How to Make a Sculpture With Sound

0:02A sound object in my case also becomes material, becomes like materiality, becomes matter you listen to, you see, and a body that can produce a sound. It has the dimension of chauffeur. It can be like a digital or like an abstract sound file.

0:21I'm Ben Davis and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News.

0:33Some of the most important visual artists working today are sound artists. In fact, to me, it seems that sound in general has been growing in importance at the museum recently. Exhibitions come with soundtracks, sculptures make noise, and musical performance of one kind or another is everywhere in and around the art. I wanted to dig into this sonic turn in art, if that's what it is, and the artist Tarek Atoui is a great person to talk to. Born in Lebanon and based in Paris, Atoui's work often takes the form of environments with sculptures that double as experimental musical instruments to be activated by the audience or by performers.

1:13This form of art is both unique and clearly resonates with a bigger trend in art of using sound to activate the museum as an event space and a space of gathering. At the current Venice Biennale, He's part of the Qatar Pavilion for a project called Untitled 2026, a gathering of remarkable people, working with a supergroup of famous figures from the worlds of art, music and food to make an environment that evolves for the entire course of the Biennale. And later this year, Atui will be the next artist to do the Giant Turbine Hall Commission for the Tate Modern in London, occupying one of the most highly watched pieces of exhibition space in the entire international art world.

1:55Where does this genre of hybrid art come from? Where is it going? What are its challenges? Atoui is here to talk about all this. Tarek Atoui, thank you for talking to me today. My pleasure. Where are you calling in from today? I'm in my studio in Paris, where I live and work, actually, and where I develop most of my productions and compositions. Well, you're a very busy guy. You know, I did this list of the artists who were in the most biennials recently and you're one of them. You're part of this big project in Venice and you're going to do the Tate project coming up, the Turbine Hall. So it's exciting to talk to you.

2:34You've got a lot going on, but I want to start with how you got your start. So how did you go from the world from music into the world of art? It's the nature of the studies I did, honestly, like starting with electronic music that I started as an amateur and as a DJ and like a curious person. And from there, going to sound studies and diving into the world of electroacoustics with their connection and con events with the world of sound art, contemporary art and abstraction. So composition, very early on, you see like this question of how to compose with what instruments, which people, in what spaces and through which sound systems and like architectures and all this were questions that were very important and part of the act of composing and making music and so that's how where did you study where did you study you studied i studied in france actually i was born and i grew up in uh in lebanon and at the age of 18 i traveled to france where all this adventure and the connection to sound started so at the age of 20 around the age of 20 and so it was during my university studies and in that time that I started to take on courses in electroacoustic music compositions and that was in a town north of Paris called Rens, the country of Champagne.

4:02And from there, yeah, I curved my path and developed different profiles. Is the art curriculum part of the composition curriculum? Are people studying like John Cage and that kind of tradition? Yes, we were. We were studying John Cage as much as Stockhausen and Legati, you see, and as much as Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari and different schools of people who work with field recording, synthethics, editing, and all these post-World War II techniques, let's say. And when you say you were a DJ, what do you mean? What kind of DJing were you? I was like a teenager DJ. DJ teenager or teenager DJ. So this was the start, like being in techno parties and going to techno parties and mixing hard techno and techno.

4:56And from there, wanting to know how you make techno. And from there, discovering electroacoustics. And here we are. It's interesting to me because that kind of nightlife has become a big interest in art. You know, I think it is like a very powerful subculture that people, you know, just find like very inspiring. Yeah, like we've seen it lately. you see a lot of djs are now like uh doing performances uh in uh in art exhibitions and inside museums uh there is a porosity now with certain musical practices that got uh like established and recognized as uh art forms you see and like that they have a place inside a museum like of course experimental music and new music but even techno and like certain schools of techno and things that have now became what we say old school.

5:48And that is like kind of going into other realms and like finding other corners. And that's indeed exciting. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that like, there's a form of minimal and experimental electronic music. Yeah, the tradition of Stockhausen and so on. And then it almost, it finds this kind of organic popular output on the dance floor. Absolutely. Repetitive repetition and certain kind of... Yeah. experimental form. I also think in art, like the DJing, there's the collage aesthetic that people find really resonant. Well, there is this, well, you touched on several ideas, but let's say like one nice idea you just mentioned that I personally believe in is that what was experimental in the 60s or what was considered experimental music and cutting edge techniques and like very elitist even somehow, sometimes.

