“What a Picture Can’t Offer”: Michael Gaudio on the Imaginative Work of Sound in Art History

In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing

In this episode, Caitlin Woolsey (Assistant Director of the Research and Academic Program at the Clark Art Institute) continues the miniseries on sound and visual art in conversation with Michael Gaudio, professor of art history at the University of Minnesota, who specializes in visual arts in the early modern Atlantic world. Michael describes his early studies in literature and the influence of deconstruction as a theory that taught him to inhabit the contingencies and ambiguities of a work. They discuss the gap between pictures and sound and how audiences in earlier eras navigated that gap. Finally, Michael reflects on the “melancholy work of being an art historian,” part of which he characterizes as the descriptive challenge of thinking, writing, and teaching about sound in visual art.