clue us into an array of realities around us otherwise missed. Oliveros’s work ran alongside trenchant feminist methodology, one also embodied by the Redstockings’ consciousness-raising discussion groups,[11] which created a space for women to come into their voices through other women listening without interruption.[12]

VIII. A Listening Exercise by Pauline Oliveros

Ear Piece, 1998

1. Are you listening now?
2. Are you listening to what you are now hearing?
3. Are you hearing while you listen?
4. Are you listening while you are hearing?
5. Do you remember the last sound you heard before this questions?
6. What will you hear in the near future?
7. Can you hear now and also listen to your memory of an old sound?
8. What causes you to listen?
9. Do you hear yourself in your daily life?
10. Do you have healthy ears?
11. If you could hear any sound you want, what would it be?
12. Are you listening to sounds now or just hearing them?
13. What sound is most meaningful to you?[13]

Radio Waves

IX. Radio Break

Most simply an exhibition, Radio Break is not a moment, but of a moment. It invites its public to listen to sounds and their own intelligence. It is, in effect, a Deep Listening exercise. What those who tune in will listen to might not be “political” in content, but broadcast and reception are always political statements. Or, to put it another way, Radio Break’s radio waves twinkle up.

Orson Welles performing at CBS Studios during the live recording and broadcast of  War of the Worlds in 1938.

 

I’m in bed, happily dozing. With the first stirrings of wakefulness, around six in the morning, I reach for the small transistor radio next to my pillow and press the button. An early-morning news program comes on, but I am hardly able to make out the individual words, and once again I fall asleep, so that the announcer’s sentences merge into my dreams. It is the most beautiful part of sleep, the most delightful moment of the day: thanks to the radio I can savor drowsing and waking, that marvelous swinging between wakefulness and sleep which in itself is enough to keep us from regretting our birth. ~Milan Kundera, Immortality, 1991

 

            This elegant passage opens the second chapter of Milan Kundera’s 1991 novel Immortality, in which Kundera expounds on the “marvelous swinging” between fantasy and reality.^[1] To say that this blur is enough to keep us from regretting our very existence is a bold statement. It is said that waking up is traumatic for the human body; upon disturbance of sleep, cortisol, the stress hormone, is released. Tempering this, we float through dreamland to the reality of our bodies held down by gravity to our beds. Radio is a medium that has found the way to be a portal between the realms of imagination and reportage. And so we oscillate between delineations of reality and fictions as constructed and sustained by voices. We choose to cross this threshold every time we turn the dial, inviting voices to guide our imaginations into concrete visions.

           The history of radio is, however, a burdensome one. Radio was conceived in order to narrate a violent reality; since its invention in the late 1800s, it has been instrumental in war as a transmitter of ally communication, a method of passing along orders, a means of broadcasting national and local information and instructions, and a channel for locating and aiding sinking ships. Radio also was installed on aircraft to keep track of routes and to glean private intel. When it was popularized in the 1920s as a way to hear music and comedy, audiences implicitly understood that at anytime the casual program might be interrupted with important information about national security or instructions for general safety. Radio was the mouthpiece of officials—the government, the military—and was regarded with the appropriate gravitas. This casual attitude toward the medium provided the perfect setup for the Orson Welles’s famous auditory maneuver.

            On Halloween Eve of 1938, Welles directed and narrated a radio adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1898 science-fiction novel The War of the Worlds for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. The Mercury Theatre had started as a New York City repertory theater company in 1937.^[2] Through the formidable envisioning of Welles, the troupe moved beyond the confines of the physical stage to on-the-air performances. This meant that the reach and impact of a radio performance could far surpass that of the theater in terms of audience size and demographics. Radio waves extended their long fingers into the ether of space, unfurling programming into homes, cars, offices, and restaurants. Nothing proved the significance of this wide reach better than Welles’s harrowing Halloween broadcast.

           In an effort to disguise the fiction, the first two thirds of the sixty-minute broadcast were presented as a series of “bulletins,” then a common mode for the dissemination of breaking news. This familiar form bolstered the realism of the broadcast. As the invasion was described through a series of fragmented news reports, how could a trusting audience not believe that aliens from Mars were attacking planet Earth? Fearing for their lives, listeners were hooked to their radios, listening to the unspooling of mankind as told through sound effects and cunning narration.           

