Initially titled “Conceptualism and the Sonic Turn,” Cox’s article has undergone significant development and expansion to become the first chapter of a historical and philosophical book-in-progress on sound art and experimental music. Now titled “The Sonic Turn: Sound, Matter, and Idea in Art Since the 1960s,” the chapter examines the way that artists working at the nexus of postminimalism, conceptualism, and sound art used sound and sound recording to explore and develop various attitudes toward materiality and immateriality that were crucial for subsequent generations of artists and that continue to inform artistic practice today.
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’s essays have appeared in Artforum, the Journal of Visual Culture, Organised Sound, Journal of the History of Philosophy, and elsewhere. He has curated exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Kitchen, New Langton Arts, and G Fine Art Gallery. Cox is professor of philosophy at Hampshire College and 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.