Brad on contemporary art's engagement with music
Hey people
Found an article in Frieze that discussed whether contemporary art's engagement with music could be more adventurous. It's an interesting question, and I kind of wish that this article was a bit more adventurous in itself.
Basically the article says that at present most contemporary visual art limits itself to utilising and/or responding to Pop music. This is because Pop music itself has it's own unique visual signifiers that seem to work pretty well if you want to express certain sociological phenomena. Say if a visual artist uses something related to the Ramones/Iggy Pop/other punk pioneers, or pure pop icons like Madonna, they're using references that are pre-packaged and easy to decipher. The values that these musos represent are well established and not too ambiguous. This might work really well depending on the individual piece, but it does mean that the relationship between music and visual art ends up being limited to Pop culture (or Sub-Pop culture) references.
Following this the article goes on to say how music and visual art used to be linked more directly via theatre etc and also mentions links between John Cage (muso) and Robert Rauschenberg in the 60's. Beyond this the article kind of fades out with a few brief mentions of current collaborations between musos and visual art.
So what do I think? Well, I reckon that using music as a pop culture reference can be really good, but it perhaps risks being a bit obvious. At the same time collaborations between visual artists and musos (using original music) can run the risk of being a bit wanky, and in themselves seem to be often limited to musos playing live soundtracks to visuals (although I've seen a couple of excellent examples of this). I think that what this article is trying to get at is that maybe there should be greater exploration into how visual art and music can be combined in an original way, rather than falling back on to already established modes of operation.....
Glad I got that off my chest..
Found an article in Frieze that discussed whether contemporary art's engagement with music could be more adventurous. It's an interesting question, and I kind of wish that this article was a bit more adventurous in itself.
Basically the article says that at present most contemporary visual art limits itself to utilising and/or responding to Pop music. This is because Pop music itself has it's own unique visual signifiers that seem to work pretty well if you want to express certain sociological phenomena. Say if a visual artist uses something related to the Ramones/Iggy Pop/other punk pioneers, or pure pop icons like Madonna, they're using references that are pre-packaged and easy to decipher. The values that these musos represent are well established and not too ambiguous. This might work really well depending on the individual piece, but it does mean that the relationship between music and visual art ends up being limited to Pop culture (or Sub-Pop culture) references.
Following this the article goes on to say how music and visual art used to be linked more directly via theatre etc and also mentions links between John Cage (muso) and Robert Rauschenberg in the 60's. Beyond this the article kind of fades out with a few brief mentions of current collaborations between musos and visual art.
So what do I think? Well, I reckon that using music as a pop culture reference can be really good, but it perhaps risks being a bit obvious. At the same time collaborations between visual artists and musos (using original music) can run the risk of being a bit wanky, and in themselves seem to be often limited to musos playing live soundtracks to visuals (although I've seen a couple of excellent examples of this). I think that what this article is trying to get at is that maybe there should be greater exploration into how visual art and music can be combined in an original way, rather than falling back on to already established modes of operation.....
Glad I got that off my chest..
posted by Polly Dance at 10:56 AM
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