I See You listening

‘I see you listening’, catalogue text for ‘Audiosphere: Sound Experimentation 1980-2020, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Spain, 14 October, 2020 - 11 January, 2021.

Sound works, particularly those played on headphones, exhibit a certain vampirism and have the potential to add a “touch of pink” to the museum walls. To distort its certain appearance, the value and convention of its organization, and to add a clownish papiermâché nose. This is not a trivial suggestion or a joke. This clown is not a jester but a serious curatorial strategy of introducing a performative action to achieve a different engagement. In this instance it is the action of listening on headphones in a public space

that is traditionally focused on looking, that opens the normative situation of the museum to another experience. This is the experience of the invisible, of what is not in the room to be seen, and what thereby escapes the conventional curatorial project but “taints” its environment nevertheless. In that sense, the “clownery” of headphone listening to works that find no reflection in the mirror of the museum

is a subversive move. It questions the norms of looking at art, as well as the newer convention of the audio guide, by being on headphones the art itself.