A book review of Against Ambience by Seth Kim-Cohen

by

Joseph Nechvatal

Published at on-verge

http://www.on-verge.org/reviews/book-review-against-ambiance/

Seth Kim-Cohen’s concise but punchy e-book Against Ambience puts forth a fervently

pithy polemic aimed at what he determined was an epidemic of anti-conceptual ambient

2

sound and light exhibitions in New York City last summer (2013); citing: Robert Irwin at

the Whitney, James Turrell at the Guggenheim, Soundings at MoMA, Janet Cardiff at the

Met, the show ambient at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (curated by Tim Griffin), and The

String and The Mirror show at the Lisa Cooley Gallery. Whether or not you agree with

him that seven exhibitions, out of the hundreds open that summer in New York, form an

epidemic or not, he does identify an interesting anti-object totalizing trend today that

picks up where some art-and-technology work of the 1960s and 70’s (Op Art and Kinetic

Art, principally) left off: with an attraction for immersive visual and sound art that tends

to wash over us in ambient ways.

First off, it was wonderfully refreshing to read someone of competence capable of

thinking and talking about visual art and audio art and art theory in the same breath,

particularly from the point of view of artist-musician-scholar/theorist. Kim-Cohen is all

of that (and does that) seamlessly here. That alone is a golden offering to a market

obsessed art world, and what attracted me first to this, his third, book. Here he attributes

this perceived desire for ambience as an undesirable response to information overload

(page 278) and rightfully thanks Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange for

their service to humanity. With these assertions, I certainly agree.

Some history of ambience is established, initially (ambience as a modality routinely

associated with the surrounding ephemeral qualities of sound) so the author can later take

issue with certain aspects of ambient aesthetics (mostly the overvaluing of a mute

phenomenological perception that is destroying our criticality) and attack what he sees as

the shrinking conceptual turn in the arts today. Thus, one would expect (and receives

here) an adequate review of John Cage’s non-silence, along with the formation of Brian

Eno’s ambient music ideals as conceived from his sick bed. Certainly Cage’s influence

on Robert Irwin’s and James Turrell’s light work is also established, as they both worked

in an anechoic chamber as part of the Art and Technology project at the Los Angeles

County Museum of Art in the late 1960s. Of course, in the early 1950s, after visiting an

anechoic chamber at Harvard, Cage reached the celebrated conclusion that there is no

such thing as silence - and Turrell arrived at an equivalent conclusion concerning light.

3

But I was surprised, delighted and intrigued with his use of cutting-edge Object Oriented

Ontology (OOO) philosopher Timothy Morton and his notion of ambient poetics, as

Morton, that same summer, dropped the year’s most eagerly waited e-book on aesthetics:

Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality where Morton directly ties aesthetics to

causality.

It is due to what Kim-Cohen sees as a lack of this level of conceptualism (even

comparing Op Art and this ambient trend, disapprovingly) that provokes him to thunder

(like King Kong) against the overly perceptual characteristics of ambience; a fault that he

sees commensurate with a loss of conceptualism (he connects this deficiency with the

death of one of Conceptual Art’s chief promoters; Seth Siegelaub, that occurred that same

summer), trouncing ambient art’s seemingly necessarily subtle, soft, and fuzzy qualities.

This loss he reads as a regrettable move towards further cultural industrial spectacle of

the sort that Theodor Adorno warned us of in his book Aesthetic Theory - where Adorno

urged art and aesthetics to resist such integration through formal difficulty - and away

from the art world’s previous embrace of engagements with criticality, new media,

philosophy, economics, gender, identity, and interpersonal relations at the level of

individuals, organizations, corporations, and nation-states. (page 18)

Working this perhaps unnecessary polarity to its end, Kim-Cohen goes so far as to

conjecture if the popularity of this modality of ambience signals the end of

conceptualism. But this is something I see too little evidence of, both in this book and

around the art world. My feeling is that he just needs to hold ambient art and sound to the

higher standard of an immersive art that does not preference the style of quiet meditation

and color transcendentalism over visceral engagement, such as that I experienced at

!K !o !n !r !a !d ! Smolenski’s brilliant immersive bell piece Everything !W!a!s! !F !o !r !e !v !e !r !, ! Until !I !t ! !W!a!s!

!N!o! !M!o!r!e ! that was perfectly presented at the Polish Pavilion that same summer at the

Venice Biennale. Indeed, if Kim-Cohen’s assertion that conceptualism is over and

ambient aesthetics rule, Smolenski would have won the Golden Lion award (I think he

should have) rather than the relationalist, Tino Sehgal.

4

But rather than pitching for a more demanding counter modality in immersive art, he

unconvincingly offers that of Dub music and its use of breezy echo, reverb, panoramic

delay, and occasional dubbing of vocal or instrumental snippets from the original version

or other works. This seems neither novel (Ambient Dub is an existent musical genre) nor

sufficient to me in reversing the perceived ambient slide into happy nonchalance. So

although he identifies a trend that goes back to Happenings, Fluxus, and Kinetic Art (see:

Frank Popper’s seminal book Art - Action and Participation from 1975) as suddenly

central, and thus problematic, I found no formula for overcoming the seductions of a

sweet totalizing ambiance here, other than getting down to work with the business of

connecting our pleasurable sensations to critical conceptions through the experience of

quality art, and through the play of immersion and critical distance in whatever form it

takes so long as it delivers critical pleasure.

Joseph Nechvatal