Emergency Noises

Irene Noy is an art historian and a curator exploring twentieth-century aural and visual culture in Germany and Britain, particularly in relation to gender and the senses. She holds a PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship. Previously, she received her education from the University of Edinburgh, University of Bonn and University of British Columbia.

• CONTENTS: Sound Art or Sound in Art: What Matters? – Sound Art and the Hierarchy of Senses – From the Bauhaus to Für Augen und Ohren: Gender and the Institutional Incorporation of the Senses of Sight and Hearing – Noise in Painting: Mary Bauermeister’s Early Practice and Collaboration with Karlheinz Stockhausen – Unmasking the Masquerade: Aural and Visual Gender Dynamics in the Performance Series Emergency Solos by Christina Kubisch – Playful Imagination: A Comparative Study of Gerda Nettesheim’s and Monika von Wedel’s Sound Objects – Listen to His Master’s Voice: Authoritative Acousmatic Voices in an Audio Piece by Hildegard Westerkamp – Epilogue: Signifying Matter.

«Gerda Nettesheim’s stainless steel kitchen sink with piano pedals, transformed into a sound box ... ! Noy’s feminist reading of German-based women sound artists is an interdisciplinary wake-up call and superbly well written: a visually and aurally powerful book.» (Sarah Wilson, Courtauld Institute of Art)«Irene Noy’s book Emergency Noises: Sound Art and Gender makes a very eloquent and necessary intervention into the male-dominated canon of sound art and unavoidably demonstrates through the bias of history the reality of a present condition. Recognising within even the most progressive institutions the shadow of sexism, Noy drags gender inequalities back through art history in the immaterial shape of sound to address the exclusion of what remains unheard. Poignant case studies sound the silences of the past and illuminate the causes and consequences of what is still left outside canonical value today. In this way Noy opens the reader ‹to information acquired via senses other than sight› and other than reason and the norms of masculine networks.» (Salomé Voegelin, University of the Arts London, author of «Sonic Possible Worlds»)«A highly original, informative and enlightening study … Having been an active player in the contemporary music and sound art scene and a collaborator of Mary Bauermeister in Cologne in the 1960s and 1970s, I can attest to the importance of this very well written comprehensive study and am compelled to recommend it not only for its many elucidating arguments in the area of gender issues but also for the light cast on the outstanding work of a number of outstanding women sound artists and related theorists.» (Rolf Gehlhaar, Professor Emeritus, Coventry University)«Dr Irene Noy successfully uncovers an untested area in research that traverses art history, music, German history and feminist theory. This publication effectively situates sound and listening at the core of twentieth-century ‹visual culture›.» (Professor Wulf Herzogenrath, Director of Visual Arts at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin)«Emergency Noises is an important contribution to the study of sound art and feminist art.»(Florence Feiereisen, German Studies Review 41/3 2018)