February 19th, 2010 Nosheen Iqbal
Animal Collective's forthcoming installation at the Guggenheim comes from a proud tradition of pop mash-ups with the art world
It's better than copying Jackson Pollock and more ambitious than pretending to be full-time robots. The only surprising thing about Animal Collective taking over New York's Guggenheim museum is that nobody thought of it sooner. But the Brooklyn experimental pop crew are collaborating with video artist Danny Perez on a site-specific installation for the museum's 50th anniversary.
The idea is to "transform the rotunda into a kinetic, psychedelic environment". From the sounds of it, the piece – Transverse Temporal Gyrus – could beef up the band's future live shows considerably. Ticket-holders are promised video projections and visual abstractions; I'd count on at least a couple of ethereal black-and-white film shorts and Cy Twombly-ish swiggles projected on the walls. The band won't be performing in the space, but the three-hour show will include recorded music composed for the event.
The Guggenheim's curators have pulled off a neat trick. Of all the Brooklyn-based bands experimenting with art rock, this lot are the best choice to fill the space. Just imagine their bass bouncing through Frank Lloyd Wright's iconic space, their blissed-out rave-pop sliding down the spiral walls.
Animal Collective are not the first to try the art-pop mash-up, though. Plenty of bands have played live shows in galleries or museums. Blur's comeback started with a gig at the railway museum in Colchester. Pet Shop Boys have also played in several modern art institutions. And seeing the Strokes perform among 50ft dinosaurs at the Natural History Museum in 2006 is probably one of the most surreal gigs I've been to.
However, artistic intervention in a public institution, mixing musicianship with modern art, is a little less common. There's the Velvet Underground getting it on with Andy Warhol, and Kevin Shields curating and soundtracking an exhibition of Patti Smith's polaroids. Similarly, Massive Attack's 3D and UnitedVisualArtists worked on Volume at the V&A, another site-specific piece. The former built the sounds, synchronised to fit a luminous installation of columns in the foyer of the building in 2005. The audio-visual sculpture could only be triggered by visitors moving inside and around the piece, like a Dan Flavin show crossed with Kraftwerk.
Last year, David Byrne of Talking Heads brought his museum piece, Playing the Building, to London's Roundhouse. Originally staged in Stockholm's Färgfabriken gallery, Byrne's interactive installation was a sublime bit of mechanical doodling. Visitors were invited to the show to play an organ connected by trailing tubes and wiring to the walls, girders and beams of the building. Bizarre, but properly seductive. As I'm sure Animal Collective will be.
Posted in Animal Collective, Art, Blogposts, Culture, Electronic music, Indie, Museums, Music, Pet Shop Boys, Pop and rock, The Strokes, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 19th, 2010 Sean Michaels
For one night only, the feral indie crew are to transform the esteemed art institution into a 'kinetic, psychedelic' jungle
Animal Collective are to take over New York's Solomon R Guggenheim museum, transforming the art gallery into a "kinetic, psychedelic" installation. The Brooklyn trance-pop gang will collaborate with artist Danny Perez for a one-night-only exhibition, Transverse Temporal Gyrus.
The 4 March event is part of the Guggenheim's 50th anniversary celebrations. After gigs by Yeasayer and Paul Banks last autumn, and one whole day with free museum admission, the gallery will now see its rotunda turned over to the architects of Merriweather Post Pavilion. Their creative partner, film-maker Danny Perez, worked on the band's videos for Who Could Win a Rabbit and Summertime Clothes, and directed their new art-film, ODDSAC.
"One of the things that you notice almost immediately in the jungle are the birds," Animal Collective wrote about the installation. "What are they saying? Does each variation serve a purpose? Why are there repetitions? Is there a pattern or is that just your imagination?" Over the course of Transverse Temporal Gyrus – and across space and time! – the group aim to provoke similar questions. To this end they will use video projections, costumes, props and original recorded music.
"As New Yorkers we are all familiar with the everyday noise around us – the car alarms, the subway trains braking, the music in bars ... Do we not realise how these sounds are affecting us? How they make us feel or act? With this in mind we wanted to create an environment where people could take some time to listen to other kinds of sounds and get away from those familiar sounds of the city. Keeping in mind the birds of the jungle, we've created an array of sounds with Animal Collective's music that is seemingly random – or is it?"
Visitors to the exhibition will be free to explore the group's "mysterious hideaway", wandering over the museum's ramps and across its open spaces. All this, Animal Collective promise, will help to "to unite [our sounds] with the inside of your brain". We just hope it doesn't hurt.
Tickets to the exhibition go on sale this morning at 10am EST.
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February 12th, 2010 Helienne Lindvall
Meet the rock managers who've spotted an opening for them to bring expertise and experience – as well as funds – into the art world
Music and the visual arts have had a loose relationship for decades. From the 60s onward, bands like the Beatles, The Who and Roxy Music all had at least one member who went to art school before embarking on a music career. Others, like Tony Bennett and Ronnie Wood, pursued careers as painters in the later part of their careers.