           The repercussions of Welles’s The War of the Worlds broadcast are infamous. Panic and chaos ensued as hordes of listeners packed up their precious belongings and fled their homes. Reports of gas leaks and flashing lights popped up across the nation, clear indications that chaos was ensuing.  The aliens were clearly landing on planet Earth with aims to wipe out the human race. Within one month, newspapers had published a staggering 12,500 articles about the broadcast and its aftermath.  Fiction bled into reality as radio space began to occupy real space. The degree of public panic evidences a willingness to believe in that which we cannot see but hear. However, this willingness is contingent on events seeming catastrophic: had Welles narrated a jaunty tale about aliens enjoying tea and sandwiches with affable Americans, the story would have been unconvincing. If The War of the Worlds had a happy ending, the world would have known it was a fake.  We doubt the veracity of happiness, but succumb easily to tales of horror and disaster.

          From News Reel discussing Orson Welles’s response to the mass hysteria caused by his radio dramatization.                   

           If the panicked responses of the masses do not substantiate truth, what does? Were the frightened phone calls to the CBS Studios any less earnest than the anxious inquiries, three years later, that would verify that Pearl Harbor had been bombed? The suspension of disbelief is absolute in radio; with only voices to negotiate, space and time fold into each other. We as an audience can be totally displaced by the news we are receiving. Our ears become the end points for radio waves transmitting information that is yet to be measured by us, the receivers.

           Let’s hold on to this notion of suspension for a moment. Let’s imagine that the English transmission The War of the Worlds produced by Welles crossed the equator and was translated into Spanish. In the Ecuadorian city of Quito, in February 1949, Radio Quito produced a Spanish-language version of Welles’s script. In a frightening parallel, the broadcast set off panic in the city so immense that police and fire brigades were deployed to ensure the safety of the population against the alien attack. When it was revealed that the radio play was merely that, a fiction, the frenzied public rioted. Hundreds attacked the radio station as well as the local newspaper that shared the same building, as it had taken part in the hoax by publishing fabricated stories about unidentified objects hovering in the skies above the city. The riot actually resulted in at least six deaths, including the girlfriend and nephew of a Radio Quinto producer who had fled to Venezuela for safe haven.^[3]

           Is the folding of fact into fiction and the engendering of real responses outof a faked event so threatening as to compel us to riot? To burn down buildings? To kill? Are these actions not the very manifestation of The War of the Worlds? Faced with our susceptibility to fiction, we become the perpetrators and act out the parts to actualize our imagination. For those that fled their homes in 1938, the aliens were a threat. Through sound without sight, radio conjures the wildest and most frantic threats in our imagination.  Kundera says that thanks to the radio that marvelous swinging swinging between wakefulness and sleep is enough to keep us from regretting our birth.  What a charge, to credit the sound box by the bed with the existential means of justifying why the day is worth living.  But if radio can give us instant access to the imagination, then Kundera’s bold statement is sound.   

           In assessing the impact of radio on contemporary culture, it is helpful to first examine the period when radio was a new medium.[1] Radio’s effects on the way audiences gathered together and self-identified in the early 1900s were profound as the dominant medium for much of the first half of the twentieth century.

The shift from public entertainment to home listening marked a transformation in the shape of collective reception.  Freed from the necessity of physically assembling together, audiences were spread far and wide, able to tune in from all sorts of places. During the 1920s, communal listening outside of stores and other public spaces was common due to the fact that radios with speakers were rare and expensive, and most home radios needed headphones.  Later in the decade, as more households gained access to radios with speakers, it became a common practice to host radio parties in the home.  Bringing entertainment that had only been available in public theaters into the private residences, listening to the radio quickly became predominantly a family activity, a shift that was apparent in the refinement of the apparatus as a domestic appliance.

           Radio Break is in part a call to exercise a different kind of listening than we employ in our everyday experience of contemporary radio – a return to the medium as if it were new again. The listening parties of the 1920s were an in-between stage of collective listening, straddling previous mass entertainments like theater and the individualization ushered in by radio, television and the Internet, among other entertainment and communication technologies.

