''Audio Arts'' was a British sound magazine published on audio cassettes, documenting contemporary artistic activity via artist or curator interviews, sound performances or sound art by artists.

History

The project was launched in 1973 by Barry Barker and British sculptor William Furlong, born 1944 in Woking, Great Britain. From 1973 to 2006, Audio Arts published 25 volumes of 4 issues of the Audio Arts Cassettes (later releasing LPs and CDs as well). Furlong conducted all interviews until 1996, when Professor Jean Wainwright took the baton as interviewer. Each interview starts with ''I am here with...'', stating artist's name and recording location. Interviewees include:

Andy Warhol Andy Warhol (;''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''"Warhol" born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director and producer. A leading figure in the pop art movement, Warhol ...

, Anish Kapoor,

Joseph Beuys Joseph Heinrich Beuys ( ; ; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986) was a German artist, teacher, performance artist, and Aesthetics, art theorist whose work reflected concepts of humanism and sociology. With Heinrich Böll, , Caroline Tisdall, Rober ...

Gilbert & George Gilbert Prousch, sometimes referred to as Gilbert Proesch (born 17 September 1943), and George Passmore (born 8 January 1942) are artists who work together as the collaborative art duo Gilbert & George. They are known for their formal appearance ...

Yoko Ono Yoko Ono (, usually spelled in katakana as ; born February 18, 1933) is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono grew up in Tokyo and moved to New York ...

, R. Buckminster Fuller, Hermann Nitsch, Mario Merz,

Gerhard Richter Gerhard Richter (; born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced Abstract art, abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, photographs and Glass art, glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important con ...

Nam June Paik Nam June Paik (; July 20, 1932 – January 29, 2006) was a South Korean artist. He worked with a variety of media and is considered to be the founder of video art. He is credited with the first use (1974) of the term "electronic super highway" ...

, as well as an interview with

W. B. Yeats William Butler Yeats (, 13 June 186528 January 1939), popularly known as W. B. Yeats, was an Irish poet, dramatist, writer, and literary critic who was one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. He was a driving force behind the ...

' daughter and readings by Yeats himself (in Vol.1 Issue #4, 1974). William Furlong was part of a generation of British artists of the 1960s-70s including

, Richard Hamilton, Bruce McLean or Paul Richards (whose Nice Style performance group was the first pose band) who were consciously moving from traditional art forms to conceptual art, performance, new media, cheap materials, in a dematerialized and process-oriented ethos. Furlong is now a sound artist with sound installations exhibited in Lisbon (''Walls of Sound'', 1998), Bexhill on Sea, Sussex (''Anthem'', 2009), Genillard Gallery, London (''Possibility & Impossibility of Fixing Meaning'', 2009). With the acquisition of the Audio Arts archive by

Tate Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK ...

in 2004 (itself a long-time subscriber to Audio Arts cassettes releases), over 200 boxes of master tapes used to edit the magazine are now secured for future researchers. A selection wa
exhibited
at Tate Britain March–August 2007. The archive is now catalogued, digitized and preserved there. In October–December 2006, a retrospective exhibition curated by Lucia Farinati took place at Rome’
Sound Art Museum
showing a selection of Audio Arts releases and adding a new sound art by Furlong: ''Conversation Pieces'', a reworking/remixing of preview Furlong interviews, making famous interviewees respond to each other by the magic of cut-up. See
SlashSeconds.org
William Furlong's Audio Arts project was featured in the ''See This Sound (Promises in Sound and Vision)'' exhibition, curated by Cosima Rainer, August 28, 2009 to January 10, 2010, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria.See officia
website
/ref>

Footnotes

Sources

Audio Arts digitised and published on the Tate website
* Bill Furlong ''Audio Arts: Discourse & Practice in Contemporary Art'', published by Academy Editions, London, 1994.
Overview and index of the Audio Arts releases
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Audio Arts Audio periodicals Defunct visual arts magazines published in the United Kingdom British contemporary art Defunct music magazines published in the United Kingdom Conceptual art Contemporary art magazines Defunct organisations based in the United Kingdom Experimental music Magazines established in 1973 Magazines disestablished in 2006 Non-profit organisations based in the United Kingdom