Histoire de l’Art

(Art History)

the fall of 2018 a close friend of mine
registered as an undergraduate student
in art history at the University Paris I
(‘Université Paris 1 Panthéon Sorbonne
UFR10’ is what it’s officially known as). She jumped right
into the second year of these undergraduate studies,
which in France is called ‘Licence 2’. The year after, in
2019, she continued with the ‘Licence 3’, the third and
final undergraduate year, which turned out to be quite an
eventful one, due to the corona pandemic that hit France
like it did much of the rest of our world at full force about
half way through that academic year.
Because French is not my friend’s mother tongue, she
recorded the many live-lectures she was attending during
these four semesters with the dictaphone application on
her iPhone, so as to be able to eventually re-listen to, all or
parts of, some of them. Many of these lectures took place in
auditoriums, where over a hundred undergraduates in art
history or archaeology took in the lecturers’ words
During these lectures a substantial fraction of the students
present took notes. And almost all of the note-takers
were typing their notes, on the keyboards of their laptop
computers. The sound of this students’ note-taking-typing
is of course quite different from the nowadays ‘lost’ sound
that until some decades ago was produced by many an office
room full of professional typists hitting their mechanical
type writers with great force and at top speed. The typing
sounds emanating from the average laptop keyboard is
far less intrusive. It brings forth sequences of but soft and
modest clicks.
However, all the sounds so made by many, many students
typing simultaneously, together makes for a grand choir,
a persistent and multi-layered mechanical whisper- and
whimpering that will last for almost all of a lecture’s
duration. And every now and then from background it
fades into foreground. That is during the snippets of time in
which the lecturer halts her or his speaking, and keeps still.
My friend was so kind as to give me access to her collection
of recordings, from which I then removed all of the
lecturers’ words.
What is left is this amazing ocean/rain-like sound, as of a
thousand electric insects, nibbling and singing in unison,
brought forth by many, many laptop keyboards’ hi-speed
rattling, while capturing the words spoken by the art history
lecturer in some or other digital text file. And this typing
choir moreover comes interspersed with environmental
sounds, of students moving, coughing and sneezing,
especially—as you may notice—in those lectures that took
place in the early days of the corona pandemic, shortly
before confinement and hence before the university’s
classes moved from physical rooms to virtual zooms.
It is also an audio record that documents an interesting
analogue-to-digital data-transfer process: the lecturer
speaks words; these combine into phrases, that are heard
and understood in some form or other by the students; in
their heads they re-combine and most of the time also re-
interpret these words; into different phrases and words,
the letters of which they then one by one transfer to their
laptop’s memory by hitting the corresponding keys on their
computer keyboard, to save their understanding of the
lecturer’s teaching as a digital text file.
That is what this album makes you hear.
(Apart from the editing and composing that consisted in
selecting and speech-removing from the many hours of
original recording, additional digital editing and composing
processes included a number of different modes of
equalising and a ‘spatial unfolding’ that I occasionally
applied to the monophonic digital dictaphone files).
~
Harold Schellinx
Paris, May 2022
1. Les Mondes de Degas (Degas’ Worlds)
(lecturer: Cathérine Meneux, original recording made on October 21, 2019)
7’13”
2. Art et Archéologie de la Gaule Romaine (Art and Archaeology of Roman Gaul)
(lecturer: Laure Laüt, original recording made on February 21, 2020)
10’57”
3. Institutions artistiques (Arts institutions)
(lecturer: Sophie Telpeux, original recording made on September 18, 2019)
6’20”
4. Méthodologie en histoire sociale de l’art (Methodology in social history of art)
(lecturer: Marion Beaufils, original recording made on November 20, 2018)
6’32”
‘Histoire de l’Art’ (Art History) was imagined and created by Har$ (Harold
Schellinx) in the late summer of 2020.
The cover picture is a mashup that one evening Yungwei Chen made of two
classic French paintings, that both date from the 1830’s, a little less than two
centuries ago: the ‘Vénus Anadyomène’ (also called ‘Vénus marine’, Venus of the
sea) by Théodore Chassériau, presented at the Paris Salon in 1839, and the Study
(Young male nude seated beside the Sea, in French: Jeune homme nu assis au
bord de la mer, figure d’étude), painted in 1835 by Hippolyte Flandrin while in
residency in Rome (the artist had won the Prix de Rome in 1832).
Design and layout by John Kontandreopoulos / Semitone Labs

5. Histoire du Patrimoine et des Musées (History of Heritage and Museums)

(lecturer: Arnaud Bertinet, original recording made on January 17, 2020)
9’53”

6. Art du XIXe siècle - Portrait (19th century art - Portrait)

(lecturer: Pierre Wat, original recording made on January 21, 2020)
2’04”

7. Renaissance française à la cour d’Henri II et de Cathérine de Médicis

(French Renaissance at the court of Henri II and Cathérine de Médicis)
(lecturer: Luisa Capodieci, original recording made on November 5, 2019)
7’11”

8. Art du XXe siècle - Surréalisme (20th century art - Surrealism)

(lecturer: Philippe Dagen, original recording made on October 23, 2019)
3’52” CS-44 . coherentstates.com . 2022