William Furlong Audio Arts: extraction, construction, abstraction.

This exhibition in the Sound Art Museum in Rome, curated by Lucia Farinati, takes its cue from the well known definition of sculpture by Michaelangelo and develops the operative and conceptual premise to Audio Arts as a plastic organism in continual expansion. Such an organism is born (to use the words of Michaelangelo) from the presuppositions of ‘taking away’ and ‘laying on’ and shares many of the characteristics common to such traditional media as painting and sculpture and to the procedures of contemporary visual art: montage, collage, addition, contrast repetition overlapping, realism, abstraction.

This exhibition of sound works aimed to discover to what extent the editing of sound is analogous to the practice of the artist in the studio. Six works were presented or heard from eight loud speakers driven by a digital hard disc player. Opposed to ideas of documentation, the very process of physical and critical editing is analogous to that of the artist in the studio: listening cutting, selecting, splicing, adding, synthesising subtracting and repeating. In Uhms & Aghs, which were removed from the last few years of Furlong’s recorded interviews the fragments of speech are not assembled to convey a linear or clearly defined meaning but rather to create, a succinct audio equivalent to thought outside of language.

A symposium, entitled ACTIVE ARCHIVE was organised by the artist, curator and Sound Art Museum to accompany the exhibition and held at the British School in Rome. Contributors included Daniela Cascella, Lorenzo Benedetti, Mel Gooding, Lucia Fariati and Furlong.