Still, the funding and business side of the visual arts has traditionally been dominated by trust funds, the rich and corporate City patrons. There is evidence that this is starting to change. As the music business became more lucrative, so artists such as Madonna, Sir Elton John, Jarvis Cocker, Brian Eno and his ex-band mate Bryan Ferry invest much of their accumulated wealth in both modern and classical art. Even Kylie, Robbie and the Gallagher brothers have been seen in art galleries and auction houses.
Music manager and promoter Raye Cosbert thinks that the art community can gain more than just funding from the music industry – he thinks it could use the expertise and experience gained from manoeuvring some of the most successful music careers of the last couple of decades. That's why this week he along with artist agent Serena Morton launched new art venture Morton Metropolis.
If anyone should know how to nurture the talented, but emotionally fragile, personalities that frequently populate the art world, it's Cosbert. He has managed Amy Winehouse since the spring of 2006, and has also worked as a promoter with acts such as Blur, Robbie Williams, Lily Allen, Massive Attack and Björk.
"Developing talent, that's what I do," he says. "I find it and I A&R it, which I guess could be called curation." Cosbert thinks that although accessibility to music has changed the music business, what hasn't changed is that talent still needs to be found and nurtured. "The middle man is still important. What Serena does is to transpose my experience into the art world."
Morton had taken Cosbert, a personal friend, to artist Gerald Laing's studio to see his piece Belshazzar's Feast, based on a picture featuring Raye at a table with Amy Winehouse reaching for a bottle of champagne at the Ivor Novello awards. From then on, Cosbert's interest in the art world grew.
The idea for the project came about after a chance encounter with another music manager – Pat Magnarella, who looks after Green Day. "Pat was the first music industry person to truly spot the market," explains Morton. Last year, Magnarella's management signed up UK visual artist Charming Baker – giving him some rock'n'roll-style promotion – and recruited Morton to work on a US art show for them.
"I introduced Raye to Pat," she continues. "and seeing what Pat was doing in the US got Raye thinking along the same lines."
"The art world is ready for some new blood," says Morton, who joined Christie's 20th century and contemporary British arts department in the 90s and set up one of the first pop-up shows in London's Brick Lane in 1998. "We want to make it more fun."
Morton Metropolis is funded by Cosbert and, he says, Morton provides "15 years of eye". The gallery opens with an exhibition of prints by Gerald Laing, including Belshazzar's Feast, and is aptly located on Berners Street, where the Perfoming Right Society and UK Music are also situated. The company will focus on artists in their mid-careers, aiming to spot talent that has been overlooked by the more established houses. "We want to provide a safety net for our artists," says Cosbert.
Winehouse's manager thinks he can take the business of art forward. One thing artist managers and concert promoters know about is risk management – they understand the intricacies of profit and loss. In the same way that a record label can use the profit from one successful artist to underpin the funding for another whose music isn't selling well enough, so Cosbert and Morton say that if they're able to help two artists to become the new Hockney, they can afford to support other up-and-coming artists with the profit.
"Art is long, life is short," says Cosbert. "I was tired of going to my friends' houses, seeing Ikea pictures on the walls. I haven't felt this excited for a long time."
But maybe there's more to it than that. As the internet has made music more disposable, easily transferable and downloaded for free, the visual art world may in the future become even more alluring to people in the music business. After all, you can't download a painting, installation or sculpture.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Art markets, Blogposts, Music, Music industry, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off
February 1st, 2010 Jonathan Jones
This journey through the culture of the Black Atlantic – from Primitivist modernism through to postmodern video work – is full of startling insights, even if it eventually loses its way
Jacob Lawrence's Street to Mbari, a picture in pencil, tempera and gouache of a crowded market in Nigeria in 1964, is the kind of work that curators put into a group exhibition at their peril. It is so good, so convincing, that it almost blinds you to the merits of every other artist in Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, which opens today at Tate Liverpool. And yet Street to Mbari – a portrait of Africa by a great African American artist – is also an argument in favour of this exhibition, and a way to penetrate its complex ideas.
Tate Liverpool seems an apposite place to explore the bleaker aspects of the Atlantic. The museum is contained within the forbidding 19th-century warehouses of the Albert Dock, which speaks more lucidly than any other British setting of the history of the slave trade, documented in detail at the International Slavery Museum nearby.
But Afro Modern is more complex than that. It is inspired by a book, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, first published in 1993 by the British cultural critic Paul Gilroy. Gilroy's thesis, reacting against essentialist Afrocentrism, is that black culture's response to the modern world, into which Africans were transported so violently, has been ambivalent. As I understand it – and it is a difficult book – Gilroy believes that although African migration in the 18th century was brutally enforced, the development of black consciousness in the Americas and Britain was never just a rejection of "white" culture, but an engagement with it. Black culture, in other words, has crossed and re-crossed the Atlantic – at first in chains, but then willfully and creatively.
