Conference Agenda
The Online Program of events for the 2026 AMS Annual Meeting appears below. This program is subject to change. The final program will be published in early November.
Use the "Filter by Track or Type of Session" or "Filter by Session Topic" dropdown to limit results by type. Some of the sessions are also color-coded: purple indicates performances, grey indicates paper forums, and orange indicates sessions which have been organized by one of the regional associations of IMS (ARLAC or IMSEA). (Sessions which are both IMS sessions and performances are only colored orange.)
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Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Sept 2026, 02:58:01am EDT
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Daily Overview |
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Rebels, Freaks, and Feminists: Avant-Garde Women in the 1970s Session Chair: Kathryn Pisaro | |
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When Sound Happens: Carolee Schneemann, Marian Zazeela, and the Turn to Sound Installation at The Kitchen in the 1970s University of Pennsylvania Founded in 1971 in New York as an artist-run space for experimental video and electronic music, The Kitchen has been historicized primarily as a venue for performance and media art. This paper argues that works presented there in the 1970s are more productively understood as sound installations that redefined listening as environmental and embodied encounter. Focusing on Carolee Schneemann’s Up To And Including Her Limits (1975) and Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young’s Dream House (1974), I show how The Kitchen functioned not merely as a site of presentation but as an infrastructural experiment that enabled durational, immersive environments structured by sound, light, and bodily movement. In these works, sound did not accompany action; it operated as spatial medium, redistributing compositional agency among bodies, object, and architecture. Audience movement and co-presence were not incidental, but constitutive of the work’s form. Drawing on archival materials from The Kitchen and artists’ papers, I revise dominant narratives that frame 1970s experimental practices through performance, dematerialization, or medium specificity. Engaging scholarship by Michael Fried on theatricality, Juliane Rebentisch on installation aesthetics, and sound studies scholars including R. Murray Schafer and Brandon LaBelle, I argue that the concept of sound installation provides a more precise, multidisciplinary, and comprehensive analytic framework for understanding these practices. Finally, reframing The Kitchen’s programming through installation foregrounds the central role of women artists—particularly Schneemann and Zazeela—in shaping the American avant-garde’s turn toward embodied, environmental sound, and challenges disciplinary divisions between musicology and art history. | |