David Toop lecture

17 October 2007, Argos Brussels

David Toop read a piece from his forthcoming book ‘Ways of Hearing’ (It’s a nice coïncidence that our series has the same title) in which he researches, in a very personal way, the position of hearing in the realm of the senses. He talked about some of the things that inspired him: his meeting with a deaf-mute girl (and her disagreement with some of the statements in John Cage’s ‘Silence’), the mistake in John Berger’s influential book ‘Ways of Seeing’ (“Seeing comes before words. The child sees and recognizes before it can speak”), the pressure he was under to include visual elements in his exhibition ‘Sonic Boom’ (which is typical in the contemporary art circus), Marcel Duchamp’s idea (the 1914 Box) that “one can look at seeing; one can’t hear hearing”, and, last but not least, the ‘Eavesdropper’ (‘de luistervink’) series of the 17th century Dutch painter Nicolaes Maes (see below)

maes

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