Who knew what I put on my porridge in the morning had such interesting properties - "This is the case with the quality of being-honeyed. Honey is a slow-moving liquid; while it undoubtedly has a certain consistency and allows itself to be grasped, it soon creeps slyly from the fingers and returns to where it started from. It comes apart as soon as it has been given a particular shape, and what is more, it reverses the roles, by grasping the hands of whoever would take hold of it." (Maurice Merleau Ponty)
From this, in the 1940's Maurice Merleau-Ponty produced a series of radio broadcasts and critical papers outlining his phenomenology of perception, a world and art perceived rather than known. The quality of being honeyed expresses the reciprocity of his phenomenological inter-subjectivity. Although Merleau-Ponty describes his world of perception in visual terms, the sensibility of his perception however is not that of vision. It is not vision that painting and philosophy has liberated from representation; it is sonic perception, which is free of the visual stranglehold on knowledge and experience. (Salome Voegelin, Listening to Noise and Silence, 2010)
In light of this phenomenology, on January 19th SOMA Contemporary invites you to the opening of Being Honeyed, an exhibition of challenging work from Irish and International Artists who have contributed immensely to the ever growing field of the 'sonic' arts, Yann Novak (usa), Lars Lundehave Hansen (Denmark), Salome Voegelin (Swiss/UK), Richard Carr (Ireland) and a project curated by Wolfgang Peter Menzel (Germany) in association with net label Modisti; Out of Silence: Reflections on Samuel Beckett's Work. Although each artist deals with issues and particularities specific to their own practice, Being Honeyed – An Exhibition of Sound(in)Art presents a diverse mix of work that at its 'core' investigates Maurice Merleau-Ponty's world of perception of Being Honeyed through a sonic sensibility.
If you're an avid exhibition goer, this looks like an interesting one.