The shift towards individual privatized space began in the 1930s with the appearance of radios in cars; marketing and advertising, previously focused on the family and the home, was now aimed at the individual. In Los Angeles today, commuting by car, I look around in the bumper-to-bumper traffic and note all of the other drivers alone in their vehicles. As we travel in our individual pods, many of us are listening to the radio. Radio Break provides an opportunity to return to the listening parties of the late 1920s by changing the type of listening experience we now typically encounter. It does so through low-power broadcasting in set locales at specific times, offering collective listening experiences and drawing attention to the medium’s spatial and physical qualities.

Radio has the ability to create a footprint, a geographical area that is capable of receiving a transmission. This impression is not physical, but constituted a transmission of information, which makes it challenging to discern. Radio Break creates small footprints by presenting works like Brandon LaBelle’s The Echo Project. Comprising audio recordings of conversations overheard on the streets of Santiago, Chile, broadcast in Boyle Heights, The Echo Project creates a distant reverberation from its place of origin. The work functions as a collage of conversations in Santiago, with each speaker emphasizing and remembering only portions of a whole soundscape of the city. In this sense, while the footprint is spatially small, its content is great in both its representation of a city and in its broadcast far from its origin.

Like LaBelle’s work, Alyce Santoro’s Between Stations maps the soundscape of one city onto another. Santoro combines street noise from New York with a composition for flute, carefully layering elements together in a single sound work to be broadcast in Los Angeles’s Union Station. In experiencing Santoro’s and LaBelle’s works, one becomes aware that they function much like our own individual listening processes. Both emphasize particular sounds, concepts, and moments while neglecting others, highlighting the act of listening as an important sense in experiencing a place. By siting each of these works in specific locations at particular times in Los Angeles, Radio Break asks listeners to travel to and experience these places. It also prompts listeners to notice the unique qualities of the medium in spaces that have diverse/different acoustics. Radio Break draws attention to radio’s use in spreading information as well as the role of the listener as an active agent in its dissemination.

Unlike the Internet, radio contains an inherent attachment to a location – its content can only travel as far as its broadcast can be received.  This allows radio to function on a micro level, promoting localism through low-power broadcasting that affords community stations the platform to create programming that addresses their own interests.  But radio can also function on a macro scale; the medium, like a memetic tidal wave, radiates content from its source outward, broadcasting it through space with the potential to travel vast distances via satellite technology or even by bouncing off of clouds.

The model for a new public art is pop music. Music is time and not space; music has no place, so it doesn’t have to keep its place, it fills the air and doesn’t take up space. Its mode of existence is to be in the middle of things; you can do other things while you’re in the middle of it. It’s a song you can’t get out of your head.

The model for a new public art is everywhere. Pop music is multidirectional. You take it with you. You move from your home to car to work to some vast open “public” space, all the while listening to the same song or album, either because you’re accessing a predetermined playlist on your portable device or because you’re tuning in to pop radio stations, all playing the same songs. You’re not in front of it, and you don’t go around it, or through it; the music goes through you, and stays inside you.

Pop music is public space. In order for public space to be a gathering place, where all the people are gathered together as a public, it needs a gathering point. These points are on the radio dial—AM or FM—and easily accessible. In the car you move from point to point, from public to public. In between the dials you are nowhere, but the mechanisms of technology don’t let you stay there. You push a button and skip to the next station, a new gathering place, a new public.

The electronic age obliterates space and overlaps places. The electronic age has obliterated the space between stations. The electronic age overlaps time, the various places on the dial.

The music of the seventies was punk; the music of the eighties was rap. The music of the nineties was grunge; the music of the twenty-first century is auto-tuned. Each of these types is music that says: you can do it, too. You don’t need a professional recording studio; anybody can do it, in the garage and in the house. The message of punk was: do what you can do and do it over and over until everybody else is driven crazy. The message of rap was: if something has been done better by somebody else, who had the means to do it, then steal it, and remix it; tape is cheap and airspace is free. The message of grunge was nirvana: if you live under the rule of the middle class, confined to a little box made of ticky-tacky, and you have a guitar, you have a way out. You might never leave your garage, but you’re on another plane of existence. In the twenty-first century everyone has Garage Band on his or her computer; if something has been done better by somebody else, who had the means to do it, then steal it, cover it, and put it on YouTube. The music of now is the cover, the remix, the mash-up.

