Monday 14 April 2025, 4-5pm, Saunders Room, School of Art History, 79 North Street, St Andrews
The growing popularity of the voice in contemporary art points to methodological challenges for a predominantly visually oriented history of art. Vocal expression transports ideas of immediacy, testimony, and connectivity, which seems to correspond to the rhetoric of more relational and socially engaged approaches in artistic practices. The rapid embrace of vocal strategies, alongside recent voice theories stressing presence and communication, asks us to step back and reflect on its implications and historical echo chambers. This talk traces the emergence of new vocal strategies back to conceptual and feminist artistic practices of the 1960s and 1970s. Illuminating the voice’s liminal position between presence and absence, the presentation explores how we can analyse the voice on a formal, material, and narrative level.
Sandro Weilenmann (he/him) is a postdoctoral student at the University of Maastricht. He is an art historian currently working on artistic participation in queer and trans archives. His fields of research are Western performance art and acoustic artistic practices after 1960. His publication The Present Voice: Vocal experiments in the works of Adrian Piper, VALIE EXPORT, and Yvonne Rainer will appear in winter 2025. Sandro is currently Postdoctoral Researcher on Perverse Collections: Building Europe’s Queer and Trans Archives, directed by Professor Glyn Davis in Film Studies at St Andrews.