UMBC's 'Sound': Paint It Blah

Nam June Paik and Jud Yalkut's "Beatles Electroniques" (1966-69) from "What Sound Does a Color Make?" at UMBC. (Electronic Arts Intermix)

The title of the show that opened Thursday at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County asks a simple question: "What Sound Does a Color Make?" Visitor response, as this critic foresees it, should prove equally straightforward.

Whatever dull sounds like.

On view in the university's Center for Art and Visual Culture, "What Sound Does a Color Make?" includes recent digital and video art, most of it made about 2003, exploring the relationship between sound and vision. In many regards it is the contemporary-art version of last summer's Hirshhorn survey "Visual Music: Synaesthesia in Art and Music Since 1900," a show with which it shares key shortcomings. As Washington Post chief art critic Blake Gopnik put it, the weakness of "Visual Music" boiled down to this: "There's something about trying to find visual equivalents for the sonic energy and verve of music that seems to push artists toward superficiality."

That complaint echoes in Baltimore. So many of the works on view don't offer much substance below their surface swells of image and sound. A quartet of vintage video works meant to provide context end up supplying the show's most compelling experiences. (The term "vintage" is relative: The earliest work among the four dates to the late 1960s, and 1999 counts as historical.)

These early works, by important video pioneers including Nam June Paik, Gary Hill and Steina and Woody Vasulka, trigger associations to contemporary art and music. "Beatles Electroniques," a video collaboration by Jud Yalkut and Paik (who died Sunday at age 74), takes advantage of imaging devices that became available in the late 1960s, making it possible to layer images and use sound to manipulate video signals. Footage of Sir Paul and the gang is interspersed with coils of light and mixed with funky, chopped-up notes and phrases that will remind some listeners of the recent "Grey Album," DJ Danger Mouse's combination of the Beatles' "White Album" and rapper Jay-Z's "Black Album." "Beatles Electroniques" is where Danger Mouse came from.

As I made my way through the dark warren of cubicles that house most of the contemporary works in this exhibition, I wondered if artists such as Paik worked smarter and harder because they faced the greater limitations of comparatively low-tech times. Are today's artists, the ones with computers at their disposal, paradoxically bound by the freedom to make work amounting to a twiddle of some very groovy thumbs?

It's tempting to think so. I'd have been happy to spend the better part of my visit dancing to the work of British sound artist Robin Rimbaud (also known as Scanner), who collaborated with graphic artists D-Fuse to make what are essentially music videos. Scanner's catchy electronica accompanies fast-motion nighttime street lights shot from speeding cars. You might as well turn up the sound, hire a bartender and call it a rave.

But my rave idea won't solve what amounts to a serious shortcoming of media-based art right now. Too many technologically savvy artists are enamored of the possibilities of their medium. Many have yet to convey much beyond sound and visual pyrotechnics. If the ideas behind their works are momentous enough to warrant an exhibition, that fact is lost in translation.

Thom Kubli asks us to stare at a blue screen that turns from cerulean to sapphire at a snail's pace. A curatorial essay assures us that the more time we spend with the work, the more alert we'll be to its nuances. But Kubli offers no reason for us to stay.

At their worst, these pieces aren't just superficial, they're outright alienating. Scott Arford's tunnel of monitors screening jittery flashes of light and computer-generated screeches hardly invites us to linger. Viennese art duo Granular-Synthesis turn the seductive sound-video connection on its head by making sonic and visual drones meant to turn the audience off. It works.

If only more of the pieces here were like Jim Campbell's "Self Portrait of Paul," a portrait made of sound. The multimedia artist has created a poetic installation that's one part old-fashioned portrait, one part media work. On one wall, a speaker transmits manipulated sounds of the artist Paul DeMarinis's voice. A microphone installed a few feet away catches the sound and transforms it into signals that slowly illuminate a box of light-emitting diodes. When all the LEDs fire, a portrait of DeMarinis emerges. Once a portrait is finished the box darkens and the picturemaking starts afresh.

And the picture changes every time, if just a little. Since the brightness of the LEDs fluctuates with modulations in sound, a visitor's whispered comments or unbridled sneeze will be picked up by the microphone and interfere with the conversation the piece has with itself. The resulting portrait will be changed in subtle ways.

The element of chance sets Campbell's piece apart. The recorded output that makes up so much of "What Sound Does a Color Make?" dulls the senses. How refreshing to use technology to enliven our world rather than deaden it.

What Sound Does a Color Mak e? at the Center for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Fine Arts Building, Room 105, 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore. Tuesday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., 410-455-3188, http://www.umbc.edu/cavc .