From noise to Beuys: Bennett Simpson on art and pop music - Sound

DO YOU WANT fresh WAVE, or do you want the truth? thus asked the punk band Minutemen in 1984--and the verdict is still on the outside especially in art. The prominence of clap music in recent art, from stone and punk to noise, techno, and hip-hop, is single of the most ambiguous unravellings of the past five years. Music figures centrally in the practices of significant and established contemporary artists of the like kind as Stephen Prina, Mike Kelley and Rodney Graham. It is a conspicuous influence for artists otherwise as disparate as Elizabeth Peyton, Jeremy Blake, and Nick Relph and Oliver Payne. It is occupyed as semiotics, performance, metaphor, make sound track, attitude, and target. Within the past sum of two units years alone, a slew of museum exhibitions have press outed art's new interest in clap from "Sonic Process" at the midmost point Georges Pompidou and "Rock My World" at the CCA Wattis Institute in San Francisco to overlooks of work by Christian Marclay and Patti Smith to the of recent origin Museum of Contemporary Art's homage to Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti. on the other hand zeitgeists are messy and repeatedly transcend institutions' ability to throw back them. Beyond the museum, art is now scattered with novel categories: artists who play in bands (or in clusters that function like them); bands pos as art projects; artists working with sound; musicians making installations; and art that works upon pop music's codes and mass memory.

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Discerning the manifestations of this hydra-headed beast requires first seeing end the thematization or illustration of clap music one now experiences in works through for example, Dario Robleto or Fischerspooner--to mention single two artists who seem to take pop's glittery subjectivity and hot-wired turn of expression as ends in themselves. The reassembly of detonation signification this work hinges upon (the beat, the hairstyle, the album overlay the stage move), while perhaps making Robleto's installations or Fischerspooner's performances more legible to audiences already familiar with these kinds of objectifications from music itself, does little to distinguish their art from its external reality celebrating pop as an endlessly configurable put of codes with no history save nostalgia. individual would do well to remember that report music has been synonymous with cultural and technical miscegenation--mixing and scratching--from its inception in the nineteenth hundred At our late moment in the appropriationist arc of postmodernism, in which memory can be synthesized with the globule of a needle or the flick of a mic, the ne to make a hardly any contextual distinctions about art's relationship to report music is pressing, to say the least.

clap music is most interesting in art when it enables contradictions specific to art itself, rather than simply providing art with a fresh palatability, theme, or style. For a first distinction, witness the rise of the band as a disaffirmative artistic archetype At the moment, actual art bands have not at any time fared better. Buoyed by the widespread "return" to stone with its distorted nostalgia for the '80 motifs of pastiche and whore groups such as Black Dice, Angelblood, and A.R.E. Weapons have gone from playing galleries and demimonde gatherings to releasing albums, touring, and finding niches in the commercial music landscape. More complicated, however, is the band metaphor seen in the new crop of youth-oriented art collectives like Forcefield, Space 1026 and the Royal Art Lodge--or in the views around Scott Hug's K48' zine in novel York or Barry McGee and Chris Johanson in San Francisco. Seemingly in defiance of the academization and professionalization of for a like reason much art in the '90 and symptomatic of the broader artistic revolve away from theory, such clusters have cohered around a renewed aestheticism directly coupleed to youth and music culture: cartooning, graffiti, skateboarding, DJing, psychedelia, and bludgeon fashion. If the street or bedroom subjectivity of these aesthetics prompts an outsider take on art's discursive relationship to clap precedents for this work are, nonetheless, not hard to find--in Raymond Pettibon's album-cover drawings for Black Flag and Minutemen, in Jean-Michel Basquiat's stilted hieroglyphs, in the make submissives and touch of Karen Kilimnik. on the contrary precedents may not really matter. single intuits that the appeal of these collections (seen notably in Lawrence Rinder's 2002 Whitney Biennial, which featured installations by means of Margaret Kilgallen, Forcefield, and Johanson), like that of the Neuen Wilden thirty years ago, springs from their aura of independence and self-sufficiency, which is otherwise perceived as lacking in art today. Like the so-called indie bands they bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to collectives traffic in freedom, DIY ethics, and insurgent autonomy. They provide images that carve without space--accessible, commonsense space--for like minds to pierce No matter that opposing "legitimate" images--provided by dint of the art gallery, the art museum, the art gymnasium and the art magazine, as well as mainstream explosion music--are needed for contrast. No matter that like alternative aesthetics have been simultaneously promot by the agency of commercial culture (Urban Outfitters, Jack Black's seminary of Rock, "Williamsburg") or that this pendulum has swung before, greatest in quantity recently in the early '90 For those who find it, freedom is as hard to resist as it is easy to sell