El espacio sonoro en el arte contemporáneo: «La materia del tiempo» de Richard Serra

Abstract

The space keeps a close relationship with the sound, for this reason many artists who have thought about their buildings or sculptural installations as living quarters with capacity to be traveled across them, have valued the acoustic properties of these spaces and their ability to suggest sound or acoustic sensations, inform about the qualities and textures of the material, about the concave or convex and the size of the container space. In the case of «The matter of time» (2005) by Richard Serra, installed almost permanently in the Guggenheim Museum of Bilbao, we find a sculpture in which Richard Serra proposes to the viewer an «encounter with matter and space». In this experiment performed by the tour and the room of those spaces (spirals, torus¹, etc.), our sound perception varies constantly. Without even opening our eyes, it shows us the properties of space and matter in sculptural form.