Artist Bill Fontana is of sound mind
The ding, ding, ding of a railroad crossing hits you outside the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art at the Howard Street entrance. The ringing is just loud enough to cause you to look both ways when here comes the roar of a passing locomotive blasting its horn.
But there is nothing to see, and the sound only lasts 30 seconds, then stops for a minute. You can miss it if you are talking to someone on the way in. That’s the signature of Bill Fontana, who has been recording the sounds of industry since 1968 and playing them back in public places to blend with all the other noise.
“It’s a way of getting people to notice the fact that their ears are working and that they are perceiving sound,” says Fontana, who is 70 and
speaks in a voice as quiet as his art can be. “Most people living in urban environments tend to ignore what they hear, so it’s a way to be provocative.”
Fontana’s work is conceptual. The idea is the art. Any sound engineer can record a high-speed train rolling by a crossing gate. The genius is in the notion to record it in the first place and then to place it outside a museum.
Wall text in glass that is nearly invisible identifies it as “Sound Sculpture With a Sequence of Level Crossings,” 1982. It was the first sound installation acquired by SFMOMA, and it has taken 35 years to find a perfect location, out on the sidewalk where the only thing a patron has to pay is attention.
Erik Kreider, a visitor from New York, was lighting a cigarette when he heard the train, and instinctively looked down to see if he was standing on the tracks.
“I’m not sure if that’s a real train or something else,” Kreider, 29, said before being informed it was part of the museum. “I can see how people wouldn’t notice it.”
This is exactly how Fontana likes people to experience his work.
“It’s out of context and there are always these gaps or silences so you don’t know when you are going to encounter it,” he says. “Then when it happens, it is very fleeting. It’s a sensory tease.”
Fontana does not claim to have invented the idea of audio art, though he may have been the first to call it “sound sculpture.” This is his 40th year of practicing it in San Francisco, which he was exposed to on a trip from his hometown of Cleveland to visit a girlfriend. She took him on a romantic walk to Fort Point in a heavy summer mist, where he heard the foghorns howling on the Golden Gate Bridge.
“It just blew my mind that a sound like that existed here,” he says. His love for that outlasted the relationship. Fontana ended up marrying a different woman, Nina Hartunian, whom he met on a train from Germany to Paris in 1991. They live in a 1907 Edwardian on Russian Hill, a block from the San Francisco Art Institute, where Fontana has taught.
But a short commute was not the attraction. He bought the place because from the roof deck he can hear those beloved foghorns to the west and the clanging of the cable cars to the east.
He has recorded both warnings, along with the laughing parrots of Telegraph Hill and the chimes of SS Peter and Paul’s Church. His mashup of those sounds can be heard at the entryway to the North Beach branch of the public library.
That is Fontana’s only permanent installation in San Francisco. “Soundtracks” is part of a major group show that features the work of 21 international audio artists on four floors, and runs until the end of the year.
“When I started, nobody was doing it,” says Fontana, who has another piece in the show, “Sonic Shadows,” which is also hard to find and hear. But if you stop mid-span on the fifth-floor footbridge and listen, you can hear a drip, drip drip that echoes the ding, ding, ding of the railroad crossing.
This is a real-time amplification of the machinery groaning in the SFMOMA boiler room. Fontana rigged up 12 sensors so you can hear the heating and plumbing broadcast through rotating speakers attached to the bridge.
“I was interested in having a live sound element of the building’s internal organs,” he says. “I use everything I hear.”
When you visit his darkened studio, in a reclaimed apartment on the first floor of his house, the hope is to find birds in cages, frogs and toads in terrariums, maybe a rattler coiled in a corner. But it is not that kind of studio. What he has are six computer screens to mix sound stored on 50 hard drives.
Close at hand is the sound of the clock ticking and Big Ben ringing in London. He also has the silence of a bell that is not ringing at a Buddhist temple in Japan. He has a sound recording of a total eclipse of the sun, made in an Australian rain forest in 1976. (SFMOMA owns this piece and will exhibit it at 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday, Aug. 21, in the Phyllis Wattis Theater, to honor that day’s eclipse.)
To get these, he flies with three high-quality digital recorders in a carry-on bag. This year has been his busiest travel year yet, to the point that he had to miss the opening of “Soundtracks” and the adulation of 20 young sound artists at SFMOMA.
He’s just back from Portugal and Iceland on separate commissions. One is an audiovisual portrait of the 25th of April Bridge in Lisbon. Called “Shadow Soundings,” it opens Oct. 3 at MAAT, a new contemporary museum.
The other project is for an international renewable-energy agency. He’s recorded the sound of wind turbines in the north of England, rushing river water in Austria, and the machinery of geothermal and hydroelectric power plants.
“I feel like after 50 years of doing this, I understand the tools and how to do sound sculpture better than I ever have,” he says.