Biography

William Furlong belongs to the generation of British
artists (which includes Gilbert & George, Bruce McLean
and Richard Long) that developed a new concept of
sculpture in the 1970s and 1980s. Furlong’s special
contribution has been in the area of sound and, with the
founding of Audio Arts (with Barry Barker) in 1973, he
began mapping the territory of contemporary art in a
series of cassette editions.

His work engages with, and explores, sound and its
reception and perception. He manipulates, choreographs
and interprets sound, working with a myriad different
sources from conversation, speech and dialogue and its
many individual nuances to the sounds of birds singing.
He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including a
sound installation in Intelligence, New British Art 2000 at
Tate Britain and a solo show at the South London Gallery
(2002). The work Walls of Sound (1998), commissioned
by the Cass Foundation for Sculpture at Goodwood,
has been acquired by the Berardo Foundation in Lisbon.
Furlong is also the coordinator of ‘Venice Agendas’,
Wimbledon College of Art’s symposium series that has
taken place at four Venice Biennales (2001-07).

Inspiration

‘My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the
transformation of the idea of sculpture, or of art in general.
They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can
be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to
the invisible materials used by everyone:

Thinking Forms –
How we mould our
Thoughts, or
Spoken Forms –
How we shape our thoughts
Into words or,
Social Sculpture –
How we mould and shape
The world in which we live:
Sculpture as an
evolutionary process:
everyone is an artist
This is why the nature of my sculpture is not fixed
and finished. Processes continue in most of them:
chemical reactions, fermentations, colour changes,
decay, drying up. Everything is in a state of change.’
– Joseph Beuys, Introduction to Joseph Beuys, Caroline Tisdall, 1979

Contribution 

I feel my role is to bring what I do as a practitioner,
which is quite diverse and connected with the outside,
into the culture of the College. As well as public events,
such as exhibitions, it is the recordings of artists and
their publications, and making those artists accessible
to a wider community, which informs the nature of the
contribution that I, as a professor, can make. I’m bringing
in contemporary artists (I don’t like the word ‘leading’,
but I guess they’re at the forefront), so the staff, artists
and students here can share in the experience of the
interactions, the conversations that I record and make
available through Audio Arts. That is one way in which
my professorial activity comes into the College. Beyond

that there is the fact that as a practitioner I work in various
contexts, currently Tate Britain. There’s a show there
(Audio Arts: Bill Furlong, 2007) with recordings made by
Audio Arts over four decades, which can be accessed
via the Internet as well as the College library. The library
has subscribed to Audio Arts for many years – that is a
contribution that I have made and will go on making.

Research

Interviewer: Mel Gooding

Mel Gooding: Can you provide a general overview
description of your practice?
William Furlong: There are two primary strands to
my practice. As curator-editor of the cassette (and later,
CD) magazine Audio Arts since 1973, I have made
innumerable audio recordings, primarily of artists and
usually in the specific locations of studio, exhibition or
international expositions, such as the Kassel Documenta
or the Venice Biennale. I would describe Audio Arts as
an artist-curated aural space for the voice, and consider
its accumulation and editing of sound materials an
integral part of a multi-faceted art practice. The other
key component has been the making and exhibiting of
independent sound works, often complex, in technical
construction and installation, and multi-layered, in terms
of their specific thematic material. These dual strands
of my practice are closely interrelated, and might be
described at times as symbiotic in that the edited material
of one becomes part of the constructive material for
the other.
MG: How would you describe the underlying concerns
of your practice?

WF: Above all, a concern for the actual, for speech and
for sound, which I consider to be the primary materials
of my work. In addition I have used the process and
procedures of sound recording, editing, layering, collage
and montage, specific to subjects and themes, and to
the time and place of the installation. This is best
described in terms of a number of specific works.
In Passage of Time (2004), for example, actual or
ambient recordings made in Venice gave rise to the work,
an installation in the Oratorio di San Ludovico, a small
de-consecrated chapel attached to a sixteenth-century
home for old men. This work comprised twelve flat-panel
loudspeakers placed just above floor level, from which
recorded sounds interacted dynamically with both the
architectural space of the Oratorio and with its history.
Visitors to the Oratorio entered a sonic field of orchestrated
and choreographed sounds that reflected an experience
of Venice, not as a spectacular city of visual delights but
rather as a unique soundscape: half-heard conversations
in many tongues, footfalls in narrow alleyways, water and
movement through water. A shimmer of ambient sound
was created, as if of an aural ‘middle distance’, equivalent
to that of Venetian light.
Off the Beaten Track (2003), conceived for the Chianti
Sculpture Park near Siena, comprised sixteen
stainless steel cubes, fitted with loudspeakers from which
an orchestrated sequence of locally recorded sounds
were heard. The sounds included tour guides speaking
in Italian, German, French and English, and the more
subjective and often indecipherable speech of tourists
and local people; the bells of the Duomo in Siena and
the Dominican church; the cries of children in the Campo,
peoples’ voices in the narrow lanes; and a rousing

ceremonial band that is heard during the festivities of
Siena’s famous Palio. Again, it is the reality – the actuality
of the city soundscape – that is the primary subject; in this
case, an actuality transported, as a reminder, from the
touristic city centre to the quiet country setting of the park.
In another work, To Hear Yourself as Others Hear You
(2002-03), shown in a solo exhibition at the South London
Gallery, recordings from the Audio Arts archive were reedited
to create a kaleidoscopic babble of the fragmented
voices of artists, writers and curators on the London art
scene, ever-changing as the auditor moved between
overhanging speakers strung across the gallery. Conversation
Piece (1999) is an edited-constructed conversation
between Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Marcel Duchamp
and Andy Warhol across time and space. In Uhms & Aghs
(2006), the ‘uhms’ and ‘aghs’ eliminated from various
Audio Arts interviews were re-edited to form an orchestrated
sequence, a work constructed out of what would
normally be regarded as redundant mannerisms of
speech. Listening, cutting tape, selecting, splicing,
adding, subtracting, repetition, overlapping and fragmenting:
I regard the methodologies used in the creation of
these works as essentially sculptural.
MG: How would you define the research questions of
your practice?
WF: Well, for Audio Arts magazine the primary question
is, does the voice of the artist, if recorded, represent an
authentic, first-hand or primary source of art history,
unmediated by critical interpretation, particularly in relation
to contemporary practice? In my opinion, and this is a
view drawn from many years of research, the voice is a
resource for understanding of the most important kind.
With the sound works, the question might be, how can
sound as a medium evoke, represent and substantiate not
only physical values and juxtapositions but also, through
the expressive layers of speech, the underlying meaning,
ideas, aspirations, ideology and identity of the artist, as
well as his/her situation, historically and critically, in
location, time, place and context?