Grantees

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Christoph Cox
Conceptual Art and the Sonic Turn (Article)
Christoph Cox’s article will examine the turn toward sound and sound recording that launched sound installation as an artistic practice as well as affecting post-minimalism and conceptualism in the visual arts. Discussing projects from Robert Morris’s 1961 Box with the Sound of Its Own Making, which first forged a relationship between sound and conceptualist procedures, through Sound Sculpture As, the inaugural exhibition of the Museum of Conceptual Art in 1970, Cox’s article will argue that this sonic turn was provoked by a rejection of the modernist emphasis on opticality and by the pervasive influence of John Cage, who liberated sound from music and foregrounded process, duration, and anonymous compositional systems.

Christoph Cox is the author of Nietzsche: Naturalism and Interpretation (University of California Press, 1999) and co-editor of Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music (Continuum, 2004). Editor-at-large at Cabinet magazine, Cox also writes regularly on contemporary art for Artforum and has published essays on the work of Max Neuhaus, Alvin Lucier, Carsten Nicolai, Steve Roden, Heike Baranowsky, Christina Kubisch, and other artists. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, The Kitchen, New Langton Arts, and G Fine Art Gallery. Christoph Cox is professor of philosophy at Hampshire College and visiting faculty at the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. He received his PhD from the University of California Santa Cruz and his BA from Brown University.