Last year, UT’s Blanton Museum of Art expanded their offerings with the Butler Sound Gallery, which deputy director Carter Foster says “is one of the few, maybe the only in the world dedicated specifically to sound art. It developed when we were thinking about the new grounds and commissions of art for the new grounds, which… opened in 2023. And our former curator, Veronica Roberts, it was her idea to do a sound garden, as the initial concept was. It morphed into what we call a sound gallery.”
A new gallery demands an opening exhibit, and for the Blanton’s new sound gallery, one artist seemed a natural choice. “[Roberts] proposed at least four artists – maybe more – to myself and our director Simone Wicha, and we all agreed that Bill Fontana was the best choice,” Foster says. “He is really a pioneer in the field of sound art. He's been doing it for a really long time.”
“I mean, I'm 77 years old,” Fontana says. “And I started my career in the late ‘60s when I was a student in New York. And I had taken the class that was given by John Cage called Experimental Music Composition. And I kind of started my work with a basic concept that for me was that the act of listening was a way of making music. And I started getting really interested in sound recording, field recording – like an acoustic photographer to kind of document those moments of listening. And I was really interested in the idea of these recordings as sort of these musical found objects. And I started experimenting with installing these in different places.”
Fontana has spent decades travelling the world to create his sound sculptures – he’s created works from sources such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the Millennium Bridge in London, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, the beaches of Normandy, and more locations around the globe than I have space to list here. For the opening of the Blanton’s sound gallery, he came and recorded in Austin and the surrounding area.
“I had the great privilege of working on this remarkable project for the Blanton Museum… for this permanent space dedicated to sound art, that enabled me to make several kind of memorable research visits to Austin and the and the surrounding regions in Texas,” Fontana says, “and to make recordings of all kinds of incredible environmental ecological habitats and then to take that material and generate a sound sculpture that actually has a duration of almost six hours. It's like 11 different sound pieces with short intervals of some silence between them. And it goes through a range of kind of significant environmental sounds. Probably one of the most unusual and memorable places that I recorded was a wildlife refuge near San Antonio called Bracken Reserve where you have this enormous cave that in the late summer has a population of about 5 million bats. And I had a measurement microphone with me that was able to record ultrasonic frequencies. And then taking that recording of the bats in my studio and time shifting it into the audible frequency range was really a wonderful kind of experience for me. But there were all kinds of other places. And I had the chance to kind of design a loudspeaker system for the site that would really create a spatial immersion there.”
“We wanted [the sound gallery] to be outside because it was part of our grounds,” Foster says. “And it was very interesting when we worked with Bill – we didn't initially think of putting speakers under the eaves of the building. But that was one of his first comments as he walked through the space, was that, oh, these eaves are perfect because he knew about the technology and the directional speakers, the quality of the speakers and the sound is really important. He works with sort of very high end, state-of-the-art sound companies to get these directional speakers. So that's a really key part of it. And he knew immediately that the space would work and the speakers up in the eaves would point sound down to this. So… you hear from different sides, it is experiential. I think for me, it's really about a sort of a calming down and slowing down. And I think the subtlety of it might be, sometimes, may be lost on people, but that's, to me, the strength of it.”
