Judy Dunaway is an artist and educator whose new article, “The Forgotten 1979 Museum of Modern Art Sound Art Exhibition” was featured in the debut edition of Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture. She is known for performance-based multimedia exhibitions using balloons as sound conduits, and she teaches History of Sound Art and courses on MaxMSP at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Resonance‘s Associate Editor, Honna Veerkamp, spoke with Dunaway via Zoom about her research, practice, and teaching.
Honna Veerkamp:
Can you talk a little bit about your article, for those who haven’t read it yet, and the piece about the exhibition being forgotten?
Judy Dunaway:
It’s about an exhibition curated by Barbara London that featured Maggi Payne, Connie Beckley, and Julia Heyward. It was the first exhibition at a major museum that used “sound art” in the title, so it’s important in the evolution of the term in that sense. There have been a large number of publications about sound art over the past 20 years, and most start their discussion around 2000 or sometime in the ’90s. They tend to trace it from the experimental music genre that was established by Michael Nyman in his book Experimental Music from the 1970s, which he’s been very adamant about not changing. Even though it doesn’t have any women in the book, he didn’t want to change that. The 1979 Museum of Modern Art Sound Art Exhibition was pushed aside and not discussed for 20 years even though it was important to the trajectory. It didn’t fit that identity that the major writers were drawing, which was experimental music, minimalism, pure noise, those sorts of things.
Honna Veerkamp:
Could you talk about how you got interested in this exhibition and started researching it?
Judy Dunaway:
I’ve been teaching a course called History of Sound Art. Throughout all this, I’ve been interested in the history of this term. Where did this term “sound art” come from? Why “sound art”? There wasn’t much written about it. I’ve talked to various people about it through the years. I knew about William Hellerman’s SoundArt Foundation, which was around in the 80s, so I talked to Bill Hellerman about his exhibitions and his history with the term “sound art.” I guess we started talking about that around 2010 or so; Bill died in 2017. He gave me the catalog for the SoundArt exhibition he curated at The Sculpture Center in 1983, which also included works by Connie Beckley, Hannah Wilke, and Carolee Schneemann. So I saw there was this kind of feminist thing going on, even when I was talking to Bill. But as far as the 1979 Sound Art exhibition at MoMA, which predates Bill’s SoundArt Foundation—I’d posted on Facebook, asking people about the origins of the term “sound art.” Seth Cluett, who teaches at Columbia, pointed to the Barbara London MoMA exhibit as being an earlier source of the term “sound art.” And then, of course, Barbara London mentions this Sound Art exhibition from 1979 in her notes to the Soundings exhibition that she did in 2013. I had seen it in that catalog but I hadn’t put two and two together until Seth mentioned it as an origin of the term. At that point, my interest was piqued. I’ve been wanting to investigate it since then. I kept reading all these books about sound art, and every time that I’d get a new book, I would open it and say,” Is there something now about the Sound Art exhibition from 1979?” And there never was.
Honna Veerkamp:
Well we’re so glad to be able to include it in Resonance. So, thank you so much for bringing this to light. You were doing your own sound-based art practice in New York a little bit later than this exhibition. Can you talk about the work that you’ve done over the years using balloons as sound-art objects?
Judy Dunaway:
The balloon brings a visual medium into the sound realm. There’s a feminist aspect in the way I approach it. I don’t have a lot of boundaries between my body and the instrument, so that the instrument almost becomes an extension of the body. That’s the same for any instrument, I suppose. But in this case, you’ve got this malleable organ—it almost seems like another appendage in a way. In that sense, I’m expressing sensuality, sexuality, humanity. Not only in the sound did I want to perform without inhibition, but in the visual image as well—for it to be very exposed in that way. I see separation of the psyche and the body as a way that people have been controlled throughout history, and this is my way of reconnecting that.
The balloon is an incredible musical instrument, because it can do so many different things. It’s so simple. It’s basically a string. If you imagine a string, a violin string or guitar string held taut between the nut and the bridge. And then you imagine that string is melted and spun out into an orb, and held taut instead by a column of air. Then you have this entire surface to play as a string, but it’s curved, so you get this odd overtone series on the string. And it also can be a bit like a drumhead in that there are different vibrational nodes on it because it’s a large surface. It has a beautiful variety of sounds. I wanted to use the inherent sounds that were on that surface and not try to impose ideas on it—I didn’t want to play a tune on the balloon. So really digging in and finding that material.
Honna Veerkamp:
Can you talk about your work as an educator and about those two different things that you teach, the more historical and the more software, practice-based work?
Judy Dunaway:
My degrees are in music. I have a Bachelor of Science in Music Education. I have a Master of Arts in Music with Experimental Music Composition emphasis from Wesleyan University, and then I have a PhD in Music Composition. But, in spite of that, for the past 15 years, I’ve taught in visual arts institutions, which luckily welcomed my ontological attitude towards sound. So, both courses involve an exploration of sound. It’s just done in two different ways. One is history and one is practice. My History of Sound Art course is a freshman elective in the Art History department. I get a wide variety of students from different majors, which is wonderful. That kind of fresh approach is helpful to me. I learn a lot from my students, as I think you find so many teachers will say. I have the students write research papers about artists working in the area of sound art, and I’m always updating that list. It’s interesting to me how many of the sound artists that we end up talking about come from hybrid backgrounds. For instance, you may have somebody who was studying music as a child, maybe they were very precocious, but then they wanted to break away from that when they got to college and they got a degree in Art. And then you end up with this hybrid work. The formal education of artists that get categorized as sound artists is about 50/50 between Music or Sound-Engineering degrees and Art or Design degrees. But almost 100% of these artists, these “sound artists” as people are calling them now, from the ’70s up through the 2000s had some sort of combination background. Yoko Ono is the first one that comes to mind. Max Neuhaus, Paul DeMarinis, and Bill Fontana started out in music then got into visual art. Rolf Julius, Harry Bertoia, and Laurie Anderson had an art background and then started working with sound. Steve Roden was a punk musician from the time he was 14. I think about these things because I’m an educator. What would a student need to know to become a sound artist? What would they need to know to make a work that’s strong in all aspects?
I became involved with visual art around 2000. I’d been involved in the free-improv scene in New York in the ’80s. Then I started playing balloons in the ’90s, and I was getting some notoriety for that. And then I wanted to get away from just working a day job and playing gigs and so I decided to go back to grad school. I got accepted at Wesleyan University and worked with Alvin Lucier for two years—where I was blissfully happy, by the way. And I had a lot of freedom there to explore whatever I wanted. It was there through Alvin’s work that I got my first real exposure to what’s called “sound art”—sound installation. I even went to Berlin to work with him on a retrospective of his work in 1999. In 2000, after I finished my MA at Wesleyan, I went to Germany and lived for two years where I was involved with the great sound art scene there. I knew younger sound artists, people like Jens Brand and Ed Osborn. I got involved with sound installation there. Plus I was at ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany so I saw many incredible artworks in Karlsruhe at that time. Then I ended up going to Stony Brook University, which is a very conservative and probably unsuitable program for me, to work on my PhD in Music. But I was lucky to have the opportunity to work with Christa Erickson in the art department, and she was helpful to me and my multimedia explorations. I’ve had this kind of hybrid experience myself.
The Max course is this idea in practice. MaxMSP is a graphical programming language, primarily for sound and video. I start by just teaching my students the rudiments of sound and a little bit of music. And because it’s an online course, I get a wide variety of people, not only from different backgrounds, but also from around the world. So I get a lot of diverse approaches and interests and things that people want to do. I’ve been pretty happy to see that some of my students have gone on to make outstanding work. Also, I help run a group called MaxMSPJitter Women Boston. We started about two years ago, trying to get more women in our area involved with Max and with music technology in general, and just supporting the women that are already working with music technology. That’s been a great experience for helping my community and also for learning more about Max.
Honna Veerkamp:
Is there anything else that you would like to talk about that I didn’t ask you?
Judy Dunaway:
Yes. Power structures in the arts are inherently classist, sexist, racist, and generally exclusionist, because they’re capitalist systems based on money. All you need to do is look at the statistics on income disparity to see who’s represented in almost any field. Real innovations cannot necessarily be represented in old power structures. Rap and hip hop are as valid an examination of sound culture and visual medium as any sound sculpture or sound installation in view of the 1970s and 80s. Tracie Morris is one of the very few people who has written anything about that. George Lewis has addressed the exclusion of free jazz [in experimental music] in his work. I think with the whole COVID pandemic, we’re going to see some shake up of the power structures. Now it could be in a bad way, but could be in a good way. Maybe a little bit of both.
Read Judy Dunaway’s article in Resonance for free for a limited time.
