This is going to be an unusual post, to say the least, focussing on a single topic, an exhibition at the lovely Glucksman Gallery in Cork which explores the relationship betwen pop music and art, and hence was of great interest to me beyond that which an average art exhibition tends to stir (although I have previously spoken of some finer forms of art here). Anyway, somehow it didn't seem appropriate to mix such culture with, for example, a review of 'Predators', which will have to wait for the next post, so I will stick to the single topic for now.
I guess I haven't thougtht too much previously about art and music, although certain album sleeves always to me showed an artistic sensibility, for example the classic covers Peter Saville designed for Joy Division's 'Closer' (what a gorgeous sepulchral image) and 'Unknown pleasures' (apparently a graphic representation of a radio-astronomy capture of the sound from a supernova - how bloody cool is that?), as shown below. While in university in Dublin, I had a huge poster on my bedroom wall for their 'Love will tear us apart', very much in the spirit of 'Closer' (as shown on the left), just to keep me cheerful!
Around the same era, I also always had a fondness for the sleeve of 'A broken frame' by Depeche Mode, which I posted about previously here. In more recent years, as albums gave way to CDs and thence to downloads, the art aspect progressively shrunk and had to work harder to grab one's attention, but ones which grabbed my attention included Tindersticks (the first abum) by Tindersticks the band (which I wrote about here) and selected others like 'A rush of blood to the head' by Coldplay (perhaps their finest moment, the graphic art not the music) and 'High violet' by the National (of course I am biased towards this album, as shown here, but it is a very cool and modern image on the cover):
Anyway, this brings me somewhat circuitously to the exhibition which this post is meant to be about the exhibition, called 'Mixtapes' in Cork's Glucksman Gallery (whose website is here).
The Glucksman is a beautifully sited building in the leafy lower grounds of University College Cork, built on the footprint of two old tennis courts which it was apparently designed to fit within, leading to it having a somewhat tree-like appearance (in perfect harmony with its surroundings), with a slender base blossoming above to a curved wooden block housing two floors of gallery.
In November 2009, a catastrophic flood ensued from the release of a huge volume of water from a dam around 10 miles from the Gallery, and the river which flowed through the University grounds, right beside the Gallery, briefly but dramatically turned into a torrent carrying the apparent volume of the Mississippi for a few midnight hours. While the shape of the gallery meant that the current collections were held high out of the waters, the basement, housing the art collection store and restaurant were, like many other university buildings, filled with dank destructive water. It has been a long road back for all affected buildings, but thankfully the gallery is in business and well worth a visit.
The exhibition called 'Mixtapes' (see programme here) runs from June to October, and I visited one quiet Sunday afternoon, and with my son got a personalised curatorial tour from one of the gallery staff.
The entrance to the gallery leads directly onto a concrete and metal stairway which is in perhaps deliberate stark architectural contrast to the bright light and pale wood of the upper floors, and the first sight at the top of the stairs is a Marc Bijl piece called 'Teenage kicks', about which there is an article here. This is a very visually arresting opening, with a black-painted drum kit adorned with roses and a fake human skull and the backdrop painted with the fairly cliched rock'n'roll slogan seen below (leaving unsaid the code about leaving a good looking corpse). It is a nice piece, the drum kit (from which the sticks had to be hidden, apparently, to avoid life beating art too loudly), dramatic, and an interesting approach to rock sculpture, like the 'tomb of the unknown Spinal Tap drummer' (bizarre gardening accident suggested by the roses? spontaneous combustion suggested by the coating of carbonised ash? did that skull look like it choked on someone else's vomit?). Anyway, art is supposed to be for the viewer to interpret, and I may have got a tad carried away that time, but I liked the drama and unsubtelty of it, just as rock should be.
I was less entusiastic about the glittery turntables next to the drum kit. The first floor is also dominated by a very odd assemblage of wood and mirrors into which one can wander, with speakers and video clips capturing the sounds of the start of a gig or soundcheck, which is, uhm, interesting and certainly different, and apparently designed especially for the exhibition. There are also a very cool set of stylsed shots of Robbie Williams fans before a gig, in which the photos have been digitally dissembled until they look like pointillistic or charcoal shots, and lose their identity, which is apparently the idea (loss of identity compounded by their own wearing football tops) and I think works pretty well.
On the stairs to the upper level one encounters Alejandro Cesarco's 'Ramones: an autobiography' (artists homepage here), which is a set list of Ramones songs all beginning with the word 'I', building a sort of life story like a list of things teenagers might say, and which is pretty cool.
The image below presents a panorama of the upper floor, including in the middle distance on the left a large black ball hanging in a grotesque parody of a disco ball (looking more like Spinal Tap - again - meets the Death Star), and which I also thought was an interesting piece. In the middle against the wall is one of two pieces which are Husker Du singles presented in display cases like artefacts in a museum - music to be preserved and studied. Considering the acres of paper which have been written about modern music (even that of Husker Du) much music is very much a subject of scholarly attention, and thus this makes sense. Maybe in 500 years a future museum on Phobos will feature actual Husker Du records and accompanying interprative babble about what they might represent.....
The Metal Ball is by Baldvin Ringsted and there is an article about it here. On the right of the photo is a second set of photos of fans pretending to be rock stars, the first appearing on the first floor and being from the 70s, while the ones upstairs feature the same subjects 30 years later, older but certainly no wiser.
The final two pieces I really liked were by the same artist, Anne Collier, and were (from the top) 'Crying' (apparently an image of Ingrid Bergman) and 'Anything you want' (the darker one with the single eye). Both take a pile of record sleeves as their central motif, in the upper one against a simple backdrop of black and white, and in the second an eye on the front cover stares from encroaching blatant blackness, as if through a keyhole from another dimension. I think these are really simple yet dramatic pictures, and the classic pride and power of the stack of albums deserves monuments such as these to remind those who now now only the iTunes library where these stacks would once have leaned against their walls. Its a bit of an old recherche of times perdu, as it were.
One last mention must go to the admirably daft piece by Merdeyth Sparks 'History' (see article on her here and here), which I left the gallery with a piece of. No, I did not steal it, but it consisted of two piles of paper album sleeves with the words 'You can't erase history' on one side and 'You can erase history' on the other, and they were meant to be taken away. Apparently they have lots in stock in case they run out. I guess it says something about the disposable mass-produced nature of modern music, the classical A-side/B-side duality of the single, and possibly illegal file-sharing, which are of course points worth making.
I enjoyed my trip to Mixtapes, and it made me think about music (and maybe even art) in a different way, and the building is always worth a visit and our support given its rough recent history, so I can only recommend it highly for all these reasons.
I guess the overall theme of the exhibition was, for me, somewhat nostalgic for a different era of music fandom, not that long ago but yet might years before iPods evolved to rule the world, and when the predecessor of the playlist in the fan's life was the mixtape, carefully assembled on C60/C90 cassettes far more laboriously its moden usurper; the spirit of this arcane art was best captured in Nick Hornby's wonderful 'High fidelity' (I previously talked about my love of that book here). I loved mixtapes, and made many in my day, which lends the name of the exhibition a particular resonance for me. My favourite was cheerfully entitled 'The darkest night' from around 1990 (well, what would you expect from the kind of melodramatist who had a huge gothic Joy Division poster on their wall at the time?) - I am still waiting for the royalty cheques after the releases of both 'Dark was the night' (my review here) and 'Dark night of the soul' (my article on which is here) in the last while on the grounds of that one!
Anyway, back to the point. 'Mixtapes' celebrates and ruminates on things which remain important to anyone who ever made their own mixtape. Go, see, think, be the fan.
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