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Toward a Morphology of Presence: The Sound Installations of Thomas DeLio

Michael Hamman Interface, Vol 16 (1987), pp. 55-73 ABSTRACT In music and art, what is traditionally generated is a fixed entity in which materials have been shaped into a unique design prior to contact with the perceiver. While such a design may be affected by the consciousness of the observer and the site in which that perception occurs, it is not structurally determined by them.

This essay explores some of the philosophical issues raisedby "site-based" artworks. In their works, visual artists like Robert Irwin, Max Neuhaus, and Carl Andre (among others) attempted to understand and articulate the very framework of perception itself as a structural determinant. Indeed, in their work the moment of perception became the focus of the work.

One of the first visual artists to carry out this approach was Robert Irwin. In the early 1960's, for instance, Irwin created a series of paintings which consist of tiny dots, typically of oppposite primary colors, spiralling out from the center of a large, slightly convex canvas. The dots themselves are sufficiently small, particularly with respect to the size of the canvas, that upon first oncounter the viewer usually observes simply a plain white canvas. However, as s/he gazes for a time at the painting it begins to shimmer and a halo of color appears to emerge from, and hover over, the surface of the canvas--an effect once likened to a "light pulsing somewhere in the silver white of the canvas" (1). What is important about the compositional arrangement of the dots is not so much the design which results but rather how that design gradually coalesces within the viewer's perceptual frame to create a particular visual effect. Further explorations led Irwin to the creation of works in which the environment--the context of visual experience--itself became the point of focus. Through carefully considered actions of minimal gesture (though Irwin is not a "minimalist"!), Irwin transformed already existing sites in such a way that the focus was placed upon the site itself and not on the compositional arrangements of any objects introduced into that site.

The composer Thomas DeLio extended this notion of site-based art into music installations. The essay discusses DeLio's Six, a piece for three clarinets and two violins as well as an installation given at the Baltimore Museum of Art on October 27-28, 1984. An analysis of this latter work is given within the context of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological descriptions of perceptual articulation.