'Listen Hear: The Art of Sound' draws visitors into Isabella Stewart Gardner's world

Museums often play to only one of our five senses: sight. Many museums were built on the assumption that vision has surpassed all other senses in its ability to communicate and express. In the exhibition “Listen Hear: The Art of Sound” at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, contemporary artists seek to challenge this notion using multiple sound works.

Contemporary artists are not the first to note the importance of engaging multiple senses through art. Isabella Stewart Gardner herself believed that visual art is best viewed while engaging all senses. She often hosted lavish dinner parties by the museum's great masterworks, hosted concerts in the palace’s music room and would sometimes even allowed her friends to bring dogs into the palace. The senses of taste, sound, smell, touch and sight were all to be indulged in Gardner’s aesthete vision. “Listen Here: The Art of Sound” brings us a bit closer to Gardner’s vision through contemporary means.

The exhibition is not presented as a typical visual exhibition would be. Some of the projects are outside of the palace, in the contemporary galleries of the Renzo Piano addition of the museum, while other works are dispersed throughout the palace. The works in the contemporary gallery include “Sound for Insomniacs” (2007) by artist Su-Mei Tse in collaboration with Jean-Lou Majerus, and Philippe Rahm’s “Sublimated Music” (2014-2017), created in collaboration with composer Sebastian Rivas. “Sound for Insomniacs” includes five portraits of cats, each with its own seat and set of headphones that play the sound of that cat’s purring. The sound is quite loud and overwhelming, which is jarring considering that cat’s purr is often seen as a soothing and intimate sound.

The juxtaposition of intimacy and distance is emphasized by the separation of the visual and auditory elements of the works. What you notice are not the senses provided, but the ones that are deprived. The viewers cannot touch the cat, although they hear the result of a haptic experience.

Rahm’s work is similar in its immersive nature. Each light in the space corresponds to a note of a Claude Debussy melody. The audience then experiences not only an audio expression of every note, but a visual expression as well. In Rahm’s work, it is almost as if we are hearing every work of Debussy being played at once, encompassing his entire milieu in one physical and auditory space.

Upon entering the palace, the most notable sound work is Lee Mingwei’s“Small Conversation” (2017). The courtyard garden is accompanied with sounds of insects and amphibians, reminding visitors of the space’s sense of life. The courtyard garden is the only space within the palace where objects, in this case living flowers, can be switched out and rearranged. The courtyard is the ideal location for a contemporary work as it is arguably the most contemporary space within Gardner’s strict vision for the museum.

Another striking work from the exhibition is Moritz Fehr’s “Undertone” (2017) located in the Dutch room. The work plays in place of the Vermeer’s “The Concert” (1664), one of the works stolen in the infamous theft in 1990. The loss of the painting has been considered one of the largest blows to the museum’s history. “The Concert” was the first work Gardner purchased, and she specifically travelled to Paris to sit in on the auction herself, something she rarely did over her many years of collecting. The loss of the work is also a loss to the art historical cannon. While Vermeer is considered a foundational master of the Dutch Renaissance, only 30 of his works survive to this day, and every loss diminishes the total number of Vermeer’s works that viewers are able to see and study.

The sound attached to the emptied Vermeer canvas serves not only as an auditory reminder of the work’s absence, but also graces the space with the music depicted in Vermeer’s work. In “The Concert,” a young woman’s lips are slightly parted, suggesting that she is just about to sing. Fehr’s work is a continuation of the visual hints in Vermeer’s painting, thus both amplifying the loss of the painting and the loss of its inherent auditory component. The work beautifully hints at how when one sense is not accessed, the others are enhanced. Although viewers lack the visual stimuli of the work, the sound piece compensates for it with auditory stimuli.

“Listen Hear: The Art of Sound” creates a museum experience closer to the one Gardner initially envisioned. Through contemporary works, visitors are brought back into an earlier time, one with Isabella Stewart Gardner still in it.