Listening and Looking beside. On the ‘Parasonic’ and the ‘Paracinematic’

The work of the visual artist Christian Marclay draws from music and sonic culture and is known for its mixed-media work, including assemblages of records’ covers, deformed music instruments, videos and installations. With or without the actual manifestation of sound, he creates back and forth trajectories between the sonic world becoming mute and and the auralised visual sphere. The cultural historian Steven Connor has described the set of relationships between the aural and the visual created by Marclay as operating in the “domain of the parasonic”, yet without elaborating further on this notion. However, its usefulness to think about artworks that participate in both the visual and sonic spheres, with none of the latter overriding them – and which thus raise questions about the very corpus to which they belong: that of art history and visual culture and/or sound studies – might be appreciated by being brought close to another hybrid category: paracinema. The latter, first coined by experimental filmmaker and performer Ken Jacobs in the 1970’s and recently revived by the film scholar Jonathan Walley “identifies an array of phenomena that are considered 'cinematic' but that are not embodied in the materials of film as traditionally defined” (Walley) and explore a space at the intersection of artist’s film, performance and conceptual art. Hence, broadly, both the parasonic and the paracinematic are analogous in their formulation and both assert an escape from their conventional material, and coextensively, from the very categories by which scholars apprehend them. Drawing on Marclay’s and the paracinematic work of Anthony McCall, this paper will discuss epistemic possibilities and insufficiencies in art history and associated disciplines as they might appear when analysing such practices that posit themselves outside of or beside (para-) traditional mediums. Finally, by addressing the intersections and analogies of sound and visuality through the parasonic and the paracinematic, this paper will also discuss the fashioning of academic corpuses and their legibility in relation to disciplinary formations and their methodologies.