6:41It wasn't, it's not about elitism at all, But techniques of their time are now in pop and hip hop and techniques that have been very widely distributed, diffused with the digital culture and all this. So when I listen to the music of the last, let's say, 70 years, I can clearly hear this transition, you know, and that the definition of noise music or like I can hear also contributions that every genre of music has brought into other genres. you see, and this kind of form of pollinization somehow of cultures. And yeah. In terms of an art career or looking towards the art space, was there a particular moment when you said, oh, yes, the musical stuff I'm interested in fits here in the world of sculpture or installation?

7:31Well, there was a moment, yes, but it happened backwards. There was a moment when I knew what I was not interested in in the music world, you see, and what I found more interest in the art world and visual arts, you see. I was not very much interested in releasing albums, for example, albums that kind of followed or obeyed certain market logic, let's say like this pace of an album a year or having to release so you exist, of having to constantly put something out so you're remembered somehow. And I found this approach like counterproductive after some time like it's nice that an album takes time takes reflection that is done with its own maturity and not out of the necessity of the music market or the music world and i was more tempted by the live and the performance so the extension of what was djing and being on stage while i was studying and practicing also like forms of music where you weren't on stage you composed for multi-channel systems you worked in ways where the composer was like in the back somehow there was already like this desire of kind of moving away from all these paradigms and finding new ones and the art world was a nice terrain to experiment with these like it's much easier to have a performance in a gallery space with the people sitting around you than in a concert space where You're supposed to be standing on a stage and people are seated in chairs.

9:02Is it because the audience can be more active and walk around the objects? Of course, walk around in the space. You can also work with audiences and people that are sometimes amateurs, sometimes kids, sometimes deaf. As in my case, I got to do, there's a different outreach through museums. And well, at least back then, 20, 25 years ago, now things have changed. But back then, music festivals and the music world was not offering much chance for such experimentation. You see, this type of experimentation was considered as being part of the artwork. So you have developed this form of art that's very unique.

9:43Sometimes the works look sort of like a sculpture, but they're a musical instrument. It's like musical instruments as sculptures. Is there a first instance when that happens, when that comes together for you? It's a accumulation of experiences, you see. It's not like as a clicking point or a turning point as such, you see. Now with time and experience and looking back at things, I think all these were smooth transitions in my case that took time, you see, and that emerged over the course of the year. And that's the kind of curve that I feel I'm still in, you know, of like learning things little by little and then they transform.

10:19So I first started by making computer programs to create sound and music. So kind of building my own plugins and my own machines and tools using the computer. And from computer programming, I learned how to do electronics. So I started to build like sensor based instruments and things I could connect to my computer programs. And after a while, I was fed up from playing just with my computer. and I wanted more to come back to situations where I play with musicians and like as in my early beginnings and like have colleagues and musicians around me. So I started inviting people, musicians, and then say, okay, why not also invite people to make instruments with me and not just me making my instruments, you see.

11:02And so that's how the story kind of gradually started. And then I found myself doing sculpture, but like after 10 years, 12 years, it didn't start right away like this. Right. It's sort of like it fades in, I guess, to use a musical concept. Yeah, exactly. Well, you have this idea I've heard you talk about of the sonic object. Where does that come from? What is that? Initially, the idea of a sonic object is something Pierre Schaeffer talked about, you see, in the late 40s, 50s. So it's the idea of... Who is that? I don't know that. Pierre Schaeffer. Shame on you. You don't know Pierre Schaeffer and you're holding a microphone.

11:39No, I don't. I'm sorry. No, Pierre Schaeffer is a very important composer, and he was a war journalist in the Second World War. And he did a lot of recordings with a portable recorder because it was the period when portable device started to appear. And so he was the first person who kind of considered that capturing like a sound, like a field recording, can become a sound object and can become material to make composition and music out of. So he's the father of this gesture somehow, you see, or at least in the West, in France, in Western cultures, Pierre Schaeffer was the pioneer who did it, you see.

