A defining characteristic of much art about music is the absence of music. It mostly concerns itself with music's myriad popular forms. Jazz, Western and non-Western forms of classical or traditional music seldom feature, save for bit-part appearances denoting ‘history’, ‘ethnicity’, or worse, ‘seriousness’. ‘Art about popular music’ could be more accurately described as ‘art about the sociology of music’, the rich prêt-a-porter visual lexicon that links design, fashion and technology to sociological phenomena; subcultures, and the political and economic conditions that incubate them. Art replays already extant visual signifiers of what popular music commonly represents – sex, sedition, solidarity and a fixation with youth. If it's the properties and structures of music itself you want to explore, you might as well make music, but why bother when you can just bring to a gallery all that subcultural capital in neat and tidy image form, without the dirty business of trying to get gigs, schlepping gear around, or posting mp3s on myspace.com and hoping for the best.
‘Thank You for the Music (London Beat)’, curated by Johannes Fricke Waldthausen – a tweaked version of an exhibition at Galerie Sprüth Magers in Munich earlier this year – was, on the face of things, typical of this tendency; little music but a mélange of photographs, video and the odd sculpture or painting co-existing in deathless limbo; subject matter clawing for air from beneath glassy photographic surfaces, and straightjacketed by objecthood. Portraits of Iggy Pop and Debbie Harry by Robert Mapplethorpe (1978 and ’81, respectively) gazed from the walls like photographs of waxworks rather than living icons of nihilistic beauty. The Velvet Underground with Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick hover in Paul Morrissey’s photos as silver-surfaced spectres from art and experimental Rock’s year zero. A monitor played David and Albert Maysles’ Gimme Shelter, their classic 1969 documentary about the Rolling Stone’s disastrous Altamont concert. Next to this bad acid trip, Sylvie Fleury’s giant psychedelic Mushrooom (2005) sculpture seemed superfluous.
Yet where ‘Thank You for the Music’ was successful was in articulating something beyond art’s dumb infatuation with pop music’s iconographics. The show took its title from Mika Taanila’s 1997 documentary of the same name (itself presumably an homage to Abba's cheesey chart-topper), which looks at the history and workings of the Muzak Coporation. In detailing with morbid relish how ‘Muzak is always underplayed […] enough of a theme, enough of a texture, but not too much […] background Muzak massages the mind more’, Taanila’s film describes the relationship between Muzak and financial profit: where music becomes a link in the economic chains of the service industry. Dan Graham’s stalwart video Rock My Religion (1982) played off Sean Dack’s 2003 No Encore – heavily-processed video footage of Nirvana smashing up their equipment – both giving attention to how the theatre of Rock’s clichéd codes of behaviour can also have political import. Liam Gillick and Philippe Parreno’s quixotic Briannnnnn and Ferryyyyyy (2004) raised the subject of art production and intellectual copyright. Presented as a series of animations, each 30-second episode opened with a Hip-Hop-lite soundtrack, briefly followed the misadventures of two ‘Ren and Stimpy’-like characters, and closed with end credits that read as forms of critique, for example ‘produced by: An Idea of Breaking the Law’. Its inclusion served to lift the level of engagement with music culture beyond the literal and starry-eyed.
Where the show merely admired popular music from a distance (the Mapplethorpe photos, for instance, or Hedi Slimane’s portrait of – to pinch Nick Kent’s assessment of Sid Vicious – that ‘exploding dim-wit’ Pete Doherty), all it gave was the nagging feeling that postwar popular music has proved far more culturally catalytic than art. Where it succeeded was in acknowledging that the thrill of music must be left to music alone, and instead explicitly focussed on the structures music generates; the nuanced codes of footwear worn in Los Super Elegantes’ photograph Nothing Really Matters (2006); the hyper-spectacular crowd in Andreas Gursky’s Tote Hosen (Dead Trousers, 2000) or the processes of aspiration and idolatry embodied by David Lamelas’ photograph Rock Star (Character Appropriation) (1974). Perhaps, if you read ‘musician’ as ‘artist’ or ‘curator’, it’s Musicians Producing Words … (2001), a Raymond Pettibon drawing, which best sums up art and music’s tangled dance: ‘Musicians producing words instead of notes are apt to fall off into embarrassing the band and crew … by fronting insipid pseudosophistishit as attitude performed … but we back it up, right? Turn it up – To ten – louder than words can tell.’