On the radio, on the dial, all of these musics exist at once. You move from punk to rap to grunge to auto-tuned ballad in the space of a second. You walk down the street and hear one song from the soundbox you carry with you, another song blaring out of an audio speaker in front of a store, one more through an open bedroom window, yet another car with still one more, and then another, as the driver changes stations. This mix of musics produces a mix of cultures. This mix of musics produces a mix of times. You change stations and you’re in the seventies, you change stations and you’re in the nineties, you change stations and you’re in the auto-tuned present. The implication of a “virtual place” is that there’s no time without space—the past of the future can’t be prelived or relived without a place to live it in. A “virtual place” puts the place into the field of geography, but a fragment of geography that’s cut off from its neighbors; you’re in place, but you can’t go from place to place. In Los Angeles, you live in a car. A fragment of geography that’s cut off from its neighbors. You’re in place, but you can’t go from place to place. You move from station to station, from time to time, while sitting in the driver’s seat.

Time is fast, and space is slow. You don’t move fast on the freeways, but you have all of history at your fingertips. On one station, the year you were born, on another, the year your parents got married. Space is an attempt to place time and understand time; space is a need to have something to see and solid ground to stand on; space is a desire to follow the course of events and to believe in cause and effect. In a fast time, public space—in the form of an actual place with boundaries—is a slowing-down process, an attempt to stop time and go back in history and revert to an earlier age. It used to be, you could walk down the streets of a city and always know what time it was. Now we carry time with us, we have time in the palm of our hands. Time is part of a package deal; it comes with our phones, our cars, on our computers. Public space, in an electronic age, is space on the run. Public space is not space in the city but the city itself. Not nodes but circulation routes; not buildings and plazas but roads and bridges.

In the space that is public, the public whose space this is has agreed to be a public; these are people “in the form of the city,” they are public when they act “in the name of the city.” They “own” the city only in quotes. The establishment of certain space in the city as “public” is a reminder, a warning, that the rest of the city isn’t public. Los Angeles doesn’t belong to us. Los Angeles is a maze of private spaces, open to the public.

Private space becomes public when the public wants it; public space becomes private when the public that has it won’t give it up. The space that is made public began as its own opposite. This was a space that was never meant to be public at all: a royal space, or a presidential space, or a corporate space. Los Angeles is made up of corporate spaces: the Staples Center, the Nokia Theater, Wells Fargo Plaza, Clear Channel Communications establish our “public” spaces, the nodes and cluster-spaces establishing our circulation routes across the city.

Groups of people form territories, as if over a vast plain. Each cluster acts as if it doesn’t need the rest of the space. In fact, it doesn’t want the rest of the space; the cluster-space exists as democratic only as long as it keeps the rest of the space out. The more people break in, and make the cluster bulge, the more the cluster dissolves into individual parts that would spread out indefinitely until one person from within or without reshapes them into something bigger than a cluster, something that needs—and that is an—organization. Radio stations are cluster-spaces, democratic points on the dial only as long as they aren’t discovered by too many listeners and begin to become popular and bulge. Radio exists without a leader. Airspace is free. So long as a station, a cluster-space, a movement remains undiscovered, it can sneak into the dominant culture; once people begin to break into the cluster-space, tuning in purposefully and frequently, it reshapes into something bigger. The space becomes public because the public wants it; the space becomes multidirectional, spreading out indefinitely, pop. Of course pop music exploits minority cultures, but at the same time it “discovers” and uncovers them so that they become born again to sneak into and under the dominant culture.

The public exists as raw material; it exists only so that it can be mesmerized by a solo voice, only so that it can follow a leader.