12:19He's the father of microphonic music or the person who used mics to make things out of them. This is how Pierre Schaeffer defined the object sonore or the sonic object as being this material you record and that you can then use in compositions. And in my case, you see, in this heritage and in the continuation of this thinking, a sound object, in my case, also becomes material, becomes like materiality, becomes matter you listen to, you see, and a body that can produce a sound. It has the dimension of Schaefer. It can be like a digital or like an abstract sound file, like totally detached from its origin and the source that produced it.

12:57But in my case, it's also like it can be an object that produces the sound and that is being like played live or like triggered on the spot. So I think that maybe we should give people an idea of specifically some works that you've done. So one of the famous works of yours is this, I guess I call it an installation, The Ground. Where did that come from? Honestly, I got known for working on large scale installations and installations in this jargon of contemporary art. But I always considered them as compositions. I was, for me, always composing. I wasn't now making installation. Then when I work in music, I make compositions.

13:41No, like even the work. Like you think about the installation, the spatial installation. Yeah, as a spatial composition, precisely. Spatial composition, much more like. So it's kind of, you see in my practice, I now like build my own or build instruments with other people and bring these instruments. And like, first of all, think how to play each instrument with the presence of humans, how to play each instrument with motors, mechanical, rotational, digital techniques, you name it. and then bringing several instruments or several things together in a space to create a sound piece in a composition.

14:19So it's a composition that deploys in space with sound objects, sometimes instruments, sometimes volumes, forms of different materials. And that's what makes this thing look like a sculpture. But it's not a sculpture done as a sculptor would do it. It's done out of how a composer or somebody listening to sound and composing a sound piece would do it. And the space is not like an art installation in the sense you see different sculptures isolated from one another. But you see a space where like all the elements in it are working together as a symphony or as an orchestra as well. And so that's the ground.

14:56The ground is one of the culminations and the projects where this materialized first. It was in Venice in 2019. And the ground came, as I was saying, I fade out slowly and like it's a slow fade out. So 2019 was the manifestation of the ground in Venice at the Arsenale. And like this big orchestra of objects I created and through travels in China. But these travels started in 2010. Right. Yeah. It's like a decade of research. Like almost, you see, and like going to different parts of China, like looking at architecture, looking at traditional music, looking at planting forms. It was done with friends I had there, the vitamin space, you see, with whom we spent a lot of time on doing this.

15:38So it was like the result of wanderings, you know, and curiosity and research in this part of the world that led to the ground. And it's specifically, without any pretension, it's mainly the region of Canton, you know, like, and the Pearl River that I explored the most. China's very big. I cannot say like. Which is why it's because of the agricultural architecture there. Is that right? kind of the terraced nature of it that kind of inspired the installation? It's not a land of terraces. It's not a region of terraces. No, it's a region of fish ponds and systems of sharing water. It's systems of also, in some places, of large-scale agriculture between which smaller isles and more experimental agricultural plots of land were existing.

16:27There was a lot of diversity in this landscape. You see, that is not at all what we would expect as a dialogue between the new and the old, the human and the industrial, the local and the universal. There was really a lot to learn from, old and new. And you say that you were part of it emerged from studying traditional Chinese music, but they're like experimental musical instruments that are totally new, right? I mean, they're sort of... No, they are the oldest instruments of mankind. They're not new at all. It's like they're like ceramic objects. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, sure, sure. Of course.

17:08No, these are the results. But these are contemporary results. These are like and look like they resemble their time. Absolutely. But the things I looked at and I studied were like Kuchin instruments or like Chin instruments that are the early string instruments. And these are the oldest instruments of mankind, you know, in the family of the strings and the philosophy of playing them. and the sound of the instrument and the pluck of the musician and the notational system and the performative situation. A lot of things around the string culture. And are you able to master them? No! Not me! Of course, no.

