Sounding the Gallery

Video art is conventionally approached from the perspective of the visual arts. By approaching it from a musical perspective--by foregrounding its time-based nature--Rogers rethinks it as a practice that drew on, synthesised, and transformed developments already under way in? both visual and musical culture. In short, she rethinks video art as video art-music. Drawing on art history and media studies as well as musicology, this impressively wide ranging and perceptive study addresses fundamental issues of generic identity and authorship, places video art-music both historically and in terms of its sites of consumption, and reveals its indispensibility to an understanding of contemporary digital media. --Nicholas Cook, University of Cambridge With the new audiovisual turn we need to think more deeply about the relations of sound and image. Holly Rogers's magisterial Sounding The Gallery covers the key early period of the 1960s and 70s, when vanguard artists brought their video-art music works into new spaces, including the gallery (which often didn't know what to do with them). No other monograph so precisely describes the labors of practitioners like John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Pipilotti Rist, and Bill Viola, nor provides such provocative discussions of technological specificity, genre-specific practices, reception studies and economic contexts. Required reading for us all. --Carol Vernallis, author of Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context A lucid and thorough introduction to the very particular kind of sound, image and technology that burst into being in the early 1960s. --The Wire Both comprehensive and immensely readable...The bibliography alone is worth the price; anyone interested in video artwork during the formative years of the discipline should start here. Rogers knows the field inside and out, and she writes in an accessible style that makes her book attractive as a course text. Authoritative, concise, and extremely well thought out, this is the key book on this subject at this time...Essential. --Choice Sounding the Gallery offers an informative look at the context and rise of video art...has great value for musicologists specifically, even those less familiar with video...[Rogers's] breadth of knowledge offers readers from various backgrounds a concise yet insightful look at the beginnings of video art-music. With its emphasis on the musical aspects of this genre, her work provides a vital contribution to scholarship on video art-music of the 1960s and 1970s. -- The Journal of Musicological Research Rogers' scope is head-spinningly impressive...Rogers deftly handles all sorts of local details and narratives, whilst also displaying an impressive theoretical take on this work. MSMI Journal