Unknown Pleasures

by Matthew Thompson, Associate Curator

 

“Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist.”
-Yves Saint-Lauren, upon announcing his retirement¹

 

Music led me to art. When I was a teenager, I was so thoroughly obsessed with the band Sonic Youth that, aside from the usual accumulation of rare b-sides and zine interviews in languages that I did not speak, I spent a good deal of time trying to look, dress, and sound like Thurston Moore. I broke up a band, not by demanding that we play Sonic Youth songs, but by demanding that we play more Sonic Youth songs, and insisting that I sing them all. But it was the time spent between practices, listening to the records in my bedroom, which had lasting effects. Eventually, once I tired of tracking down obscure Danish interview discs, I wanted to know about the album covers themselves, and, as I learned more about the artists that had created them—James Welling, Richard Kern, Raymond Pettibon, Gerhard Richter, and Mike Kelley—one obsession slowly replaced another.

Art and music have long been cultural cohabitants. Often, their relationship is described in terms of influence. James Welling, for example, describes the impact that music had on his early photographs:

 

For me, a big part of the inspiration for doing the aluminum-foil and drapery photographs came from experiencing Glenn Branca’s music. Spectacular, ear-shattering crescendos. Have you heard him live? Anyway, he was doing these early pieces with massed groups of guitars, and his music confirmed a lot of my ideas about where I was headed with abstraction and these absolutely spectacular images I wanted to make. In their hallucinogenic accumulation of detail, those photographs really were a response to his music. It was a bone-rattling experience. Not that it was idea-less, but you needed your whole body to hear it.²

 

Much of music’s seductive power lies in its quick, visceral gratification. It is difficult to recall the last time an artwork compelled the metaphorical equivalent of rolling down the windows, turning it up, and singing along. Although, on its surface, the comparison seems absurd, what would this type of viewing—if we can even call it that—feel like? Implicit in the question is an understanding that engagement with contemporary art has, for quite some time, demanded more than just the eyes seeing and brain interpreting. In addition to conscripting all the senses, contemporary art makes certain emotional or psychological dimensions integral to the reading of the work, contesting a long-held notion that emotional distance is necessary for proper critical and objective reception. When I recall the most profound or moving or simply satisfying experiences I have had with artwork and with music, it quickly becomes clear that the experiences are so distinct, even within each field, that the language of comparison is insufficient, relying so heavily on experience and thus being thoroughly flattened in description. What is clear is that artists’ practices have cannibalized other creative and non-creative frameworks, from the cinematic to the bureaucratic, and engaging with the affective dimension of other disciplines seems the logical extension of borrowing their structural or aesthetic components.

 

Over the past few years, discussions about a return to Romanticism in contemporary art have formed around attempts to describe a broad shift towards modes of working that are more generous, or anxious, or intuitive, or irrational—in general, more emotionally complex.³ But the term Romanticism itself connotes frivolity and impracticality, something occasionally, but not always, associated with the work in question. Perhaps the term is too historically bound, conjuring a trajectory that does not adequately account for the range and depth of feeling and shift in attitude that much current work projects. Work in this vein has been dismissed as alternately narcissistic and escapist, looking inward or to fantasy in times of real trauma. This judgment, however, narrowly interprets the impulses behind and the effects of the melancholic attitude central to the Romantic. While melancholy has been historically identified as a state of malaise, disaffection, and inactivity, its imaginative reflection helps us envision new ways to constitute the world in the present. Melancholy can be distinguished from similar states by its direction. For example, where nostalgia pines for a past state, reaching backward, melancholy is a peculiar longing in the present aimed toward the future.

 

Unknown Pleasures features a number of international artists, working in a variety of media, who explore the connection between music and melancholy in contemporary art. Rather than acting as a comprehensive survey, this exhibition aims to present a range of usages of music, strategies of referencing, and types of affect produced by the work.

