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Thank You for the Music, we love original but our copies are so beautiful
interfaces between visual arts and music
by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen
Spruth Magers Munich
“Thank You For The Music” addresses the recent history of music as a project in progress. The exhibition 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 more than 30 contributions by contemporary international artists, filmmakers, and musicians, the project attempts to position music culture within a larger social context. 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 since the 1960s.
A main focus within this context 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. 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. It is the artistic works, their particular context, and the resulting individual experience that serve as source material.
The 60s counter-culture movement and the 70s Punk Avant-garde scene serve as an historical backdrop for the exhibition. “Thank You For The Music” addresses the epoch’s value chains and juxtaposes them to the works of two generations of artists—then and now. After Andy Warhol had turned arts into business, Dan Graham noted that “in a time in which artistic production has become increasingly calculated and cynical, we understand (...) that there are few expressive forms of art that allow the exploration of the transcendental by using visual images. In other words, the Modern is essentially dead. Music and the “Rock Star” (...) have appropriated a function of the pictorial in the arts — the quest for the mystical, the transcendental.“ (1)
The tragic events surrounding the Rolling Stones’ free concert at the Altamont Speedway in San Francisco in 1970 demonstrated how the dreams of the “Love Generation” and the sanctified aura of the “Rock Star” were demystified and turned into a psychedelic utopia within a decade, as a result of exploitive marketing efforts. For the English Punk Avant-garde in the early 70s, the myth of the “Rock Star” represented nothing more than a by-product of the marketing strategies of major record companies from the preceding decade. For them it was clear that the magical authentic aura of the superstar was nothing more than a complete fake manufactured by the media and the recording industry. They were aware that the superstar myth had to be dramatically challenged since the superstars themselves had forgotten to confront the tangible reality around them.
David Lamela´s photo series Rock Star (character appropriation) is an example of how the media stages the concept of the “Rock Star.” It also addresses the mystification of the superstar and its performance rituals. Created in the London of the 70s, the series depicts the artist himself assuming the poses and attitude of a Rock Star, referencing the Avant-garde icons of the London Underground of the day, including Roxy Music, David Bowie and Ozzy Osbourne. The fictional self-portraits of the artist in the role of a “Rock Star” demonstrate how the perception and evaluation of identity is dependent on the actual modes of representation.
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 objects has become a starting point for new artistic production. With the renewed invasion of the art industry by pop culture and the resulting appropriation of pop music into the repertoire of artistic production, the mid 90s were accompanied by the impact of a pervasive paradigm shift: the overlapping and remixing of various styles and categories, which has become an accepted cultural technique in itself (2). The technical possibilities of the computer-generated “rendering” of already existing materials from everyday life have transformed Walter Benjamin’s theoretical model of the mechanical reproduction of the artwork towards a new model of post-production or “field recording,” or, as Simon Moretti simply claims:“arrival on remix or pirate island”.
Questions of the authenticity of the “original” and the recycling of that which is perceived to be authentic take on a particular meaning in this relationship. Displaced contexts refer to a ubiquitous phenomenon in the visual arts; namely, that existing cultural information is edited, processed, manipulated and re-presented in totally new contexts. Where are the boundaries between an original and a copy, beyond traditional copyright restrictions? Do they even exist? Welcome to Copyland! Previous examples of boundary violations appear to have become difficult to perceive and the practice of such violation has deeply embedded itself in pop culture. The discourse about the distinction between an original and a copy has become less relevant.
Conversely, questions of production-contexts, ownership and copyright issues became significant with 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 agreements, eventually artists must obtain the status of producers in terms of ownership. Subsequently, Liam Gillick´s & Phillipe Parreno´s work Briannnnnn & Ferryyyyyyreveals howcopyright issues are growing to be more critical than questions of authorship for contemporary artists.
The show’s title “Thank You For The Music” (lent by the famously terrifying ABBA song) is a direct reference to a film with the same title by 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 MuzakCorporation deals with the origin of the psychoacoustic phenomenon known as Muzak, which he presents as a form of ideological control using involuntarily perceived mid frequency sound sources to instil a sense 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, distinguishable only by copyright assignments. As early as the 1930s, the then newly founded Muzak Corporation proclaimed that “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, sound, 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 that exposes shifting, co-existing boundaries and reciprocal interactions.
Of Curiosity
by Adrian Dannatt
Suddenly, I became indifferent to not being modern.
Roland Barthes
‘I lower my eyes when I walk past an antique shop, like a seminarian passing a night-club’, admitted Henry de Montherlant concerning his obsessive collecting, and likewise whenever my children spy any sort of bric-a-brac emporium they push me across the road or blinker my sight like a carthorse, to ensure they will not be thus delayed. For some of us (the disbelief of discovering that it is not all of us) find such places irresistible, time-consuming and potentially ruinous, to the point where we must be eventually weaned off them. The time-worn analogy with addiction, narcotics or alcohol, seems closer to medical fact that mere turn-of-phrase.
