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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Keywords

The Speakers, voice box, black speakers, sculpture, art

College

Fine Arts and Communications

Department

Art

Abstract

The Speakers (Voice Box) is a six-foot cube made of two hundred-twelve black speakers. The point of departure for this sculpture is found in an art historical dialog between Minimalist art and the criticism of Michael Fried. In this piece I examined the phenomenology of perception as it applied to Minimalist artist Tony Smith’s sculptures—specifically Die, a six foot steel cube. The dimensions of Smith’s Die and mine correspond to those of the human body as depicted in Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing, Vitruvian Man. Both Smith and myself are interested in the ways physical objects, as well as our spatial proximity to those objects, shape our self-perception. My work contributes to this focus on self-perception by adding a new dimension—sound. I use speakers and sound in hopes of further unveiling the anthropomorphism of Minimalist art. I reconstructed Tony Smith’s Die out of black speakers and endowed the anthropomorphic cube with a voice, and by so doing seek to fill the “hollowness” of which Die was convicted by critic Michael Fried.

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