How to Make a Sculpture With Sound

A sound object, in my case, also becomes material, becomes like materiality, becomes matter you listen to, you see, and a body that can produce a sound. It has the dimension of chauffeur. It can be like a digital or like an abstract sound file. I'm Ben Davis, and this is The Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News. Some of the most important visual artists working today are sound artists.

In fact, to me, it seems that sound in general has been growing in importance at the museum recently. Exhibitions come with soundtracks, sculptures make noise, and musical performance of one kind or another is everywhere in and around the art. I wanted to dig into this sonic turn in art, if that's what it is,

and the artist Tarek Atoui is a great person to talk to. Born in Lebanon and based in Paris, Atoui's work often takes the form of environments with sculptures that double as experimental musical instruments to be activated by the audience or by performers. This form of art is both unique and clearly resonates with a bigger trend in art of using sound to activate

the museum as an event space and a space of gathering. At the current Venice Biennale, He's part of the Qatar Pavilion for a project called Untitled 2026, a gathering of remarkable people, working with a supergroup of famous figures from the worlds of art, music, and food to make an environment that evolves for the entire course of the Biennale. And later this year, Atui will be the next artist to do the Giant Turbine Hall Commission for the Tate Modern in London, occupying one of the most highly watched pieces of exhibition space in the entire international art world. Where does this genre of hybrid art come from?

Where is it going? What are its challenges? Atouy is here to talk about all this. Tarek Atouy, thank you for talking to me today.

My pleasure. Where are you calling in from today? I'm in my studio in Paris, where I live and work, actually, and where I develop most of my productions and compositions.

Well, you're a very busy guy. I did this list of the artists who were in the most biennials recently, and you're one of them. You're part of this big project in Venice

and you're going to do the Tate project coming up, the Turbine Hall. So it's exciting to talk to you. You've got a lot going on,

but I want to start with how you got your start. So how did you go from the world from music into the world of art? It's the nature of the studies I did, honestly,

like starting with electronic music that I started as an amateur and as a DJ and like a curious person. And from there, going to sound studies

and diving into the world of electroacoustics with their connection and con events with the world of sound art, contemporary art and abstraction.

So composition, very early on, you see like this question of how to compose with what instruments, which people, in what spaces and through which sound systems and like architectures and all this

were questions that were very important and part of the act of composing and making music. And so that's how... Where did you study? Where did you study?

You studied in... I studied in France. Actually, I was born and I grew up in Lebanon. And at the age of 18, I traveled to France where all this adventure and connection to sound started.

So at the age of 20, around the age of 20. And so it was during my university studies and that time that I started to take on courses in electroacoustic music compositions. And that was in a town north of Paris called Rens, the country of Champagne. And from there, yeah, I curved my path and developed different profiles.

Is the art curriculum part of the composition curriculum? Are people studying John Cage and that kind of tradition? Yes, we were. We were studying John Cage as much as Stockhausen and Legati, you see,

and as much as Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari and different schools of people who work with field recording, synthetists, editing, and all these post-World War II techniques, let's say. And when you say you were a DJ, what do you mean?

What kind of DJing were you? I was like a teenager DJ. a DJ teenager or teenager DJ. So this was the start, like being in techno parties and going to techno parties and mixing hard techno and techno. And from there wanting to know how you

make techno and from there discovering electroacoustics. And here we are. It's interesting to me because that kind of nightlife has become a big interest in art. You know, I think it is like a very powerful subculture that people, you know, just find find like very inspiring. Yeah. Like we've seen it lately. You see a lot of DJs are now like doing performances in in art exhibitions and inside museums.

There is a porosity now with certain musical practices that got like established and recognized as art forms, you see. and that they have a place inside a museum, like, of course, experimental music and new music, but even techno and certain schools of techno

and things that have now became what we say old school, and that is kind of going into other realms and finding other corners, and that's indeed exciting. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that there's a form of minimal

and experimental electronic music, the tradition of Stockhausen and so on, And then it almost, it finds this kind of organic, popular output on the dance floor. Absolutely.

Repetition and certain kind of experimental form. I also think in art, like the DJing, there's the collage aesthetic that people find really resonant. Well, there is this, well, you touched on several ideas, but let's say like one nice idea you just mentioned, and that I personally believe in is that what was experimental in the 60s or what was considered

experimental music and cutting edge techniques and like very elitists even somehow sometimes it wasn't it's not about elitism at all but techniques of their time are now in pop and hip-hop and techniques that have been very widely distributed diffused with the digital culture and all this