But there are so many voices…

To keep itself intact, the cluster moves indoors where it has walls to preserve it. When “place” is embodied concretely enough to be “sensed,” it has been distinguished from the places surrounding it. The indoor cluster-place has embedded, within its own category, the principle of its own negation. The prototype of the self-destructive cluster-place is the rock music club. The club has, as its end, the playing of music that draws people into the club and keeps them there as paying customers; but the end of the music itself—if it isn’t stopped too soon, before it’s too late—is to be so loud and so strong that the walls shatter: the goal of the music is, literally, to bring the house down. In Los Angeles, the indoor cluster-space is the car; it has, as its end, the radio, the playing of which keeps them inside, part of a public sharing a “virtual place” on the radio. The model for a new public art in for Los Angeles has embedded the principle of its own negation—a vast earthquake of sound.

So keep your hands free and your eyes wide open and your ear to the ground.

*All text in italics is from Vito Acconci, “Public Space in a Private Time” (1990), reprinted in Art and the Public Sphere, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 158–76. Text in roman is the author’s own.

Sound, instead of being a series of inadequate clues from an unlit world, becomes a medium that opens onto and generates a world and, as a part of this world-generation, enjoys interaction and conjunction with the other senses.

—Clive Cazeaux, 2005 (1)

Los Angeles is home to more than twelve million people, each one carrying a distinct way of perceiving his or her surroundings. On a daily basis, individuals are exposed to a variety of sights and sounds that act as signals (such as a phone ringing, a friend, an advertisement, or green light), prompting a multitude of reactions (stopping, smiling, remembering, or moving). The individual perceptions formed from these signals and reactions compose the topography of the city. Working from a field that prioritizes the visual, Radio Break first and foremost responds to the tendency to show art in a gallery to a predetermined audience as an exhibition platform—the dispersed nature of the radio wave was the foundational impetus for this exhibition.  Moving art into public space via the radio wave, this exhibition questions the fixed ideas of the display and reception of artworks, challenging the artists participating, the curatorial team, and the receivers. Reaching into infinite space, mysteriously moving in and out of audible reach, and allowing for the participant to form his or her own visualization and reaction, the radio wave’s intangible nature and relationship to space questions both perception and reception.

More than just listen, Radio Break invites, or more so requires, its audience to intervene. Encountering any one of the twelve artworks in this exhibition as a listener, one meets the works in a full experience with the body. As the radio waves travel around and through the body, a participant might even stop the transmission or alter the experience of it for others. Simultaneously, there is a component of reception that is a purely subjective experience, with works triggering specific actions, emotions, and memories in each participant, simultaneously allowing the imagination to wander.

The body’s interaction with a medium as a means of making art is a strategy that was extensively explored throughout the twentieth-century avant-garde, with artists employing their own bodies as well as others in their work. At times, this intersection of the body and medium has created an experience for the artist primarily and the audience secondarily. For example, we can turn to works by Kazuo Shiraga, a member of the Japanese avant-garde group Gutai Bijutsu Kyôkai, in which the artist would use his feet, hands, nails, or entire body in place of a paintbrush or tool. This physical interaction has also been transformed into processes developed by the artist for the audience member to activate the work through his, her, or their presence—consider works organized by artists such as Suzanne Lacy that are developed through direct participation of community members. In many ways, both of these types of interactions counter the traditional artwork-viewer relationship as well as the traditional process of creating artworks. Interfering with long-standing boundaries of the artist’s and artwork’s role within the studio or gallery and the work’s association with the audience, viewer, or participant, this experimentation created space in the realm of fine art for radio art and noise art, as well as spaces and moments to experience sound, noise, radio, and narrative. Radio Break is not the first exhibition focused on sound or the specific medium of radio; rather, the projects presented during this exhibition are tied to the complex history of sound works, one that includes their relationship to the art sphere, their similarities and differences with visual art, and their position vis a vis the receiver.

Writer and theorist Clive Cazeaux argued that sound, distinct from the purely visual, allows one to tune into the surrounding world by provoking the interaction of multiple senses; sound allows one to create one’s own mental vision and to consider the signals it ignites within our individual perceptions of the world. The reaction that a particular sound may trigger for one individual—a memory, visual image, or emotion—may be completely different for another. Sounds allow us to understand our surroundings, remember situations, or call on us to act. Phenomenologically speaking, some of the Radio Break broadcasts will affect individuals directly, allowing memories to surface, while for others they will create new experiences. Each work addresses the conscious and unconscious of perceivers, who physically encounter the sound waves in order to receive the work. In the words of the Gutai—of which many members used the body to cultivate a spiritual and sensual interaction between the artist, the viewer, and the artwork—this exhibition “brings [the material] to life,” calling “forth a tremendous scream in the material itself.” (2)

Radio Break invites participants to interfere with the radio waves, the artworks, and their surroundings, challenging the boundaries of art reception, the art sphere, the everyday, and the imagination.

