Among Voices: Conversation, Performance, and Media in American Contemporary Art

Abstract

My dissertation argues that artists’ experiments with conversational voice index a formal engagement with emergent communication technologies, which I synthesize in terms of period-specific aesthetic styles of relationality. After tracing the origins of what I term “conversational aesthetics” in the crossover of cybernetics and performance in 1960s experimental culture, I focus on three chronologically arranged case studies spanning the 1970s to the present. Each artwork in this genealogy productively juxtaposes conversational speech with the multimedia vocal performance of song: Robert Ashley’s made-for-TV opera Perfect Lives (1977–1983); Wynne Greenwood’s queer video-art band Tracy + the Plastics (1999–2006); and Wu Tsang’s ongoing multimedia collaboration with Fred Moten, in particular Miss Communication and Mr.RE: (2014) and Girl Talk (2015). Following the aesthetic hybridization of speech and song across this series of artworks, I formally analyze how aspects of the conversational voice represent markers of a common style of contemporary multimedia art, for example in Ashley’s use of conjunctions; Greenwood’s notion of the “pause”; or Moten and Tsang’s affective-linguistic exploration of miscommunication. Theoretically, these works challenge the notion of the uniquely human voice conventionally taken as an extraordinary resource for interpersonal intimacy in art history and media studies. Instead, I detail how and why these artists work to overcome the interpersonal framework in their entanglement with audiovisual technologies common to the media environment of everyday life: the television, the camcorder, and the smartphone. The relational media aesthetics of this period of American art conceives of the voice as a pragmatic means of participation across multiple modes of everyday communication. At the same time, remixing our ideas about the voice allows for a critical interrogation of themes of publicity, identity, and the dynamic between the individual and the collective.