Katherine Trimble: Touch Box

KATHERINE TRIMBLE TOUCH BOX Sep 22–Oct 22, 2017

“Please Touch the Art: Katherine Trimble’s Touch Box” Melissa Warak, Ph.D., University of Texas at El Paso To enter Touch Box is to enter a sensorium.

Katherine Trimble, a Houston-based sound artist and musician, deals with the negotiation of the senses. In the case of Touch Box, viewers are encouraged to engage actively with the work. Enter the space and allow your eyes to adjust to the darkness. Listen for sound and move toward it. Put out your hands and feel the space. Allow yourself to absorb the walls’ vibrations. Take your time.

Touch Box blocks the primary sense associated with fine art – sight – and instead privileges hearing and touch. This is one of the most interesting facets of Trimble’s work in sound and performance, going back to her years as an M.F.A. student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked with sound in an art and technology studies capacity. As a cellist, Trimble was accustomed to holding the body of a sound-producing instrument and feeling the sound waves it emitted vibrate against her own body. In concerts, audiences normally see musicians play and it is part of the visual-sonic experience.

However, Trimble embarked on a series of performance works that denied the faculty of sight. She would play behind walls or in spaces otherwise unseen by the audience.

Audiences had to rely on and trust their ears for the duration of the event. Similarly, Touch Box requires the viewer to privilege the senses of hearing and touch.

The concept for this installation originated with Trimble’s experience of her sister’s occupation as a music therapist. Working with clients with a variety of disabilities some sensory - Trimble’s sister engages 2

her patients in non-verbal forms of communication. Seeing her sister at work, Trimble was impressed by the use of sonic vibration as a form of healing, particularly with a young client who is physically disabled, vision impaired, hearing impaired, and non-verbal. Yet, this particular client reacted to the use of drums in his therapy; this child sensed the feel of vibrations from the drum held to his body, which opened up a non-verbal exchange between client and therapist. What a beautiful concept: that we don’t have to speak to be heard.

Touch Box relies on non-verbal interactions.

On the interior, one feels and hears vibrations. On the exterior, a microphone picks up ambient sound and conversation, which are then translated into the vibrations felt inside the box. As a result, viewers on the interior do not see the source of the sound; rather, they experience the voices on the exterior in a physical manner through touch.

This notion of the therapeutic value of vibration also speaks to Trimble’s interest in the arts of India and, in particular, North Indian Hindustani music. This music is spiritual in nature and uses specific instruments such as the tamboura and sitar to create drone vibrations that are maintained for longer durations than those achieved by many Western instruments.

And the music has a goal: it stirs the soul, or more appropriately, the chakras of the body. This is meant to be both grounding – the musicians and audience often sit on the earth – and elevating in terms of consciousness. Rest assured, this is not hokum. The tonal vibrations are based on human biorhythms such as blood beats and magnetic pulses, which ancient medical practitioners tapped into centuries before modern technology used machines to do the same.

New York-based composer La Monte Young and artist Marian Zazeela, an artist couple, have collaborated for over fifty years in developing sites of vibration that they deem “Dream Houses.” In the early 1960s, they organized a band called the Theatre of Eternal Music, which included violinist Tony Conrad and violist John Cale (who later left the group to play guitar for the Velvet Underground). They would play hours-long concerts incorporating drone and light projections, and this was several years before such projections became a staple at the Fillmore in San Francisco or in Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. So strong was Young’s and Zazeela’s interest in North Indian culture that they invited Pandit Pran Nath, a guru of classical raga singing, to live with them for twenty-six years as they developed their skill in raga. They also developed their Dream House spaces in succession. In the current iteration on Church Street in downtown Manhattan, the space is filled with vibrations created by four sine wave generators positioned in the room’s corners. Colored lights project onto abstract white hanging mobile sculptures created by Zazeela. Visitors may sit or lie on the floor, which has several large pillows.