Those journeys are well captured by the work of Jacob Lawrence, who was born in Atlantic City in 1917 and in the aftermath of the Great Depression, created the most important American history painting cycle of the 20th century, The Migration Series. It portrays the journeys of black people from the oppressive south to the northern industrial cities in search of work and freedom. Lawrence's Street to Mbari is the exhilarated, ecstatic, yet composed and detailed record of an outsider's response to Africa. In Lawrence's eyes, Africa is the new world. It is a painting that travels; not a document of "homecoming", but as a record of complex perspectives, of what was gained as well as lost.
The show is more subversive than it first appears. Yes, there are nods to the Harlem Renaissance – notably poems by Langston Hughes illustrated by Aaron Douglas – and documents from the civil rights era, including a telling work by David Hammons in which black faces and hands press desperately at the glass panel of the door to a university admissions office. But here too are works by white artists who were entranced by "the primitive". Picasso's 1909 Bust of a Woman comes from the same period as Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and shares its deliberately jarring, shocking transformation of a face into a carved wooden African mask.
Man Ray's photograph Noir et Blanche (1926) portrays the famous Parisian avant garde muse Kiki of Montmartre resting her pearl-complexioned face next to a mask from Africa. The picture finds a similarity in the almond shapes of their faces that, too, echoes Les Demoiselles. These images take us to the very heart of the fascination with African art that so inspired European modernists a century ago.
These are artists whose views on race would probably seem highly offensive to us. And not so long ago, an exhibition such as this would have felt obliged to point this out, to provide long wall texts explaining that modern art's "primitivism" was the racist culture of an age of empire. But this exhibition is far more ambivalent: it documents the jazz age dances of Josephine Baker as comic, self-conscious, dramatisations of the kind of fantasy Picasso indulges in Les Demoiselles, with watercolours and magazine photographs that reveal how she became an icon for Parisian artists. It sets a painting of Harlem by the strange British painter Edward Burra alongside jazzy works by the Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas – the pure shapes of Douglas's murals contrasting with Burra's meaty caricatures.
Near Lawrence's street scene is Constantin Brancusi's abstract sculpture The Blonde Negress (1926): a shining metallic vision of a futurist head that resembles a cross between yet another African mask and a design for a beautiful robot. Brancusi's eroticised, idolised visions of an abstract human form indicate how modernists drew on Africa to invent a utopian model for a new humanity. Elsewhere, a film by the surrealist Maya Deren records Voodoo rituals in 1940s Haiti – the very appearance of which reminds us that no history of the Black Atlantic world can just be aesthetic or art-historical.
One of the best things about Gilroy's book was the way in which it broke up the distinctions between high art and popular culture, and between history and the new, that limit conventional views of modernism. The Black Atlantic discusses JMW Turner's 1840 painting of a slave ship and tells how its bloody sky and sea scattered with flailing African bodies so upset its first owner, John Ruskin, that he sold it. Yet it also discusses how Quincy Jones was influenced by a stay in Sweden in what Gilroy sees as his pivotal role in the reinvention of jazz. Gilroy sees such music as one of the fundamental black contributions to a "counter-culture of modernity".
In the early galleries of Afro Modern, the curators follow this principle, mixing jazz culture and art together – Langston Hughes's poems are modelled on blues lyrics and eerily evoke Robert Johnson, but read with enormous weight and clarity on the page. Yet in the later rooms of the show, recent art is treated in isolation from that kind of larger cultural history. The least impressive room is the 1960s display, whose protest art seems narrow in comparison with the possibilities of 1920s modernism: you simply don't get the same sense of creative dialogue between black and white artists, although Frank Bowling's painting Who's Afraid of Barney Newman?, which reinvents Newman's abstract vertical bands in tropical colours and places on them a spectral map of South America, is a highly honourable exception. The last room presents Chris Ofili's painting Captain Shit, with its psychedelic black superhero, whose powerful features suggest Japanese comics. But offering the work in isolation from 1990s hip-hop, whose aesthetic it so clearly shares, is surely a bit po-faced.
In fact, the entire argument about the Black Atlantic seems to dissipate as the show goes on. Only fleetingly does its big themes surface in the contemporary work on display. In Ellen Gallagher's spooky painting Bird in Hand (2006), for instance, which resembles a design for a crazed countercultural remake of Pirates of the Carribean. And there is a hypnotically horrible film by American artist Kara Walker, Eight Possible Beginnings; or the Creation of African-America, in which the history of the US is told by puppets in black-and-white silhouette. They begin in folksy, sickly-sweet nostalgia, but rapidly degenerate into scenes of rape and abuse. I can't count the number of times I have encountered films by Walker in group shows; each time they grow to consume surrounding works. Here is an artist whose sense of history seems to be choking her, and threatens to swallow us.
Outside, rain lashes the pool at the heart of the Albert Dock, out towards the Mersey and the Atlantic beyond. This exhibition is a brave, intelligent – and at its best – transformative encounter with that melancholy ocean and its voyagers.
Rating: 4/5
Posted in Art, Art and design, Chris Ofili, Culture, Exhibitions, Jazz, Music, Reviews, Tate Liverpool, guardian.co.uk | Comments Off