While there are plenty of examples of contemporary artists being commissioned for album sleeves – Sonic Youth covers have included work by Richard Prince, Raymond Pettibon and Christopher Wool, while Talking Heads hired Robert Rauschenberg for Speaking in Tongues (1983) – I can’t think of so many bands that have used paintings from before the dawn of rock’n‘roll.
Last year there were two high-profile exceptions, neither of which I paid too much attention to until I saw that both had appeared on a list of 2008’s best album artwork. Topping the chart is the cover for Fleet Foxes’ self-titled debut, which is – somewhat surprisingly – a crop from Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Netherlandish Proverbs (1559).
As frieze‘s associate editor Dan Fox pointed out yesterday, it could be the cover for a Deutsche Grammophon recording of 12th-century Flemish plainsong – which was, I assume, exactly Fleet Foxes’ intention (or rather that of designers Dusty Summers, Sasha Barr and Robin Pecknold). The brief is easy to imagine: ‘Please cloak our lovingly crafted, close-harmonied hymnals with something, you know, old.’
So is this a new direction for mainstream indie bands, or is it further evidence that, as Adrian Shaughnessy argued in Cover Art By: New Music Graphics (2008), the album cover is a dying art form? The idea of awards for cover art itself feels somewhat anachronistic; record labels are yet to find a convincing way of packaging downloaded music.
Also on the list is the cover for Coldplay’s Viva La Vida (2008) which uses Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) (though the album title is a nod to Frida Kahlo). Here, Fleet Foxes‘ unintrusive copy is ignored in favour of enthusiastically daubed white paint. Ingres’ great rival certainly makes for a surprising match for a band that, according to a 2008 poll sponsored by hotel chain Travelodge, produce the music most likely to help people fall asleep. Indeed, on the day of the album’s release, rather than talking up the July Revolution of 1830, Chris Martin made this mild claim on the band’s website: ‘I hope there’s songs on there that will make a shit day slightly less shit, or a good day even better.’ My guess is that the image was either chosen to coincide with the band’s vaguely military-inspired restyle, or suggested by the album’s producer Brian Eno (whose Another Green World, 1975 used a detail from Tom Phillips’ After Raphael, 1973).
So are there many other precedents? The most obvious one that I can think of is Peter Saville’s use of A Basket of Roses (1890) by Henri Fantin-Latour for New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies (1983) – the title of which was, intriguingly, taken from a line that Gerhard Richter, whose Kerze, 1983 adorns Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation, spray-painted on the outside of Cologne’s European Kunsthalle in 1981. The National Gallery, so the story goes, refused reproduction rights until Factory record label boss Tony Wilson pointed out that the painting was part of the national collection belonging to the people of Great Britain and that ‘the people wanted it’.
frieze.com’s regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.
The record for the number of visitors to a contemporary art exhibition – set 12 years ago by ‘Sensation’ at the Royal Academy – has been broken by ‘The Revolution Continues: New Chinese Art’, the inaugural show at Charles Saatchi’s new London space – reports the Guardian.
The LA Times has an interview with outgoing director Jeremy Strick (pictured above).
After the National Academy Museum, New York received criticism for selling two paintings from its collection,The New York Times asks what’s so bad about deaccessioning.
Two weeks before President-elect Barack Obama takes up office, The Art Newspaper looks at his arts policies.
Antonio Villairagosa (pictured above), the mayor of Los Angeles, announces January 2009 as LA Arts Month, claiming L.A as ‘the Venice of the 21st century’. The city has a total of 900,000 employed in the creative industries, who generate a total of US$100 million revenue each year.
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London looks to establish an exhibition centre in Blackpool, reports The Art Newspaper.
Cities in the UK will compete every four years for the title of British capital of culture, following the success of Liverpool as the 2008 European capital of culture, reports the Guardian.
The Wall Street Journalreports that artists are taking advantage of a fall in recycled materials.
In an interview with The Independent, Nicholas Penny (pictured above), the director of the National Gallery, argues that blockbuster exhibitions are a thing of the past.
A new and regular round-up of recent and breaking arts-related news.
