Magnus Kaslov

• Præsentation

My research project is housed at SMK, National Gallery of Denmark and addresses the historiography of how artists engage with emerging media. Specifically the project investigates how sound has entered into the visual arts in Denmark. The point of departure is a sound archive located at and established for the National Gallery of Denmark, SMK in 1990-91. The archive contains original soundworks going back to the 1940’ies, but also documentation and interviews with artists and curators along with contextual materials such as clippings, catalogs, books and notes by the artist William Louis Sørensen, who was responsible for collecting for the archive.

How artists have engaged with the medium of sound remains a largely unheard and unwritten chapter of Danish art history. This research project breaks with and remains critical of established narratives around so-called Sound Art, that often emphasize the material and ontological status of sound and listening as key parameters for Sound Art as an artistic genre. This implicit – and often explicit – formalist and essentialist definition within the fairly recent discourse around so-called Sound Art has led to a host of historical omissions and led research into Sound Art to become a parallel narrative generally not implemented within the context of a wider art history as such. The sounds in the SMK sound archive testify to a wide range of different ways that artists going back at least to the 1940’ies have come to work with sound in context of their artistic production. The thesis of this project is that artists' works in sound should be regarded in relation to and situated within the surrounding artistic practices and be contextualized with a wider (visual) art historical scope.

The project is generously funded by grants from both the Independent Research Fund Denmark under the Danish Agency for Science and Higher Education and the New Carlsberg Foundation.