The key to it all seems to me ‘curiosity’ and the attendant curious lack of it in some people, the other people; curiosity as a principle motor of daily conduct, aesthetic discovery and everyday ethics, the wanting to know about other people and their lives, historic or actual, and their objects. Ye Olde Curiositie Shoppe or plain Curiosity Shop strikes me as an excellent name - however ghastly the reality of any store that would use such a term today - because that is the central fact about those who own and frequent such places - an unquenchable curiosity about the world, its inhabitants and their varied creations. These are shops for those of us with a genuine curiosity, who will speak to strangers to discover their life-stories, or at least eavesdrop their restaurant conversation, look at what is hanging on the walls of the same restaurant, and discreetly check eye the furniture, furnishings and decoration of any house where they should be welcomed.
All such might seem self-evident, but it is surprising how specific and rare is the actual character-trait of real curiosity. Not the generalised, vague term ‘curiosity’ which everyone in the world automatically assumes they share, but the real thing in its active, if not incursive, application. W. H. Auden said ‘a true friend is someone who reads your mail when you are in the other room’ and in that same ambiguous, sometimes annoying manner the genuinely curious, the curiosity-hunters, are ‘true friends’ to the world and all its effects.
It is this same curiosity which unites both the specialist antique dealer or collector with the contemporary art connoisseur, irrespective of how different the objects involved might appear. Of course all art was contemporary art once upon a time, at the time of its making, and the very special and tangible excitement of such art is due to its newness, its freshness and often its unexpected demands. Seeing something new and having to deal with its seeming banality or originality, adjusting it to the canon of art history, or indeed rejecting it, just the act of ‘processing’ its claims and forms, is highly enjoyable. No, it’s rubbish, yes, it’s interesting, well, it’s both, not art, yes art, too ugly, too easy, too odd, and yet and yet…. The pleasure is that the decision is up to you, right there, faced with something made last month and trying to stake its place in the long future to come. Whereas, most works in the museums, the old-master galleries, have already had the decisions made about them, have already been ticked, approved and passed on into the future.
There is an obvious difference, indeed a diametrically opposed principle, between things on display in a contemporary art gallery and an antique shop. In the former one is looking at things of untested value and novel risk, things that may actively attempt to disown all antecedents, that refuse the ‘anxiety of influence’ in suggesting a new direction for the subsequent making of art. In the latter the objects are tied to the past, to already established values and hierarchies, and it is specifically how they are linked to history, and the closer the better, that gives them importance; their precedents and their pedigree, their provenance, is crucial to their continued value today.
Also, unmentioned so far, yet crucial to any comparison, are the actual aesthetic characteristics of the object, its appearance, shape, colour, size and specific signs. Who made it and when it was made, is equally important to both contemporary and antiquarian collector but above all else remains the question of whether this thing appeals, intrigues, touches one, somehow grants a pleasure, intellectual or instinctive.
In that wonderful phrase of the late French artist Robert Filiou, ‘art is what makes life more interesting than art.’ It is art that can make one look at the world in a new manner, with a more precise or critical edge. And ever since Duchamp’s ‘Readymade’ when we see art which looks like things we do not consider ‘art’, we have to think longer and harder about what makes something ‘art’ or not, about the specific properties of all such objects, their ‘thingness’. We are just obliged to be a bit sharper, smarter, to see so.
Any really good antique shop, like any really good contemporary gallery, will serve as a sort of laboratory for the active testing of your sense-of-response, for your awareness. Thus if you are a curious person there can be nothing more enjoyable than to put yourself through such a battery of tests. Why look at that, what could that have been used for, how beautiful, how improbable, how was that made, why was that made, how impossibly grand. The principle motivation of every antiquarian dealer should be the same boundless curiosity, what will I find next, how many of these exist, why was this made, that drives the contemporary art world.
Curiosity is certainly the ruling principle at Harris Lindsay Works of Art, which as its full title suggests welcomes a wider definition of ‘art’ than just painting, drawing or sculpture, precisely as contemporary practice also insists upon a far more ambitious scope to the term. A work of art should in itself help expand the boundaries of its own definition, and at Harris Lindsay there is as much emphasis on ‘workmanship’ as on aesthetic intent, the art being both in the skill of the maker as well as in their imagination. The relevant criteria here (aside from the given one of authenticity), are the quality of design; the quality of execution; the historic interest.
Hence the rightful insistence on the correct word; that this is an ‘antiquarian’ dealership, meaning dealers in rare and unusual objects of interest to collectors and academics, rather than simply dealers in decorative antiques. Harris Lindsay welcomes the widest range of human creation from any time and any place, from the Neolithic to the neo-neo. Whether in a seminal exhibition on Danish design covering the modern period from 1920 until 1970, or the present display of heraldic ‘beestes’ once belonging to Henry VIII, the intention of Harris Lindsay is to open one’s eyes, to share their own passionate curiosity. Thus a recent exhibition such as the Hawkins Zoomorphic Collection, in which a truly extra-ordinary range of objects created from animals was displayed in an ideal setting, pushing the boundaries of ‘good taste’ if not the ‘politically correct’ in a manner all too familiar to the contemporary art world.