17:48After 20 years I can play anything on earth. Of course, I can play anything on earth. You just bring me an instrument, tell me where it's from and I'll play it for you, like an artificial intelligence. I was not learning myself how to play Kuchin, for instance. I was more studying like that in terms of learning an instrument, like studying the culture, the technique. I worked with musicians who are masters of Kuchin themselves, but myself, I did not try to play. Imagine like I go to so many places and I work with so many people. It's not about learning the instrument. It's really about learning the culture, the philosophy behind it uh the articulation of the of thought and thinking and not learning the objects necessarily but the kind of newness of them the the fact that they produce a kind of an open relationship with the audience where it's not exactly sure how to use them that's part of the work that's the objects i do yeah yeah of course of course but that's that's like kind of the the contemporary reading or revisiting of all these learnings it's the synthesis or what comes out from this research and like this uh travel and dialogue and uh interest in other cultures is like objects that are totally different that are not mimicking what i discovered on my research that are done with people in these places but with different techniques with twists and innovations that build on the on established techniques but also challenge them and take them to different places.

19:33Yeah, for people who don't know, these kinds of works both function as an installation, but then also you can jam on them or you stage like musical events where people come and and jam basically in the work, right? Yes. Yes. This is, this is a quality and something the work has into it and has in it. And initially, and like in the beginning, I always work with improvisers and people who practice improvisation and like to improvise. So it is very normal. I think not to when you work on new instruments and develop new things to invite others to play them with you. Otherwise it's really selfish. Sure.

20:09Yeah. I think, I think, it's an unusual sculptural practice, but I think as a musical practice, it's fantastic. I guess the next maybe moment that was 2019 is really the pandemic moment, the 2020, and that had a big effect on you, correct? Honestly, not big. No, it wasn't a big effect. It was a time that had particularities to it, like all of us, you see, and like all of us, I found myself in a different relation to time and to others. So it was rather than something that was lived as hard, it was another time. It was just a different time of experimentation with different people. And like, I was lucky.

20:56I was on the good side. COVID, it affected me, but I survived. So no, no, it's not as a hard experience. Well, I mean, I guess you have this practice of jamming with people through your art and you couldn't do that so much during during the pandemic and your your reaction was to to work with children yeah exactly exactly so that was the nice uh experimentation that came out of these circumstances you know and when you improvise you are always like kind of dealing with rules or with a set of instructions or constraints and uh that's like how i found myself working with kids in kindergarten and schools, trying to think, okay, like how can I teach kids that are four years old about what I do and talk to them about what I do?

21:44Like I'm talking to you today, you see. Yeah, well, you know, one of my very first art jobs was explaining art to kids at a museum. And I learned a great deal about it. You see things through their eyes that you just, your ideas hide from you. Absolutely. I know you had an artwork, the whispers that came out of these workshops you did with kindergarteners. What did you learn from them? It was, first of all, about doing these workshops, you see, and about being with the kids in the classroom. And when I started to think like how to bring the language of a sound specialist or like sound notions that are sometimes complicated and difficult to understand, how can I transmit these to children?

22:31So playing and playfulness came about, you see, it was like, okay, rather than maybe talking about things, let's use objects and like tools and materials from our environment, like the classroom, for example, or, or home, and start to listen to them and play with them and talk about their qualities and like how they vibrate and how like they sound and like how we think about them, what we feel about them. And yeah, like through this kind of exploring the world and then playing together. You seem to like what different kind of audiences give the work. You mentioned already your work with deaf folks.

23:10Maybe we should just revisit that work a little as well, because I think for a sound artist, it's a very interesting audience to explore. I think for any artist, all artists should. that was a changing point in my life working with deaf people and that was before working with kids honestly it's after working with the deaf that i had the confidence to go work with kids i early on worked with a variety of people but never that young and like the experience of working with the deaf opened up a lot of things for me about how to relate to others but also about what sound is how our senses work, how to understand myself, what I was doing.

23:53And this came from curiosity of trying to understand what is sound outside of the ears and how to share sound through different ways than just the ears. So bass, in the case of techno and electronic music, but what else than bass, you see, how else does sound speak to us? And this is where deaf people were, for me, a crowd that was an expert in this because they were not using their ears. They were using all their senses, their body, and like a whole set of faculties. We haven't trained very much us as hearing. Yeah, I mean, I guess I suppose if you're thinking as you are about the sculptural qualities of sound, the physicality of sound, I mean, it's a brilliant lens in order to discover some of that.

