SWICHT ON THE POWER!
NOISE AND POLICIES ON MUSIC
BilbaoArte. Del 17 de octubre al 5 de diciembre de 2003. Bilbao.
Alaska & Nacho Canut, Laurie Anderson, Anat Ben-David, Tobias Bernstrup, Leigh Bowery, Carles Congost, Jane County, Chicks on Speed, Chico y Chica, DAF, Jon Mikel Euba, Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Diamanda Galás, Caron Geary, Dan Graham, Nina Hagen, Pam Hogg, Killer Barbies, Chris Korda, Kraftwerk, Ladypat, Lene Lovich, Begoña Muñoz, Yoko Ono, Genesis P-Orridge, Peaches, Planningtorock, Siouxsie Sioux, Jean-Luc Verna and Andy Warhol.
SWITCH ON THE POWER! Noise and the Policies of music brings together 30 artists from the world of art and music who employ similar performative and aesthetic strategies as a means to construct discourses that often convey alternative values and/or political critique. Through the various artworks and/or videographic documents, the exhibition highlights and explores the interactions between these artistic disciplines.
In "Switch on the Power. Noise and Policies on Music", we have ignored the temptation to show music as yet another theme in today's art and have instead focused on the singularity of artistic discursive practices that we see as being shared by pop, rock and other musical artists and by visual artists. In some cases, these artists have been part of trends such as happenings, Fluxus, body art, the various types of performance, etc., whereas others have followed the approaches of the artistic movements that emerged during the 20th century, reinventing them by adding their own contributions. Despite these differences, all these discourses have centred on the use of the body, reconstructed using individual parameters, as an aesthetic symbol for their public presentation, creating with it a language that has often specifically used the voice and which is characterised by an interest in linking various disciplines such as the performing arts, the visual arts, dance and/or various rituals of bodily movement, film, literature and design. Above all, however, these discourses have forged a body that moves to the orders of the sound that it itself generates, of musical offerings that have managed to establish a place for themselves in the contemporary music scene and which have, moreover, taken into account cultural contexts such as club culture or the cultural and social phenomenon of pop, rock and electronic music.
The title of the exhibition exploits the capacity of the English language for polysemy: "Switch on the Power!" alludes to the spirit of immediacy and independence that has often characterised the various musical and artistic movements in the show. The exhibition's subtitle, "Noise and Policies on Music" refers to the subversive nature of these practices, noise being understood as a form of disturbance that enters a system in order to modify it, and to the need to see these practices as policies with their own structures and languages.
ART, MUSIC AND PERFORMANCE
Since the early 20th century, several artistic movements and theorists have redefined, from several fronts, the concepts of Art and Artist, blurring, among other things, the borders between visual arts and other disciplines that were (and still are) considered 'minor'.
In the meantime, while these struggles were waged in the field of art with greater or lesser fortune, there were serious transformations in the field of popular music. These transformations have materialized as, with a determined absence of prejudice, different musical styles and influences have mixed, enabling the emergence of new cultural and social phenomena, among which we can highlight the unique pop-rock universe, which combines elements from fashion, advertising and the performing arts. Moreover: many of these processes have taken place practically with little or no regard for the opinion of critics, institutions and other controlling bodies, and nevertheless, during the development of these processes, we have also seen the rise of charismatic figures that have acquired social relevance: pop and rock stars. Stars that became what they are by using the tactics of art to differentiate their products and public personae, choosing to explain themselves in elaborate terms and adopting a hyper-reflective discourse where a fundamental role is given to aesthetic issues.
In this sense, since the 1960s, some pop and rock artists began to produce static and moving images to promote their songs and showbiz personae. These images referred to their performance strategies to present their music and to build their public personae from parameters that often resembled the premises of avant-garde artistic movements. Moreover, a good number of these people collaborated with cinema directors or visual artists to create what was a new product and format called video clip. This collection of performance and aesthetic strategies led to the creation of a complex artistic discourse that projected a real lifestyle, and which was soon to become a cultural and social phenomenon, of crucial importance in the foundation and dissemination of what we now call youth movements and which in turn led to urban tribes.
An essential element of the success of these strategies was based on the potential that the pop and rock worlds have traditionally shown as an instrument for resistance and rebellion in young people, and for being an excellent vehicle for social and political content. In fact, pop and rock have created fascinating works defending socially alternative values, and even though these products have not often achieved massive success, recent publications and authors such as Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson agree on highlighting the singularity of these musical styles and the politics they represent. In their opinion 'the phenomenon of pop and rock music, focused on the singers from the 1960s, works following a phono-logo-central logic, with the voice, the logos, as a place of truth invoking an idea of social group formed by the music group and the audience. Regarding the promoters of the protest, the singers were to be the political-cultural representatives of their audience, responding to the belief that music could and should be a soundboard for their audience'.
All these events in the world of music are related to the attention being given to the phenomenon of pop-rock and other contemporary music styles in the last few years by a new generation of visual artists, resulting in an intersection between both fields (music and art) that has become one of the most interesting lines of research in the current artistic scene.