But quite apart from a shared curiosity for the object-of- life, Harris Lindsay provides, so obviously, a wonderful environment to put together an exhibition of contemporary art, as much for its happy congruities as differences. A vocal boredom with the accepted ‘white cube’ model of presenting contemporary art is becoming increasingly loud. When Charles Saatchi presented his collection in the old fashioned wood-panelled warmth of the old County Hall he made clear his disaffection for the standard blank white concrete space, and openly spoke of his interest in other ways of showing such work. Indeed there is a whole micro-history, an alternative tradition, of such strategies of exhibition, whether Dr. Barnes’ mansion, Peggy Guggenheim’s ‘Art of This Century’ designed by Frederick Kiesler, or Gertrude Stein’s apartment on Rue de Fleurus.
The oft-acknowledged precedent for a certain type of such an exhibition is the wunderkammer, a curiosity cabinet, or kunstkammer, a debt made overt in the show ‘Feux Pâles’ at the CAPC Bordeaux organised in 1990 by the extremely, radically conceptual artist Philippe Thomas. Indeed, curiously, it is often the most soi-disant ‘conceptual’ contemporary artists who are most interested in other means of displaying their art, perhaps because they are so aware of the immediate history of art-curating and theories on the presentation of important objects throughout history.
Another crucial example of this would be the show ‘Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow’ organized by Hans-Ulrich Obrist at the Sir John Soane Museum in December 1999, in which individual, often very discrete contemporary art works were oft indistinguishable from the original décor. Likewise, the 2005 show ‘Past Presence’ at the Getty Research Institute and Grolier Club, starred the earliest known copperplate engraving of a curiosity cabinet from 1622. As they put it :- ‘The wide-ranging display looks at how artists… responded to notions of time and the urge to capture a moment, recreate the past, record the present, or imagine the future’. More recently, two exceptional exhibitions have been mounted by Joe La Placa and his All Visual Arts organization, ‘The Age of the Marvellous’ and last year, ‘Vanitas: The Transience of Earthly Pleasures’, held in Great Portland Place. In Sydney there have been a series of contemporary shows mounted at Elizabeth Bay House and supported by the Historic Houses Trust, whilst at Pallant House in Chichester, under the knowing eye of Stefan van Raay, contemporary art is cleverly and pleasingly incorporated into an 18th Century setting.
Such institutional examples of truly imaginative presentation are rarer, perhaps because the bureaucratic mindset moves so much slower, but Peter Noever’s groundbreaking installation of his MAK in Vienna, of 1986, can still seem shocking, with its rare antique furniture presented by modern artists, most notably Donald Judd’s pitch-perfect re-design of the permanent Baroque collection. Of equally exceptional quality is the Musée de la Chasse in Paris which has managed to integrate contemporary art works into an historical collection and building in a flawless manner, a mise-en-scène of utter charm.
Of course one could also suggest that there are now, and always have been, contemporary artists whose interest in the codes and practices of the past are precisely their radical novelty. And this makes them particularly suitable to exhibiting in a context more sympathetic to the historical than the minimal. Indeed there is a continual claim that the truly ‘radical’ or truly ‘reactionary’ (in the sense of reacting to its own era) contemporary art is always that which proposes a ‘return-to-order’, a ‘traditionalism’, neo-neo-classicism or postmodernism. This is an ‘eternal return’ in itself, distant as such now vanished issues as the battle between ‘ancient’ and ‘moderns’, or between ‘abstraction’ and ‘figuration.’
And certainly I would never want to suggest that the artists in this current exhibition belong to any movement or even loosest of groupings, whether ‘Romantic Conceptualism’, ‘Aristocratic Neo-Realism’ or ‘Theoretical Figuration’.
No, the only thing that temporarily unites these very disparate artists is that I think they are very good, and that certain of their works might build an engaging and ideally enlightening exhibition within this very specific antiquarian context. If the ‘historical objects’ in this show already belong to Harris Lindsay, they have still been selected or conjoined by myself for their resonance with the contemporary art, such possible combinations and rewarding clashes, aesthetic or intellectual, being the very essence of the curatorial aim. The historical objects should as much mettre-en-valeur the contemporary art as vice versa, the present influencing the past, encouraging the spectator to question the values and codes of both domains equally and simultaneously. A whole range of issues, a whole other essay, might be provoked by such synchronicities and oppositions, between the hand-made and the mass-produced, the workshop and the atelier, the signed and the anonymous, the practical and the perversely purposeless.
New qualities of architecture and public space were brought to light as a result of artists' involvment
in four building projects supported by the RSA's Art for Architecture sheme.
words by Mark Rappolt
Dare or Demand
The artists-curator in the contemporary art world
Saskia van der Kroef
University of Amsterdam 2006
