RON HENGGELER

June 15, 2024

The Art of Noise

at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art

Art of Noise presents more than eight hundred works that have shaped our relationship to music over the past century. It shows how our experiences are built by both the sounds we hear and the artifacts that help illustrate or activate them, whether through color and composition or through form, material, and mechanics.Art

Music is a pillar of our creative culture and artistic output. While fundamentally sonic, our perception of music goes beyond just hearing it-design and art have long established a visual counterpart to its performance and transmission.

Displayed floor to ceiling, hundreds of expressive works-SFMOMA's entire trove of psychedelic rock posters-are presented here for the first time. This grouping illuminates concerts put on by the famed promoters Bill Graham and Chet Helms between 1966 and 1971 for landmark San Francisco venues like The Matrix, The Fillmore, the Avalon Ballroom, and beyond.

Across album covers, posters, and flyers, graphic design can complement or convey a musical sound and provide a parallel to our auditory experience of it. These visual outputs are so essential that genres of music are often associated with specific typographic styles, color palettes, and even production techniques-from hand drawn to photocopied to digitally manipulated.

The commercial introduction of the twelve-inch LP (long playing) vinyl record in 1948 established a new format for record art. While the first LP album covers featured simple title blocks and a photograph of the recording artist, in the 1950s designers began taking a more modernist approach. Experimenting with bold typography, innovative photography, and abstraction, they set out to graphically express the essence of the music. Record labels for jazz and other emerging genres gave creative license to designers and artists-like Reid Miles for Blue Note Records, Alex Steinweiss for Columbia Records, and Laini Abernathy for Delmark Records-whose styles became synonymous with the sounds of the record companies.

This exhibition tracks the evolution of these objects as well as the integral role that design has played in how we listen, where we listen, and what we listen to. For many people, these choices resonate as inseparable from music itself, becoming embedded in the vivid experience and memory of a soundscape-a synesthesia for our ears and eyes.

Presented in this exhibit are 128 album covers from the SFMOMA Library and San Francisco's Letterform Archive that capture the energy and emotion of the music of the 1950s and 1960s and suggest how this pivotal era set the stage for decades of covers to come.

The look of music players-including radios, stereos, boomboxes, turntables, and portable devices-has developed alongside advancements in technology and evolving cultural aesthetics. Art of Noise maps these expressive and iconic product designs, from the mechanical and analogue playbacks of a hundred years ago to the devices that deliver nearly infinite access to digital streaming today.

Art of Noise maps these expressive and iconic product designs, from the mechanical and analogue playbacks of a hundred years ago to the devices that deliver nearly infinite access to digital streaming today.

Model 40 radio ca. 1927
Metal and electronic components

Arthur Atwater Kent
Atwater Kent Manufacturing
Active 1919-36, Philadelphia

Model 425 speaker ca. 1926
Metal and electronic components

Stewart Warner
Active 1905-54, Chicago

The Sound of the Earth spherical phonograph
2009
Metal, plastic, and electronic components

Yuri Suzuki
Born 1980, Tokyo; based in London

Suzuki's experimental playback device The Sound of the Earth is a three-dimensional record player designed to reference a world globe. The grooves etched into the sphere map the contours of countries and continents, but are embedded with recorded audio. As the needle circumnavigates the globe, it plays sounds from the locations it passes over, including folk and popular music, local broadcasts, and national anthems.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase, by exchange, through a gift of Peggy Guggenheim

Model 425 speaker ca. 1926
Metal and electronic components

Collection of Jim Chanin

Stewart Warner
Active 1905-54, Chicago

Air King radio
1933
Plastic and electronic components

Collection of Jim Chanin

Harold L. Van Doren and John Gordon Rideout
Air King Products
Established 1932, Brooklyn

This exhibition tracks the evolution of these objects as well as the integral role that design has played in how we listen, where we listen, and what we listen to. For many people, these choices resonate as inseparable from music itself, becoming embedded in the vivid experience and memory of a soundscape-a synesthesia for our ears and eyes.

RCA Victor
Established 1929, New York
Special Model K phonograph ca. 1935
Metal, felt, leather, and electronic components

Collection of Jim Chanin

Vassos was one of America's highest-regarded industrial designers of the 1930s and 1940s, with work that spanned interior decorating, furniture, and product design.
Most of Vassos's designs, including this hand-crank phonograph, were for the RCA Victor company. The Special Model K combined the sleek aluminum profile of the aerodynamic era, dubbed "Streamline Moderne," with the portability afforded by new battery technology.

