Hasta La Ideas

You may know art when you see it, but what does art sound like? Is the answer in a chortling Tony Oursler installation, the womb-in-a-seashell interplanetary soundchecks dreamed up by Bill Viola, or the infectious “Back in the New York Groove” so expertly deployed by Daniel Guzman? Perhaps. Paddy Johnson is determined to find out. The intrepid founder and editor of Art Fag City, which is celebrating five years at the pinnacle of smart art blogging, is in the final days of a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds for “The Sound of Art,” a limited-edition album filled with the sounds of art installations, videos, and performances heard over the last five years. More than 40 artists—including Lawrence Weiner, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, John Fahey, and Ted Riederer—and one cymbal-wielding toy monkey have donated their sounds, and Johnson is now mere dollars away from her $10,000 goal (go put her over the top by pledging your support here). The project is a marvel of collaboration, with Phillip Niemeyer (Double Triple) designing the album cover and celebrated performance and video artist Michael Smith creating a limited-edition screen print in response to the sounds on the album. If all goes according to plan, the album will be released, and appropriately feted, next month.

“‘The Sound of Art’ is a unique product of the work I do offline and on, as the tracks come from an online call we posted on the blog and from a series of invitations we sent out to artists we hoped to include,” Johnson told us. “The criteria for the selection mostly had to do with what we thought would would represent the rich variation and life within the art world, as well as simply something we thought would make an interesting record.” Among those that made the cut? Difficult electronics. Sounds of stampeding animals, Hebrew prayer, a transformer fire, and a children’s carousel. Also 100 carpenters pounding 10,000 nails, an iPod drum circle, and thoughts on nostalgia (remember that?). Naturally, we asked Johnson to pick a favorite. “The record is meant to be a tool for other musicians to use and create work with, so the answer to this question is more like saying ‘I like the color pink’ than it is a qualitative assessment of the sounds,” she replied, before professing her love for the lead track, a spoken-word piece by Moyra Davey that touches on knowledge, time, and unread books. “I like to be surrounded by an excess of books and to not even have a clear idea of what I own. To feel like there is a limitless store waiting to be tapped and that I can be surprised by what I find,” says Davey in the piece. For Johnson, “The words are a perfect metaphor for the spirit in which this project was put together.”

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