 

Referencing is a slippery process, especially with artwork. It is fairly easy to name the reference, to point to that which points outside of the work. Talking about the specific way in which the reference operates, or even its level of specificity, is much more challenging. Take Anne Collier’s photographs of stacked album covers. They are highly stylized, the covers re-photographed against neutral-colored backgrounds in the artist’s studio. There is a coolness to the work that is constantly in tension with the projection of emotion that is the focus of the covers. The album covers themselves are immediately recognizable as such, and it is central to reading the work to know what they are, but the interpretation does not similarly hinge on whether or not the viewer knows that, for example, Anything you want (black) (2006) depicts a Jack Valenti album of the same name from 1976. At best, that knowledge adds the nuance of historical fact—it was the singer songwriter’s only album—in dialogue with the aesthetic treatment. In the end, Collier’s use of the album cover evokes a specific type of photography, a portraiture that is fundamentally organized around desire and the marketing of emotion.

In Jesper Just’s elegant film A Vicious Undertow (2007), the focus of the work is its emotional tone. Filmed within both the language and infrastructure of cinema—down to the lush Super 16mm stock, exquisitely controlled lighting, and almost floating camera—the work presents the viewer with what seems like the climactic moment wrenched from a longer narrative. This feeling of great tension and possibility for dramatic action becomes foregrounded, and viewers are left to ground themselves with only the suggestions provided by the mood, the character types presented, and the limited action. Every detail is imbued with emotional significance as viewers attempt to find footing according to their expectations of cinema. And then there is the music, a gradually swelling, whistled version of the song “Nights in White Satin.” It occupies a peculiar functional position in the work, acting much like a soundtrack, and at the same time it is whistled by the characters in the film as if it were perfectly natural. Here the reference seems to play against expectation, as absolutely nothing about the elegant, dark wood paneling, European setting, and tense emotional expectation would suggest the Moody Blues.

 

For the artwork included in Unknown Pleasures, working through the references certainly adds a different texture, but it never dominates the work’s reception or interpretation. The works are not about “getting it”—that is, deciphering the reference. For example, Susan Philipsz’s usage of existing songs is more invocation than direct reference. The spare quality of the vocal arrangements recalls liturgical music; the voicings themselves like lullabies. In Long Gone (2006), re-imagined for the Aspen Art Museum’s grounds, two public address speakers are installed at either end of an early twentieth-century iron bridge that crosses a bend in the Roaring Fork River. Philipsz has arranged an early Syd Barret song for two voices, both her own, calling out to each other across the rushing water. Instead of becoming a focal point within the landscape, Philipsz’s work spatially dramatizes its setting, pointing away from itself, and the melancholic lyrics and idyllic landscape begin to melt into one another. The subtle imperfections and intimacy of Philipsz’s rendition and the vastness of the surroundings perfectly mirror the confluence of personal and collective experience that underlies much of Philipsz’s work.

Euan MacDonald also works with existing music. For his Selected Standards series, the artist creates diptychs combining re-drawn covers of sheet music standards and drawings that have an oblique relationship to the evocative song titles. The accompanying video, Where Flamingos Fly (2006), features a close-up shot of the artist flipping through the covers, the song titles suggesting a found narrative of love and loss. The soundtrack of the video is a rambling piano piece reminiscent not of a single song but perhaps all of them (and is, in fact, synchronized to the covers themselves). The sheet music was found in bulk by the artist at a second hand store, becoming an improvisational readymade in MacDonalds’s hands. While popular culture is often linked to notions of collective memory, MacDonald’s usage of the sheet music forestalls a separate process, a sort of collective amnesia where the songs themselves, stripped of individual nuance, become flattened into “standards.” The tender treatment of the drawings and the reanimation of the sheet music recover the simple poetics of the songwriting and its suggestive possibilities.

 

In a similar way, Sanford Biggers works with music-related objects to uncover and redirect their relationship to collective identity. Biggers’s sculpture of a melting boombox The Bridger is Over (biddybyebye) (2006), could more properly be called an assisted ready-made: it is a real boombox, and it really was melted. “The Bridge is Over,” a 1987 track by Boogie Down Productions, was a salvo in the “bridge wars,” a dispute played out through successive recordings over whether hip hop was birthed in the Bronx or Queens. But Biggers’s incorporation of reference (in this case in the form of the symbolism of the object and its title) serves a wholly different function. According to critic Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Biggers “strategically incorporates derogatory symbols from the Black American experience to question not only the historical realities for which they stand, but also how these symbols might function in the future ‘to get beyond the lazy habit of stereotyping.’”⁴ The often destructive gesture of melting here becomes constructive, an attempt to get beneath the plastic surface of signification.

