Noise in the Garden

Contemporary Art & The Noise of TENDING
By Caleb Kelly & Ross Gibson

It’s been a long time coming, but finally a paper I wrote with Ross Gibson has been published in the online journal Interference. I had originally seen a call for an issue of the journal dedicated to ‘Noise’. On seeing this I took a deep breath, wondering why a journal would dedicate an issue to noise at this time. Mostly this wonderment was because noise keeps on coming back as a topic for discussion represented by the same names of the noise cannon. The call-out however stated:

‘… we invite papers that deal not only with categories of aesthetic dissonance or vibrational force, but invite an expanded view of noise as a collection of sonic strategies that engage social, technical, political and economic concatenations.’

I imagined how noise theory and my expansive history in noise (from putting on gigs for Merzbow or Whitehouse, to writing about it in my books and curating it into exhibitions) could be used to read something that might not seem very noisy; namely the garden project at the Sydney College of the Arts entitled TENDING. TENDING, as you can read about, was a very political and noisy project – the signal filled with the noise of beautrocratic interests. Interestingly the process of writing a paper about noise in a garden caused editorial noise. The readers had trouble hearing noise in our paper and keep looking for sound art where there wasn’t any. They wanted to read the inclusion of the 80s noise cannon and connect gardening to sonic art. We, however, wanted to use noise to read the gardening project, to see if our understanding of noise could be used to understand a socially engaged art practice and the complexity of its situation. I see this as a future approach to sound studies, something beyond the often myopic readings of sound pitted against the visual.

In the coming months I plan to expand this approach to see how hearing can help understand things that are seemingly sound-less.