1.
Volume: Hear Here is conceived around the vexed question of presence in its entwine with absence—the da of dasein. An ontological discussion considered through the tenuous objecthood, but resolute materiality of sonic phenomena. Benveniste's epigraph gives primacy to the speech act, here the intent is to supplant it with the sound act. The event of language taking place in time is replaced by sound as infiltrator, enveloper, occupier of both time and space. This is a moment akin to Tony Smith's famed conclusion following his experience of driving on an unfinished and unmarked portion of the New Jersey Turnpike: "There is no way you can frame it, you just have to experience it."22Tony Smith in Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood” in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1968, 131. The incompleteness which is a corollary of the decision to dwell on unframed experience is what Michael Fried in "Art of Objecthood" so vehemently resisted and is the condition of possibility of this exhibition project. Returning to the epigraph, the other bias it foregrounds is the role of discourse which also performs a framing function. There is a desire in the twenty-four works by nineteen artists assembled here, however temporary and fraught the exercise of this desire might be, to go beyond meaning, beyond interpretation. Why this desire to seemingly bypass the straight path to knowledge? Hans-Georg Gadamer spoke of a poem speaking not only through a "meaning intention" but that simultaneously a "truth lies in its performance."33Hans-Georg Gadamer in Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004, 64. Serendipitously, he dubbed this dimension volumen.

2.
Following Gadamer's notion, the volumes at play here are not measurable or quantifiable, they are "sung" by the artists and mixed by the curator.44Gumbrecht, 107. In a gallery context which Daniel Buren said "flattens"55Daniel Buren, "Function of the Museum" in Museum by Artists, eds. AA Bronson & Peggy Gale, Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983, 59. the artwork and which Robert Morris describes as "antispatial or nonspatial,"66Robert Morris, "The Present Tense of Space" in Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, New York: October Books, 1995, 197. the fixity and rigidity of the gallery (non)space is interrupted by a playful sound(song)track. This is not to assert that all the works presented here sing by producing actual sound, but certainly in an expanded sense, they can all be heard. The following synoptic list gives an idea of the range: A skull turntable, a turning bass floor, a paper bag breath, a graphited silence, a speaker igloo, drawings of the here and now, moiré pattern compositions, an amplified sweeping, a murmuring, a pair of feedback headphones, a wall in the middle of nowhere, a tarred instrument, a song unsung, a cryptic monster music video, a box of hearing aids of the ocean, a set of bells triggered by television static, a sign language choir, a tale of acoustic architecture, a bookwork tracking sonic movement, a cluster of ultra-sonic pest control devices, and a wireless headphone for head and mind.

3.
In the same text mentioned above, Morris establishes a distinction to his model of presentness between a "real-time 'I' and a reconstituting 'me'."77Morris, 77-78. Morris borrows this concept from George Herbert Mead. The recurrent cleavage between the moment and its passing, the present and its absence, the immediate and its mediation, the I and its other, animates a profusion of theoretical debates from varied philosophical traditions. How does sound inform or deform (informe) the discussion? Can an exhibition, focused on sound and foregrounding its play at display, propel the question to a position heretofore unheard? To synchronously stage here and un-here, to place and dis-place, to orient and dis-orient, albeit momentarily or even instantaneously, may be the most we can expect.88These notes are a brief preliminary condensation of ongoing readings. The concurrent exhibitions at the Blackwood and the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery instantiate another facet of the conversation. Rather than expound a thesis, these curatorial notes and the exhibitions adopt an essay form and all the provisionality this genre affords. An example of a substantive consideration of these theoretical matters as they pertain to sound art is Seth Kim-Cohen, In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art \(London: Continuum, 2009)\, especially in chapter 3 "The Perception of Primacy" which already in the reversal in its title of a lecture by Maurice Merleau-Ponty \("The Primacy of Perception"\) hints at its critical stance.

4.
Corresponding to the poetic instant that Gaston Bachelard says occurs on a "vertical" axis of time, the sound art object performs a peculiar song whose duration does not flow, rather it is sudden and discontinuous.99Gaston Bachelard, “Instants poétique et métaphysique” in L'Intuition de l'instant, Paris: Éditions Stock, 1992 [1939], 103-105. Translation mine. Interestingly, Bachelard characterizes this poetic instant as being androgynous. To intersect this moment with the recent book by Tara Rodgers might lead to generative results \(Tara Rodgers, Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, Duke University Press, 2010\). In other words, the collective song played by the disparate chorus of assembled artworks, is resolutely abrupt, staccato, improvised. As part of the manifestation of this instant, Bachelard includes the "harmonious relation of two opposites" which create a "dynamic, excited, and active ambivalence."1010Bachelard, 104. So, the instant is by no means simple or singular, it is vexed. Is the instant here? Is it here as you read this, or there as you visit the galleries? The instant is not synonymous with the present, but occurs within it.

5.
According to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht there is "a tension or oscillation between a meaning culture and a presence culture" where the former overwhelms or silences the latter.1111Gumbrecht, 107 and passim. Hear Here (a sonic progeny of différance)1212The homophonic play shared between the exhibition subtitle and Derrida's différance manifests a connection at the surface-level, a more extensive study would delve further into the theoretical links as they pertain to the issues at play here between presence and meaning and the related metaphysical and logocentric processes addressed by Derrida. Interestingly, from a curatorial perspective, David B. Allison, the translator of La Voix et le phénomène \(where différance first appeared\), points to the dual spatial \(différence, differentiate\) and temporal \(différer, deferral\) aspects of Derrida's term. See Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: and other essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 82 fn. 8. attempts to stay stuck in its presence mode, and sound may be the apt sensorial mode for such wanton disregard for an interpretable product, for as Morton Feldman declared "sound does not know its history."1313Morton Feldman in Christof Migone, Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body, Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2012, 7. Whether this statement made in "The Anxiety of Art" from 1965 remains factually true given the plethora of texts staking the history of sound art published since is debatable, nevertheless it remains a useful notion in order to consider an art form's degree of self-awareness, especially one with historical tensions between its live and recorded manifestations. Thus, the repeat button contains an amnesiac function, the play simultaneously erases. Sound in this mode does not construct a time, it foregoes memory. However tempting this line of argument which appears to privilege presentness may be, it is chimerical. But this trap is instructive for it is where the recurrent paradoxical twinned desire for and dismissal of presence (material, body) paired with distrust of and dependence on meaning (logos, reason) find their stage.

6.
Each work in Volume functions as a stage, in some cases literally, in others metaphorically or conceptually. The concomitant reception (hear) and presence (here) require volume to act, to activate and be activated—the feedback of poetics. The stage here is present(ed) as the ground zero for a sound event. But as alluded earlier, the sound event may not produce actual sound, it may only reference it. In the latter mode, the possibility of resonance arises. Martin Seel characterizes resonance as "an occurrence without something occurring" and as such it enables a "forming beyond the formation of forms."1414Martin Seel, Aesthetics of Appearing, trans. John Farrell, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005, 143 and 152. Seel makes a distinction between mere resonating and artistic resonating that I am glossing over here for the sake of space. For resonance to occur and provisionally materialize, an a priori condition must be met, a constant, a base state is required. The formless forms, including silence (sound's rhythmic foil), emerge out of a plural or hyphenated space, a space beyond space, a performative space. A voiced space, a sung space, in other words, a volumen, a volume.

—Christof Migone, Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery