Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.
text by Hank Manning
At Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum in Andrew Carnegie’s former Upper East Side mansion, over 300 works consider the multisensory experience of music. Art of Noise analyzes the intersection of music and design, exploring how technology and graphics shape our consumption, understanding, and memories of music.
Although the exhibition provides only a few opportunities to listen to music, the radios, jukeboxes, and turntables function as works of art in their own right. The first room features a timeline of product design, from phonographs to MP3 players. We witness a familiar trend towards more affordable, versatile, and higher-fidelity products. (Bright colors seem to cycle in and out of fashion unpredictably.) The oldest device on display is Edison’s Fireside Model B cylinder phonograph, released in 1912. It cost $25 (roughly $766 today) and exclusively played four-minute celluloid records. Featured on Beastie Boys and LL Cool J album covers, the JVC RC-M90 Boombox (1981) became a commercial hit and remains coveted by collectors. Today, a blue tie-dye Gomi Bluetooth speaker, smaller and less flamboyant than its predecessors, can functionally stream an infinite supply of music.
Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.
Music accompanies both public gatherings and moments of deeply personal introspection. Accordingly, a divergence between communal and personal players began in the 1950s. The Regency TR-1 was the first device to make music easily portable for a large audience. Its rectangular handheld form seems particularly prescient, hardly different from modern portable electronics. Sony’s Walkman and Apple’s iPod further normalized the experience of listening on the go and provided greater freedom to curate personalized playlists.
Stereos and speakers occupy space in our homes and thus must accommodate evolving popular cultural aesthetics. The trumpet-style horns on the earliest phonographs resemble instruments. Later, minimalist styles sat more comfortably with home decor, reflecting the futurism of the ‘70s (including the white spherical Rosita Vision 2000, which celebrates the moon landing) and chrome and steel in the ‘80s. The influence of Dieter Rams’ mantra “less, but better” design is obvious both in his own work and that of later designers. Many of his “Ten Principles of Good Design” are exemplified by his 1963 SK 55 Radio-Phonograph, with its simple rectangular shape and clearly-labeled knobs and buttons. These remind us of the tactile ways we experience music—the turning of knobs, clicking of buttons, the weight and texture of the devices.
Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.
The exhibition’s second half focuses on two-dimensional art: album covers, posters, and flyers. The 1948 introduction of commercial LPs established a new canvas for visual artists. Early on, they often featured title blocks and portraits of artists, but by the ‘60s, many embraced bolder choices in typography and abstraction that attempted to represent the music’s essence. Familiar sights include the electric colors and bubbly, distorted typefaces characteristic of psychedelic rock; and the elegant portraits of jazz musicians.
Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.
The exhibition, first shown at SFMOMA, has adapted to New York by highlighting five genres that developed in the city: folk revival, salsa, disco, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. Associated works reveal how the cultures of genres and their audiences differed and changed over time. Early punk art, for example, often projected a DIY vibe, with hand-drawn and photocopied work, whereas later new wave graphics became more stylized and less defiant. To capture the genre’s raw energy, hip-hop imagery merged graffiti aesthetics with disco chic.
Installation view. Photo: Thomas Barratt.
Some of the most compelling implications lie in what remains unsaid. Before the late nineteenth century, recorded music did not exist; music could only be experienced through live performance, making it an inherently communal but also cumbersome and infrequent activity. The now nearly universal experience of listening to music in solitude—while driving, exercising, or studying—did not become common until the rise of portable audio technology in the mid-twentieth century.
Art of Noise offers a time capsule of a possibly foregone era of specificity. Today, people often listen to music on their smartphones, devices also used for communication, gaming, and innumerable other daily activities. But the vast majority of objects on display were designed only for the function of listening. Likewise, a rapidly-evolving lineage of physical formats—records, 8-track tapes, cassettes, CDs—has coalesced into invisible digital files. Thus the specialized designs, even if obsolete, may stay fixed in our cultural memory as visual symbols of music.
Art of Noise is on view through August 16 at Cooper Hewitt, 2 East 91st Street, New York