Sound and Vision
What connects the following?
1. ‘Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967’, which opened last week at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
2. Jerome Bel’s performance ‘The Show Must Go On’ at the Lyon Opera, commissioned as part of the Lyon Biennial which opened in September, and featuring around a dozen dancers enacting the lyrics to a playlist of songs ranging from ‘Into Your Arms’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds to Celine Dion’s ‘My Heart Will Go On (Love Theme from “Titanic”)’.
3. Sound & Vision by Luca Beatrice and Alberto Campo; a book released this September that, according to the press release, ‘observes the fertile mixing of photography, painting, music and video, a node of interdisciplinary connections that has slowly become a major influence in the historical development of both pop music and visual arts’.
4. PERFORMA 07, the second installment of the New York performance art biennial which begins at the end of this month, and includes amongst its manifold performances Daria Martin and experimental harpist Zeena Parkins, a gospel and jazz-scored ‘Southern-style religious revival’-meets-experimental writing jam by Adam Pendelton, noise-rock group Japanther, Californian band My Barbarian, and ‘White Noise II’, an exhibition of work and performance by sound artists.
5. A new John Baldessari monograph entitled ‘Music’ – the press blurb says it explores ‘the centrality of music in his oeuvre’.
6. The announcement of ‘Abstract Rhythms: Paul Klee and Devendra Banhart’, a forthcoming exhibition at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art ‘exploring the relationship between music and visual art’, featuring the work of Klee alongside that of pin-up ‘freak-folk’ musician Banhart.
7. The book ‘New York Noise: Art and Music from the New York Underground 1978–88’, published this summer as an accompaniment to the Soul Jazz Records eponymous compilation series.
8. Slater Bradley’s exhibition ‘The Unreleased Factory’ currently at Max Wigram Gallery, London; photographs of Bradley’s alter ego Benjamin Brock posing as, amongst others, Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson and Ian Curtis; the show’s title a conscious nod to Warhol’s Factory and influential Manchester record label Factory.
9. Radiohead’s announcement this month that their new album, In Rainbows, would be available on a pay-what-you-like, ‘honesty box’, basis.
10. All over the newspapers, magazines, radio and television in the UK: Joy Division, Joy Division, Joy Division.
This weekend, Anton Corbijn’s film Control hits UK cinema screens. As this biopic of tragic post-Punk icon and Joy Division singer Ian Curtis racks up the column inches and causes a tidal wave of reissued and repackaged albums you’ve already got (it seems rock music is the new arm of the heritage industry), so too has the usual constant background hum of contemporary art exhibitions/books/events about music been turned right up to eleven.
Whether any of the exhibitions and books mentioned above – not least Dominic Molon’s huge art and rock survey show ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ which features artworks including Andy Warhol’s ‘Screen Tests’ portraits of the Velvet Underground, Raymond Pettibon’s drawings for the West Coast punk label SST, ephemera from Cosey Fanni Tutti chronicling her involvement in Throbbing Gristle, and images by Scott King relating to (here he is again) Ian Curtis – provide fresh perspectives on art’s love affair with music remains to be seen, and it’s not for me to speculate on their worth here. Nor will I repeat any of the arguments I’ve put forward in the pages of frieze magazine before regarding art’s predominant obsession with the sociological epiphenomena of mainstream (and mostly white, male) Anglo-American pop subcultures.
However, the fact of this critical mass of music-oriented shows and books should be noted. With paeans to Curtis/Joy Division and tributes to the late Factory Records impresario Anthony H. Wilson loud in our ears this month, they raise curious questions. As pop music dematerializes and devolves from an object-oriented experience (records, CDs) into the ether (digital downloads), its audiences are also having to cope with the inevitability of history and ageing – the very ideological antithesis of the live-fast-die-young mythopoeia of rock ‘n’ roll. Is the groundswell of art/music interest in the visual arts formed of nostalgia for the traditional structures of music consumption and hagiographies of its heroes whose moves and poses are now aped by every new bad boy artist who appears on the block? Is it an almost reactionary refusal to let go of the idea of music as object-commodity? Is it just the manifestation of the fact that all those who formed the audiences for the Velvets, Black Flag or Throbbing Gristle back in the day are now also not only the CEOs of record companies today but the curatorial directors of museums and heads of publishing houses? Or, at best, is it the understanding that in its very disembodied essence, music – much better than visual art – is a means to understanding the dematerialized artwork and the communities it creates?
Dan Fox
Responses
Added by NedB,
What’s sad is that there’s not really any reciprocal interest in visual art from music. There will be no ‘New Cross Noise: Art and Music from the New Cross Underground 2007-2008’ in twenty years’ time because although obviously there are a lot of art school graduates forming and watching bands, and a lot of gigs in galleries, art feels like too much of an accessory and not an equal partner.
Added by JoergHeiser,
The problem with many of the art/music crossover projects – whether taking place in the realm of contemporary art, avant-garde music, or theatre for that matter – is that often too much attention is placed on the ideas of collaboration and influence and too little on virtually all of the rest. This results in encyclopaedic rather than idea-driven propositions: you get a list of well-known or ‘cult’ connections, represented by record covers, paraphernalia and artworks that happen to take pop/rock’n’roll as subject matter. There has been a continuous lack since the mid-1990s, when the first of these kinds of shows started to pile up. What is usually completely ignored are the nuts and bolts of it all: the different means and meanings of production, distribution/dissemination, and reception/consumption in art and music respectively - and how all of this is reverberating in the actual music and art being produced. As if it didn’t matter that Velvet Underground actually did want to become rock superstars, playing shitty clubs predominantly rather than nice galleries, and failed at the time. Or as if it didn’t matter whether, when an artist records music, whether he intends it to be a side-project edition that will make him/her look somewhat cooler, or something he/she invests a lot of time and expertise into to inject into the ‘regular’ circles of pop, interested in the response from that very different audience. This is what Dan actually points to when bringing up the question of digitilization.
One could claim, of course, that there is a whole new genre and audience of art/music crossover in itself, but I bet that all those placed in that category are secretly or openly yearning to get out of it, interested as they should be in encountering audiences that are not prepared to let anyone get away with crappy stuff, just because it has crossover pretentions. As Emily King recently said about a similar issue, the crossover between art and design, we need to distinguish between ‘boundary’ and ‘hierarchy’ when discussing the connection between different fields of cultural production. i.e. we have to be able to address the different boundaries between these forms, while tackling and blurring the hierarchies they are often attached to, otherwise there is no intelligent way to discuss them.