24:39In terms of the physicality of sound, the sculptural qualities of sound, Is that what emerged for you from those experiments? What was the output? Yeah, like physicality of sound, of course. It's a phenomenology, I would say, or how it manifests to us as vibration that we can feel with our bones or different parts of the body, but also how it manifests to us as movement that we can read with the speed, how we can read rhythm through movement, through oscillation. so much was learned to the point where I started to feel that deaf people have developed much more capacities there than us in understanding what sound is about you see and grasping sound like really in some situations I felt I was the the person who could not hear and not them so uh obviously you like collaboration um you are part of this um the cata pavilion in in Venice which is called A Gathering of Remarkable People.

25:40So I guess you are officially a remarkable person. And how did that come together? Because it brings together, you know, artists of a variety of different disciplines. Well, The Gathering of Remarkable People and Cantar Pavilion at the Venice Biennale came first as an invitation from Rikrit Terevanisha, you know, my friend and artist. I deeply respect Rikrit And his work, you see, in terms of creating spaces, creating architectures and situations that bring people together, you see. He was designing this pavilion for Venice. And some of the ideas in it were to have music, were to have film, were to have food, and a hospitality that called upon people to stay and dwell.

26:26And that, yes, this would be the flow or like also something that the pavilion transmitted to its visitors, you see. like a space that was different from the rest of the biennale also in terms of like hospitality space to sit and hang out yeah and so what was your contribution i mean i think i saw you perform perhaps at the at the opening yes so my contribution was to be like the music convener the music guy yeah the music guy the sound and music guy so no i act i acted like the music convener you see and the person who set up the the performance and music program you see while Fadi Kattan on his end was the chef who was the kind of food convener you know and Sophia and Maria was there doing a film Alia Farid a sculpture so there were different artists invited within Recruit's proposal and each brought something so I brought together the music program you see and a series of musical events that take place every now and then on a monthly basis inside the pavilion and that explore a different idea or a different theme each time.

27:32Yeah, it was a very lovely moment. I had some great food there. It was a lovely oasis within a very intense moment of the Biennale. Yeah, no, indeed. It created something that we were all very, very proud of and happy about. You see, it created something that had in it energy, intensity, edginess and experimentation, like the quality of the concerts and the performers who were there was fantastic. You see the musicians came from all over the world, from Iran, from Singapore, from Egypt, Lebanon, Algeria, London, Austria, France. So it was kind of beyond borders and everybody was a high level, high level improviser.

28:16I'm very lucky to have established throughout these years as being able to bring together remarkable people. and so they were the most remarkable somehow and the chefs and all the guests were invited these activations had they worked together like something like that when that comes together is it is there a rehearsal do you jam together or is it just like it really just uh like a jazz improvisation well it is uh the continuation of jazz traditions and uh heritage of course it's improvisers it's beyond jam you know somehow it is people who practice this on a regular basis and who come from improvised music and new music and who are very much trained into this.

28:59And no, they had never met before, but the group could manage itself. I was also there helping, orchestrating, performing, playing with everybody as well. But it was a very nice gesture. And like this, the beauty of this came from here, is that all those in the pavilion saw that it was not composed or planned, that it was all happening live, this dialogue between the musicians and this fluidity. And it was very important to have this type of dialogue in a pavilion like Qatar's. Qatar is all about dialogue at the moment. So fantastic. Different types of dialogues. One of the other things about the pavilion is that it goes on and evolves throughout the run of the Biennale.

29:40And you just did a performance there, correctly, called the 60s Collection, which is a... Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's one of our topics, musics from the past and from the Arab world and the Gulf, indeed. Which is based on the field recordings, correct? Absolutely. Like several collections of sound, actually. There are sounds that come from my personal collection of classical Arabic music and travels. These are things like classical Arabic, traditional Arabic music are things I have been working a lot on since years now. So working with things I have collected myself or in other cases, things from a recordist and a person who recorded musics of the Gulf early on in the 60s and who is Paul Matar, like who is a Lebanese sound recordist, whose recordings were inspiring to us, or at least to me, to think this program and articulate.

30:37So yeah, it seems like you're trying to set up some sort of encounter between the past and the present. It seems like consistent things are looking to traditions of music and try and remix them in the present or give them new life. composition what john cage said is about time you see and time management but it's another time flow and it's another stream of time you see and when you are composing and dealing with time the old and the new and the future become all like part of your color palette these temporalities collapse because you're creating another temporality which is the temporality of the composition.