Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Conflicted Phonemes (detail), 2012, voice maps, digital print. Courtesy Lisa Cooley.
If MoMA’s summer exhibition “Soundings: A Contemporary Score” marks the belated introduction of sound art to the canon, “The String and the Mirror” suggests just how much the retina-based community has been missing. Organized by Lawrence Kumpf of Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room and Justin Luke, director of New York gallery Audio Visual Arts, this summer group show posits the aural as “a transgressive alternative to current visual arts practices.” Yet it also demonstrates that a conventional white cube gallery can be as fruitful a venue for presenting sound as traditional concerts or recordings. There is plenty to listen to here, but sound is also materialized (Christof Migone’s piles of raw record vinyl); visualized (Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s “voice maps”); and cast as something to be read (C. Spencer Yeh’s text pieces).