LA MoCA is down, but not yet out – from the LA Times. Critic Roberta Smith offers some advice on how to rescue the ailing institution.
The renovated Whitechapel Gallery is due to reopen in April 2009. The New York Timesreports that planned exhibitions include an Isa Genzken retrospective and a show of works from the British Council, whose collection has never had a permanent home.
Damien Hirst demands £200 from a 16-year old street art – from The Independent.
To coincide with the opening of the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Washington Post considers Frank Gehry’s fraught legacy.
REDCAT reviewed five years since it opened – from the LA Times.
Designed by I. M. Pei, Museum of Islamic Art opens in Qatar – from The New York Times.
Interview with Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey – from the Guardian.
Sao Paulo Biennial under threat – from The Art Newspaper.
A new report from London-based think-tank Demos claims that museums alienate the public.
Ignoring the looming recession, two new galleries open in London – from The Art Newspaper.
An update on the UAE Pavilion at Venice 2009 – from the Guardian.
Art director Pearce Marchbank recently launched a website that rounds up much of his excellent magazine work from the past 40 years, including many now-iconic covers for Architectural Design, Time Out and OZ.
Marchbank started at Central School of Art and Design, London in 1966, initially influenced by George Lois (whose work for Esquire is currently showing at MoMA ; some of Lois’s best-known covers have been revisited – or rehashed – a few times of late).
A precocious student, Marchbank was art-directing AD, a ‘design science’ monthly, while still studying at Central. After graduating, he worked on Friends, the short-lived Mick Jagger-funded UK version of Rolling Stone, before starting at the newly founded Time Out in 1970. Marchbank’s re-design of the Time Out logo, a slightly blurred Franklin Gothic only intended as a stop-gap, is still used today.
The covers are all the more impressive given that Marchbank would often have less than a day to come up with a design. Marchbank worked at Time Out until 1983, then moving to the Richard Branson-backed competitor Event. Interestingly, some of his layouts for Le Nez Rouge (pictured below), a house magazine for a wine club that Marchbank worked on in 1984, are close to those of well-designed new(ish)comers Fantastic Man and Bedeutung. It seems that his influence lives on.
A hushed sense of anticipation preceded a late-night preview of Matt Wolf’s Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell at the ICA last Friday. How sensitively would the young director handle the life of the much-loved disco auteur? How, more to the point, could Wolf even begin to deal with the many sides of his musical output? Allen Ginsberg, who appears several times, called Russell’s music ‘Buddhist bubblegum’ – a pretty good catch-all for a busy career that, aside from the emaciated disco and cello-and-voice folk for which he’s best known, ran from almost joining the Talking Heads, to scoring Samuel Beckett’s final play, producing a failed hiphop project fronted by a young Vin Diesel and performing with Philip Glass at the Kitchen (where Russell was musical director). (Despite the oft-noted connection between classical minimalism and disco’s loops, Russell was the only musician whose career successfully passed between the two.)
A trailer for Wild Combination
Full review to follow, but Wild Combination is an excellent – and sometimes heartbreaking – film that follows the awkward Iowan teen from Buddhist seminary in San Francisco to (relative) fame as a dance producer, through to his slow decline due to AIDS-related illnesses and eventual death, at 40, in 1992. Wolf has said that he was sometimes restricted by footage that was either non-existent or hackneyed, which I’d guess accounts for Russell’s best-known releases – the records he put out as Loose Joints and Dinosaur L – being skimmed over in favour of his World of Echo album of reverbed solo cello. This aside, the film does an awful lot in just 71 minutes.
During his own lifetime Russell’s music went largely unheard outside of Manhattan. But, with Audika Records diligently released managing Russell’s vast archive of unreleased tapes (the next of which, Love Is Overtaking Me, comes out at the end of October) and Tim Lawrence forthcoming biography, Hold On to Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-92 , his singular legacy of Buddhist bubblegum is in good hands.
Curated by the critic and art historian Richard Cork, ‘A Life of Their Own’ at The Castle Arts, Lismore, comprises works by nine emerging British sculptors
