Is sound art a plastic art? This is the question asked by this latest exhibition at the Miró Foundation (and the title itself raises doubt). It’s clear that painting is, above all, a question of visuals. However, art is not a finite field, and since the 19th century and up to the present day, artists have been seduced by music and sound, and have taken them as sources of inspiration. Through works by such great artists as Delaunay, Rolf Julius, Beuys and Joan Miró, this exhibition, curated by Arnau Horta, analyzes how sound has left its mark on art from recent centuries in the visual field as well as thematic and conceptual areas – whether it’s been a source of inspiration, with titles taken from musical terms (‘fugue’, ‘nocturnal’, etc.), incorporating sound into a work of art through mechanisms or sound recordings, or using visual resources such as, for example, scores and sound wave graphics.
This very interactive exhibition often invites (or requires) you to act, and shows us that we can hear with more than just our ears, that sometimes we have to make use of our whole body to really experience sound. It’s marking an end of an area dedicated to the concept of silence with works by John Cage and other artists who, in the same way that they question the sound of art, call into question the existence of silence.