In fact in the art world, a whole generation of artists that have lived or grown up with products from the music world, have incorporated these languages into their artistic work connecting them to artistic practices such as performance or body-art. Artists who made as well use of practices common in music, such as the personality cult, the insistent search for a generational element, with its specific problems, the use of mass production and a special interest in the idea of collective creation and that creation is not limited to an album, but also encompasses concert performances. In this respect, as witnessed in the sphere of music, there is a total lack of prejudice when it comes to combining styles and disciplines that once again reject the elitism of art and its determination to embrace the interests of the middle, working and other classes, one of the latest techniques for popularising art.
All these questions have led to the many artistic projects nowadays that result in a live, visual or recorded "product". These products are the outcome of the application of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary logic, which has become a generational symptom and is presented as a solution to the new communicational needs and concerns of this 'New' visual artist, who also projects a kind of non-conformism with the mechanisms that move the art world. Moreover, the artworks being created based on these premises, often attack the prevailing concept of a work of art, because the resulting product defies the traditional parameters of the art market, while at the same time questioning the rigid dividing line between disciplines.”
A BRIEF TOUR OF THE EXHIBITION
From the 1960s, Andy Warhol collaborated with the famous music group The Velvet Underground. This was the beginning of a new type of contemporary art where artists link visual art with popular music. Warhol's 1966 film The Velvet Underground and Nico is a good example of this interdisciplinary connection. However, in the history of the intersection between music and visual arts analysed in the exhibition, two artists stand out for being pioneers in contemplating popular music as a sphere to intervene in from an artistic standing. One of them is Yoko Ono, and we present her latest work Onochord, and the other is Laurie Anderson, who in works like Oh Superman from 1981, sets the foundations for a type of art that has currently a large number of followers. This is the case of Chico y Chica, Anat Ben-David, Planningtorock, Begoña Muñoz, Tobias Bersntrup and Chicks On Speed. The latter group, composed entirely of women, will present their new musical/artistic adventure called Art Rules a project with Douglas Gordon and Christopher Just that will be released soon as the new single of the band.
Diamanda Galás sound installation called SCHREI 27 consists of several short performances over the space of twenty-seven minutes alternating extreme high-energy vocal work with absolute silence. The performances are chapters of a confession which might have been induced through a chemical or mechanical manipulation of the brain. There is a high density of speech-sound over time which is often machine-like in its velocity. The work employs the atypical speech and vocal signal processing that Galás has been researching since 1979.
The social and cultural phenomenon of Rock and Pop has also provided significant examples of artists who in music have used aesthetic and performative strategies common in the world of visual arts. In the exhibition we are also acknowledging an specific style, punk, that at the end of the 70's made posible for women and sexual disidents to develope equal positions to the traditional parts played by men in music. Alaska & Nacho Canut, Siouxsie Sioux, Nina Hagen and Jayne County offer, for the first time in a museum, a detailed history of their careers; Lene Lovich presents The Power of Performance, a short film specifically made for this exhibition, and Peaches offers the visitor the world premier of the video-clip Fuck the Pain Away. Directly influenced by the language generated by Rock, the visitor can contemplate the work of artists such as Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Jon Mikel Euba and Jean-Luc Verna, who highlight in their work the artistic relevance of performance strategies developed by Rock. For his part, in Un mistique determinado, Carles Congost analyses and recreates teenage pop culture. The success of this collection of strategies can also be found in the group from Vigo Killer Barbies and their video Crazy, made by Silvia Superstar herself.
While the Rock phenomenon developed, in the 1970s the German group Kraftwerk was to popularise electronic music, creating unique works that have been the inspiration for several of the events taking place in music and art in the last two decades. The exhibition contains performances by the group and several videos by another German group, DAF (Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft), which in the early 1980s applied electronics to Punk music.
Questioning the frontiers between artistic disciplines and contexts and halfway between club culture, Rock, fashion and art, are two artists: Leigh Bowery, object of several retrospective exhibitions after his death, among which we can highlight that of the latest Venice Biennale, and which this time presents a selection of performances carried out in the 1990s with his music group Minty. In this sphere, we can also include the British fashion designer and performer Pam Hogg, who has created two mini-collection of clothes and two videos where she sings her songs as a way to show, both the songs and the clothes.
Relating club culture, ragga, hip hop, and other popular electronic musical styles that get to be popular in the 90's, another british artist, Caron Geary presents a vídeo edited by Dick Jewell in wich we can observe how under the diferent nicknames that she has used in her career (MC Kinky, Cantankerous, etc..) her musical and performative estrategy has serve to apropiate and to question the typical male attitudes of those styles. As an example of the new practices in the context of current London club culture, the artist Ladypat contributes with a selection of videos of his own or made in collaboration with different artists in this field.
Regarding the relationship between Art, Rock and Politics-in the classical sense of the term- the exhibition includes the emblematic work by Dan Graham Rock my Religion and the video Save the Planet, Kill Yourself by Chris Korda, inviting us to enter the strategies that in the 1990s linked music and political activism. Finally, it is a pleasure to recover -twenty years after it was first broadcast on television, the TVE programme La Edad de Oro, directed by Paloma Chamorro- the video by the British Artist Genesis P-Orridge and his group Psychic TV. With this video we include documentation on the PANDROGENY project, which is currently being developed by Genesis.
Xabier Arakistain. Exhibition curator.