In Tim Lee’s My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)/ Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black), Neil Young, 1979 (2007), the artist creates a double self-portrait that re-imagines him

recording Neil Young’s 1979 live album Rust Never Sleeps. As the album had an acoustic side and an electric side (and the song referenced in the work’s title bookends the album), Lee is pictured playing both ways, inverted from one another even in the hanging of the work. Because of the extreme overhead angle of the shot, the artist’s shadow stretches out eerily, becoming a dark phantom of the expected frontal view. Stemming from Lee’s own interest in Modernism and a divide between artist and audience, Lee inhabits a creative persona, Neil Young, whose career seems to be marked by intentionally going against the expectations of the public. In Lee’s depiction, the disjunction (and the analogy drawn to artistic practice) sits on a precipice, where a leap can leave the audience seeing only shadows.

The peculiar power of place figures heavily in Melanie Schiff’s Cannon Falls (Cobain Room) (2007). The work depicts a rural Minnesota hotel room in which Kurt Cobain was rumored to stay while Nirvana was recording its final album. But is it the aura of the place itself, or our will to believe, that imbues a setting with energy? Whichever the case, Schiff’s photographic diptych pictures a young, nude woman, pausing at a draped sliding glass door in the hotel room’s generic interior. In the companion image the woman is gone, presumably into the unknown, the void characterized by the light spilling into the room around and through the drapes. The identity of the woman, the specificity of her actions, whether or not the rumor is true: all are questions purposefully left unanswered, allowing the tenuous, ghost-like quality of myth to permeate the image.

 

While best known as a painter, Wilhelm Sasnal explores the emotional and psychological territory between representation and abstraction in his films as well. Untitled (Touch me) (2002) is a grainy filmic depiction of the artist’s home town combined with a seemingly incongruous, though thoroughly transfixing, soundtrack. As the landscape unfolds, a dark black ink begins to diffuse through the image as if in water. Aside from nodding to the artist’s other medium, the substance immediately destabilizes the filmic image, suggesting that it is immersed in fluid, unfixed, and somehow unreliable. But it is precisely the obscuring effects of the inky overlay and the incongruent soundtrack that break through the visual representation of the place to get closer to its emotional core.

 

Although ostensibly an industrial-looking white metal box hanging from the ceiling—recalling fluorescent light fixtures and other institutional infrastructure—Ugo Rondinone’s Thank you silence (2005) creates an intimate, poetic installation in dialogue with it surroundings. As a beautifully minimal piano soundtrack plays, a gentle snow of white shredded paper cascades to the floor. The gesture of an indoor August snowfall in Aspen reminds us of unknown pleasures, those that surprise us, that stop us in our tracks, that we find without seeking. Through the transformative power of the aesthetic experience, unknown pleasures can help us roll down the windows, turn it up, and sing along with the world around us.

NOTES

1 Quoted in Anne-Marie Schiro, “Yves Saint Laurent, Giant of Couture, Dies at 71,” New York Times, 2 June 2008, accessed online at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/02/fashion/02laurent.html.

2 James Welling, interview with Jan Tumlir, Artforum, April 2003, 255.

3 See, for example, “Powered by Emotion? A roundtable discussion on Romanticism, art, and melancholy,” Texte Zur Kunst, volume 17 no. 65 (March 2007), 116-134; and Max Hollein and Martina Weinhard, eds., Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2005).

4 Cay Sophie Rabinowitz, Blossom, exhibition brochure for Sanford Biggers, Grand Arts, Kansas City, September 7 - October 20, 2007, accessed online at http://www.grandarts.com/exhibits/Sanford_Biggers.html.