Incense burns, activating the sense of smell. As a visitor, you are in the light and sound. The sine waves are very loud, and because the generators are pointed at one another, the sound waves interact as they meet in the middle of the room. Additionally, the generators are also tuned to different frequencies, meaning that the slightest physical movement by a visitor changes the sound. It is pure sensation.

While Young’s and Zazeela’s work has the intention of healing through long listening and absorption of the sine waves, Trimble is more ambivalent toward the outcome of the individual visitor’s experience. Trimble has similarly studied Indian art and music and

has also taught in India. In 2016, Trimble visited the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kochi, Kerala, in India, where she experienced the works of sound artists Camille Norment, Voldemars Johansons, and Lundahl & Seitl, a collaboration between Christer Lundahl and Martina Seitl. In particular, Lundahl & Seitl’s work Symphony for a Missing Room: An Imagined Museum questions the concept of trust between artist and audience. The viewer of this work is blindfolded and given headphones with instructions while a trained facilitator physically takes each viewer through the non-sighted experience of a series of works, relying on touch. This type of experiential art informs Trimble’s work at Lawndale.

Touch Box begs the audience to employ a mutual trust not only with the artist, but with other viewers. Enveloped in darkness, there is a sublime thrill of danger in losing sight and relying solely on hearing and touch in negotiating the space. Trimble complicates the artistic lineage of the work by connecting with spontaneity. The audience makes the sound of the work and are therefore not only participants, but also architects of the experience. Our actions and words dictate the experience of others.

Some may question whether the work is about sound or music or noise, and what the difference is among the three terms. While music is often designated as organized sound, noise is just the opposite.

In Touch Box, the three concepts dissolve and can be interpreted uniquely by each participant. Aesthetics are not the concern; rather, it is about the connections made through sound. Time is also an agent of transformation. What starts as a difficult or unsettling sound may evolve into something beautiful and transcendent. As Trimble says, “Beauty is in the ear of the beholder.”

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Katherine Trimble Touch Box, 2017 Custom room, tactile transducers, microphone, custom software Dimensions variable

Katherine Trimble is a Houston-based musician and visual artist. She makes audiovisual installations and performances that explore how our senses influence, contradict, and depend on each other to create our own individual versions of the world. Originally from Rochester, NY, she earned a BFA in Animation from the Rhode Island School of Design (2006) and an MFA in Art & Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012), and has performed and exhibited her work internationally in a wide range of art spaces, film festivals, music venues and public spaces. She currently teaches at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts (HSPVA) and Houston Community College.

literature and art history from Vanderbilt University, an M.A. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin, and a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, titled Made to Music: Interactions of Music and Art, 19551969, is comprised of four case studies of the ways that visual artists from the mid-fifties to late sixties employed musical models in their work.

Aside from musical and sonic art, her research interests include the history of abstraction, spirituality in modern and contemporary art, science and technology in modern and contemporary art, and astronomy in art. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships Dr. Melissa Warak is Assistant Professor from the National Portrait Gallery of the of Art History at the University of Texas Smithsonian Institution, the Getty Research at El Paso where she specializes in the Institute, the Royal Music Association of the relationship of music and sound to American United Kingdom, the Menil Collection in and European art of the twentieth century.

Houston, and the Crystal Bridges Museum Dr. Warak is a proud Texan and a native of American Art, among others. of Houston. She earned a B.A. in English 4

Acknowledgements Tomas Feijo, Cooper and Viki Collier, Jen Trimble and Mary Cariola Children’s Center in Rochester, NY, Alex Goss, Claudia and Luiz Feijo, Stephanie Mitchell, Lauren Lohman, Emily Fens and Jon Clark. Special thanks to 19231 Rio Villa Drive.

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Katherine Trimble, Touch Box (installation view), 2017 Major support for Lawndale Art Center programming is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., the John R. Eckel, Jr. Foundation, Houston Endowment, the John P. McGovern Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and The Wortham Foundation, Inc.

Lawndale Art Center 4912 Main StreetHouston, Texas 77002

www.lawndaleartcenter.org