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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.
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