The projects in Radio Break create spaces for reflection and experience, allowing for different ways of perceiving and receiving the surrounding world. While the New York subway sounds of Alyce Santoro’s Between Stations allows participants to contemplate city sounds while situated inside a major Los Angeles transportation hub (amid echoing announcements of trains departing for Houston, Lake Charles, New Orleans, Chicago), Vanessa Place’s Full Audio Transcripts employs audio tapes from September 11, 2001, prompting a reexamination of the emotions many experienced on that day. Other works in Radio Break comment on or contain elements of everyday life—from the voices of those present in Los Angeles and beyond (as in Brandon LaBelle’s The Echo Project, Pedro Reyes’s VMR: Voice Mail Radio, Arnoldo Vargas’s Triggermomentry and the Cartography of Sound, and Lincoln Tobier’s The Orchestra Pit Theory by Roger Ailes), to stories from and reports on individuals in the city (such as Elana Mann’s People’s Microphony Camerata, Brendan Threadgill’s Incident Reports 2007–2012 (MacArthur Park Homicides), and 2 Headed Dog’s Clowntown City Limits), and musical preludes or vocal commentary concocted from inspiration from the city (such as Lucy Raven’s Con Air 2, David Schafer’s Cage Mix: Static Age, and Richard T. Walker’s between distance and a mountain). The exhibition occupies an existing medium, bringing to surface sounds, memories, and narratives that were often already present for new examination. Through continuous, intermittent, and live broadcasts, the varying structure of Radio Break as an exhibition offers multiple ways for individuals to interfere and experience these artworks and the medium.

¹ Clive Cazeaux,“Phenomenology and Radio Drama,” British Journal of Aesthetics 45, no. 2 (April 2005): 173.

² The Gutai group ignited their works of art—utilizing sound, performance, and painting, among other outlets of creation—through interaction, often creating a multisensory experience for both the artist and the participant or audience. See Jiro Yoshihara, “Gutai Manifesto,” in Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 700–01.

From outside the opening reception at La Serenata. Above photo by Eve Ruether

For documentation of the event at Union Station, follow this link.

For documentation of the event at La Seranata, follow this link.

Saturday, 4/14

DOWNTOWN/EAST LA

Suggested transportation: METRO

4-6pm, Union Station

Alyce Santoro, Between Stations

6-9pm, Mariachi Plaza, E. 1st Street and Boyle Avenue

Lincoln Tobier, The Orchestra Pit Theory by Roger Ailes

6-9pm, La Serenata Restaurant and opening reception, 1842 East 1st Street  Los Angeles, California 90033

Brandon LaBelle, The Echo Project

6-9pm

Opening Reception

La Serenata Restaurant

Listening to artwork by Brendan Threadgill and Arnoldo Vargas during Ciclavia. Photo: Mark Escribano

For documentation of the events at Cyclavia, follow this link.

Sunday, 4/15

DOWNTOWN/CICLAVIA

Suggested transportation: Bicycle

10am-2pm, El Pueblo de Los Angeles, 125 Paseo De La Plz

Los Angeles, CA 90012

Pedro Reyes,VMR: Voice Mail Radio

10am-2pm, MacArthur Park, near W. 7th Avenue and Park View Street, near the public sculpture “Clocktower: A Monument to the Unknown” by George Herms

Brendan Threadgill, Incident Reports 2007-2012 (MacArthur Park Homicides)

Arnoldo Vargas, Triggernometry and the Cartography of Sound

Arnoldo Vargas broadcasts from Slanguage Studio

For documentation of the events at LACE, follow this link.

Saturday, 4/21

LACE: Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

6522 Hollywood Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90028

Suggested Transportation: FOOT

1-5pm

Lucy Raven, Con Air 2

1-4pm

Vanessa Place, Full Audio Transcripts

4-7pm

2 Headed Dog, Clowntown City Limits