Toilets, Tears and Transcendence: The Postmodern (Dis-)Placement of, and in, Two Water-Based Examples of Australian Sound Art

Abstract

Water has enjoyed an enduring place as subject matter in western musical works for centuries. And what Douglas Kahn calls “discursive” water has streamed in ‘traditional’ musical works from Handel’s Water Music from 1717 through Romanticism, “albeit in the harmonic gushes that repulsed Cage”. In the ‘experimental’ genres, the early to middle parts of the twentieth century were splattered by various engagements with water and sound, with Percy Grainger’s Free Music innovations sparked by gazing at the waves in the Victorian waters of his childhood from as far back as the late nineteenth century. Water in Surrealist art of the mid-twentieth century often featured live women inhabiting large fish-tank/window displays of sound and water — but their own voices were silent. Kahn wonders whether water for the Surrealist men represented “the vaunted maternal voice proffered in certain psychoanalytic scenarios”. But as Kahn also comments, “since the early 1960s, innumerable artists have combined sound, fluidity and water in every way imaginable”. Two examples of postmodern Sound Art, “Tears”, from Passion (1998), by Andrée Greenwell and The Gordon Assumption (2004) by Wax Sound Media artists David Chesworth and Sonia Leber, have traversed a sizable slab of historico-cultural ground in their use of water (via toilets!) as a major component since mid-century modernism. Through select psychoanalytic theories, it is fascinating to witness how they grapple with the themes of water, woman’s voice and transcendence — “discursively”, with a re-examination of the notions and possibilities of “harmonic gushes”, as well as using modernist-based technology.