Coco Klockner
Sounding
December 7 - January 7, 2023
Silke Lindner is pleased to announce Coco Klockner’s first New York solo exhibition titled Sounding. In it, the artist presents three new sculptures that test linguistic and auditory possibilities of sound through which making sound, being a sound, and the activity of sounding all hold diverging meanings that Klockner synthesizes into the crosshairs of this exhibition through the lens of transfemininity.
It is often the simple act of naming that creates a divergence of meaning — to name something is to engage in a dialectic of fact (forced reality) and freedom (choice). It is a political decision configured through the subtle and strategic whims of the namer. For one audience, sounding invokes an investigation into sonic experimentation and research; for another, the imagery suggests the sexual act of sounding—a precise form of urethral penetration whose association with transfemininity lies more in its penetrative ontological conditions than in any overwhelming presence in trans sexual tendencies. Naming, and the consequences of such, are intrinsic and vital play for Klockner, who makes use of double and triple entendre to produce unique meaning in their work, functioning as dog whistles for those who can or who choose to register the tenor.
Adorning and punctuating the room, a series of silver sounding rods are installed both as stand-alone wall works and part of an adjacent work. Visually, iterations of Sounding Rod appear as shiny ribbons, with each rod culminating in a perfectly tied bow, but it is the subcultural object of the sounding rod that creates the body and structural support of the piece. The namesake for the sounding rod originates from a tool used in a ship’s hold to ascertain water depth, and is linked to the topographic mappings of sounds (a body of water) and modern-day sonar (echo mapping). The undulating wave-like form and its associations are provocative of vibrations and grooves in the body. With Sounding Rod, Klockner sets the tone for the larger exhibition, in which the artist casts the conditions of penetrability upon language, subjects, and objects alike.
Visitors to Klockner’s arrangement of works find themselves implicated in the experience of Girl-Sounding (Transpessimist Lovers), a sound sculpture consisting of tall, sleek tower speakers. Audio created by the artist intermittently sweeps a sine tone through the space, records its reverberant tail through a microphone embedded in the wall, and emulates the room’s reflective and dampening qualities back through the speakers. The quality of the constantly adjusting sound—a product of probing the hard architectural surfaces of the space and the soft body of its audience—ultimately results in an audio field as if it were emitted from within the hollow of the room.
If sound is Klockner’s medium and linguistics their method, then penetration might be considered the mode. The artist utilizes the metaphoric possibilities of reverb and resonance, and formal qualities of such, to operate in between the fact vs. freedom dialectic that comes with the territory of language and names. Good Name / Dead Name is the final work in Klockner’s
installation. It counters the svelte nature of the show through its inclusion of singed trail shoes, expended greenware clay, and drooping ribbon. The structural body of this work, functioning much like the sounding rod to the bow tie, is made of two drum stands that prop up old shoes once worn by Klockner. As indicated by the title of the work, the forward momentum of the shoes has halted.
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.”
While Klockner’s audience finds themselves sounded — interpellated by the work inside of the gallery space — each speaker in Girl-Sounding (Transpessimist Lovers) can be found renamed by Klockner: “Good” emblazons one in silver script, “Girl,” the other. The latter has an ornamental, oyster-like form affixed to the bottom. An oyster is an aphrodisiac, the name for which derives from Aphrodite. The Greek goddess of love, beauty, passion, and pleasure was born out of sea foam, when Cronus castrated his father Uranus and threw his genitalia into the sea. Next to this, atop “Good,” a single sounding rod stands perfectly erect.
- Text by Isabella Achenbach