Thank You for the Music, poster.
Thank You for the Music, 2006, installation view,
Galerie Monika Spruth Philomene Magers, Munich.
Remix, Simon Moretti, 2003, neon, 2/3.
Press Release
Thank You for the Music
SAÂDANE AFIF, JOHN ARMLEDER, JOHN BALDESSARI, MATTHEW BARNEY, PASH BUZARI, BRUCE CONNER, SEAN DACK, WALTER DAHN, JEREMY DELLER, THOMAS DEMAND, SIMON ENGLISH, CERITH WYN EVANS, SYLVIE FLEURY, ROBERT FRANK, LIAM GILLICK, DOUGLAS GORDON, DAN GRAHAM, ANDREAS GURSKY, STEFAN HIRSIG, CHRISTIAN HOLSTAD, DAVID LAMELAS, ROBERT MAPPLETHORPE, CHRISTIAN MARCLAY, DAVID & ALBERT MAYSLES, JONAS MEKAS, JONATHAN MONK, SIMON MORETTI, PAUL MORRISSEY, RAYMOND PETTIBON, ZBIGNIEW ROGALSKI, STEVEN SHEARER, HEDI SLIMANE, THADDEUS STRODE, MIKA TAANILA, WOLFGANG TILLMANS, RIRKRIT TIRAVANIJA, ESSI UTRIAINEN, BANKS VIOLETTE
November 24, 2005 - February 11, 2006
Interfaces between visual art and music
Curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen
The exhibition “Thank You For The Music” examines music and pop culture, their various market mechanisms and the liberation from traditional copyright restrictions as a ubiquitous source of artistic inspiration — one that has become a global phenomenon and a permanent aspect of everyday experience. Drawing on a selection of contributions by more than 30 international artists, filmmakers and musicians, the show attempts to position intersections between visual arts, music culture and music history within a larger social context. A main focus is the presentation of a series of contemporary artistic strategies that use various methods to confront more recent music history as well as the presentation of diverse intersections of music, sonic relationships and visual media. Whilst the 1960s counter-culture movement and the 1970s Punk Avant-garde serve as a historical backdrop, the influences and effects of music culture on youth cultural movements are depicted as catalysts for the various criteria of inclusion in and exclusion from different Avant-garde movements. “Thank you for the Music” addresses the epoch’s value chains, amongst others by scrutinizing the mythology and the phenomena of the „Rock Star“, and juxtaposes them to the works of two generations of artists — then and now.
Towards the middle of the 90s, an analytical delineation of the aesthetic territories between art, sound, and music seemed to have lapsed. The montage and recycling of existing cultural material has become a starting point for new artistic production. Where are the boundaries between “an original“ and “a copy“, beyond traditional copyright restrictions? Welcome to Copyland! The discourse about precise distinctions has become less relevant and its violation has deeply embedded itself in pop culture. Conversely, questions of production-contexts, intellectual property and copyright issues became significant in respect to the distribution rights of artworks; If producers of artworks are equally eligible to capitalize and diffuse them within the markets due to licensing and contractual assignments, eventually artists must obtain the status of producers in terms of ownership. Subsequently, copyright issues are growing to be more critical than the question of authorship for contemporary artists.
The show´s title “Thank You For The Music” is a direct reference to a film with the same title of the Finnish artist and filmmaker Mika Taanila, whose work is included in the exhibition and establishes a conceptual springboard: His narrative-fictional documentary about the Muzak Corporation deals with the origin of the psychoacoustic phenomenon known as “Muzak”.“Muzak” is based on a mid frequency spectrum that presents an ideological control using involuntary perceived manipulation by providing a source of comfort at work environments, in airports, at shopping malls, and in elevators. Mid frequency culture seems to have become a pervasive daily phenomenon: “originals” are increasingly being simplified and adapted to prevailing market-mechanisms, merely distinguishable by copyright assignments. As early as the 1930s, the then newly founded Muzak Corporation proclaimed: “Muzak fills the deadly silence“.
The conceptual backbone of the exhibition is set against the questions of rigid definition, categorization and delimitations between visual art and music. As a contemporary cross-section of various media, “Thank You For The Music” endeavors to elucidate how music culture and the practices of visual artists influence each other without glorifying one media over the other and without succumbing to the categorization of particular connections between art and music.“Thank You For The Music” is less of a display of the current positions in contemporary art dealing with the subjects of sound and music as sources of creativity. Instead the exhibition poses questions about interdisciplinary similarities and mutual influence, presenting a fairly open concept of music and its relationship to developments in contemporary visual art. It is an experiment in progress that exposes shifting, co-existing boundaries and reciprocal interactions.
Thank You for the Music, 2006, installation view,
Galerie Monika Spruth Philomene Magers, Munich.
Pirate, Simon Moretti 2003, neon, 2/3.