Edison Fireside Model B cylinder phonograph
1912
Metal and electronic components
In 1877 Edison invented the cylinder phonograph, which he called his favorite invention. With this world-changing device, we gained the ability to record and play back sound for the first time and to bring recorded music, sound, and speech into our homes. Priced at around twenty-five dollars, the Model B phonograph marked a major step forward. It allowed playback of four minutes, double the duration of its precursor, the Model A.

Courtesy Mark Albertson

RCA Victor
Established 1929, New York
Special Model K phonograph ca. 1935
Metal, felt, leather, and electronic components

Collection of Jim Chanin

Vassos was one of America's highest-regarded industrial designers of the 1930s and 1940s, with work that spanned interior decorating, furniture, and product design.
Most of Vassos's designs, including this hand-crank phonograph, were for the RCA Victor company. The Special Model K combined the sleek aluminum profile of the aerodynamic era, dubbed "Streamline Moderne," with the portability afforded by new battery technology.

John Vassos
RCA Victor
Established 1929, New York
45-EY-2 phonograph
1950
Plastic, metal, and electronic components

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, bequest of the George R. Kravis Il Collection

David Gammon
Transcriptors
Established 1960, London
Skeleton phonograph
1973
Glass, metal, and electronic components

Collection of Nathan Smidt

Gabriel / DaVinciAudio Reference
Turntable MKIl
2010/2024
Metal and electronic components

Da VinciAudio Labs
Established 1999, Kirchdorf,
Switzerland

Known for producing high-fidelity turntables and tone arms, Da VinciAudio Labs combines high-precision technology and design. The Gabriel turntable is assembled from carefully engineered and isolated components-including a silent magnetic bronze bearing and a suspended aluminum platter-designed to eliminate vibration and noise. The modular design easily allows for the placement of additional tonearms.

Beosound 9000 compact disc player and Beolab 8000 speakers
1996
Aluminum, glass, plastic, and electronic components

David Lewis
Bang & Olufsen
Established 1925, Kvistrup, Denmark

1426 jukebox
1947
Plastic, metal, and electronic components

Rock-Ola
Established 1927, Chicago

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase

1426 jukebox
1947
Plastic, metal, and electronic components

Project G phonograph
1963
Wood, metal, felt, and electronic components

Hugh Spencer
Clairtone Sound
Active 1958-72, Toronto

During its decade of producing consumer electronics, Canadian company Clairtone embodied the optimism and ebullience of the 1960s. With varnished walnut cabinets and space-age spherical speakers, the forms straddled the aesthetics of the mid-twentieth century. These systems were considered the pinnacle of both style and performance and were famously owned by Sonny Bono and Cher, Hugh Hefner, and Frank Sinatra.

Collection of Sonya Yu

Project G phonograph
1963
Wood, metal, felt, and electronic components

System One radio and cassette player
1978
Plastic, metal, and electronic components

Nakamichi
Established 1948, Tokyo

Nakamichi is known for making some of the best cassette decks of the 1970s and early 1980s. Its System One inspired by specialized recording studio equipment, brought professional-level audio gear to a consumer market. The system's rack design could accommodate different combinations of components. Its form is both sleek and industrial, and it nods to the black monolith in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase

Power of Love digital music player
2009
Plastic and electronic components

Mathieu Lehanneur
Born 1974, Rochefort, France, based in Paris

Lehanneur's Power of Love is a listening device with a built-in dual MP3 player. Conceived as a relationship aid for couples, it evokes the romantic draw of a crackling fire and queues up sounds for two listeners to enjoy either simultaneously or independently. Lehanneur says he"focused on the ideal moment of the first encounter. . . as if the fireworks sparked by the encounter could be frozen in time and space and one could keep a trace."

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase

Concrete Stereo
1983
Metal, plastic, and electronic components in cast concrete

Ron Arad
Born 1951, Tel Aviv, based in London

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Accessions Committee Fund purchase

SoundSticks (first generation) speakers and iSub subwoofer
2000
Plastic and electronic components

Apple Industrial Design Group
Harman Kardon
Established 1953, Westbury,
New York

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, gift of Christopher Stringer

Zenith Radio
Established 1918, Chicago
9-S-232 radio
1938
Wood, metal, glass, fabric, and electronic components

Collection of Jim Chanin

Model 6D030 radio
1946
Wood, metal, plastic, textile, and electronic components

Office of Charles and Ray Eames
Zenith
Established 1918, Chicago

Collection of Eames Institute, Petaluma, California