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Song as a Force of Social Transformation
CAAC
Issue 2 July–October 2011
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Song as a Force of Social Transformation
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo July-October 2011 Issue 2
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04 Political Pop: An Introduction
Peio Aguirre
16 Album Covers, Sleeves, Labels, Boxes, Packages and Cases
Pedro G. Romero
40 Annika Ström: Personal Delivery
Jonathan Griffin
48 Ruth Ewan: Smash Hits
Chris Fite-Wassilak
56 Alonso Gil: Libertarian Artist
Raj Kuter
64 Matt Stokes: No Way Back
Matthew Collin
71 The Ballad of Britain: Folk Music and the Holy Grail of Authenticity
Will Hodgkinson
76 La Chanson: Towards the Transformation of Ways of Life
Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
98
Nocturama
108 CAAC Exhibitions Floor Plan
110 Credits
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Political
Pop
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An Introduction
Peio Aguirre
The “Political Pop” section of my blog emerged
by chance.1 My first blurb about the Pet Shop
Boys led to another and yet another, until I
finally realized that writing about the music
I like was a real possibility. Music is unique in
the field of cultural production given its status
as information, which has allowed it to become
the object of financial speculation and
ultimately the paradigmatic expression of mass
culture. However, the very definition of mass
culture has changed dramatically and now
bears little resemblance to the description of
the culture industry outlined by Theodor W.
Adorno and Max Horkheimer. What then might
have been defined as a homogenization of
consumption, due to an increasing amount of
leisure time, now has its own specialized critics,
and of course we mustn’t overlook the multiple
ramifications of individual emancipation that
mass culture has generated for half a century.
Whatever the proper definition of political pop
might be, the real issue here is the need for a
politics of pop – a directorate for the changing
forms of popular culture. At the heart of those
globalizing market forms, there has always
been a transformative critical potential. The
ambivalence of pop music, like any other
market product, stems from the fact that its
fetishism simultaneously reinforces and
threatens the system. And if there is one
musical form that stands out as a shining
example of peaceful coexistence with and
within the system, it is pop music.
Pet Shop Boys is a case of selfconsciousness that oscillates between mass
culture and authorial singularity. But for now
let us examine the social message they
enunciate. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe launch
a frontal assault on Yes with the bonus track
“This Used to Be the Future”, where the duo
criticizes the social and urban utopias that
were apparently constructed at some
unspecified point in the past. The track features
the voice of Philip Oakey from The Human
League, a powerful beat that gives it an
addictive quality, and lyrics with a message.
The alternating vocals of Tennant and Oakey
are brilliantly accompanied by an authoritative
robotic backup voice. The chorus is perfect, and
so is the song. Is Pet Shop Boys a militant band?
Undoubtedly. Pop music’s policy of evasion,
pleasure and enjoyment has never been at odds
with social responsibility. Unlike other disco
bands, PSB has always known that its
engagement is not so much rooted in its
proclamations, but that its radicalism stems
from the band’s loyalty to electro-pop, a genre
capable of combining the most personal desires
with the most pressing problems. This critique
of the projections of a half-planned, halfspeculative future does not hide what should be
one of the missions of utopian thought: not to
imagine a perfect, idyllic future, the product of
a recreational positivistic effort, but to think of
the possibilities by exploring its dialectical (or
negative) side – in other words, through a kind
of implosion of thought at its very root. Thus,
the engagement with utopia is as ordinary as an
exercise routine: “But that future was exciting /
Science fiction made fact / Now all we have to
look forward to / Is a sort of suicide pact / Was it
the dear old future / That created the problems
we face? / How do we deal with the fallout / Of
the age we used to call space?”2
We can also trace a historical arc through
this bonus track. It comes as no surprise that
there is a nexus between brutality, government
housing policies and socialist labour politics in
the English-speaking world, where poor urban
practices, the vicissitudes of class and
subcultures are rewritten in a type of sociology
where boredom is merely the lull that precedes
the forward thrust of change (as in PSB’s “Being
Boring”). As if that weren’t enough, the conflictfree future envisioned by neo-liberal consensus
in the early 1990s, when socialism collapsed,
has proven to be profoundly ideological. But
the ambiguity of the song “This Used to Be the
Future” lies in the fact that you can dance to it
at a club, listen to it through your headphones
while practicing psychogeography, or analyze it
as a cultural critique; this multiplicity is an
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intrinsic quality of pop music. In the following
paragraphs I will outline some of the
characteristics of this music from the
perspective of economics, ideology, style and
form in order to highlight some of its inherent
policies.
Once they have been made aware
of the danger they pose to the
status quo, musicians should know
that it is not the contents of their
songs that threaten to topple the
established order but rather the
manner of distribution.
Pop Economies
Jacques Attali, an economist and former adviser
to the Mitterrand administration, is credited
with developing a political and economic theory
of music. His work Noise: The Political Economy
of Music is a theoretical reference of the first
order whose primary claim to fame is that it
proposes a new theory of noise (bruit).
According to this theory, the utopian nature of
music acts as a sensor that detects future forms
of society which have yet to emerge. In other
words, the music of one era heralds the
economic system of the next.3 This notion
undoubtedly complicates the already tangled
web of links between the economic base (a
society’s productive mode) and the
superstructure – in other words, the sphere
where cultural and ideological products are
consummated. It has traditionally been believed
that the music of an era reflects the dynamics of
its contemporary social system, acting like a
mirror that reproduces or replicates those
dynamics. According to this logic, the
superstructure “expresses” the base; the latter
determines the former (as any Marxist manual
will tell us). But according to Attali, this
relationship can now be dialectically inverted,
suggesting the possibility that a superstructure
may actually anticipate historical developments
and predict new economic and social
formations. He sustains that music, the
organization of noise, is prophecy. Attali’s
theory invites us to peer into the future, as if
gazing into a crystal ball; the music of any
period is several decades ahead of that society’s
social forms. This would explain why the
political economy of music is premonitory.
Musicians are therefore heralds, messengers of
a future yet to come. And Attali says, “Its styles
and economic organization are ahead of the
rest of society because it explores, much faster
than material reality can, the entire range of
possibilities in a given code. It makes audible
the new world that will gradually become
visible, that will impose itself and regulate the
order of things; it is not only the image of
things, but the transcending of the everyday,
the herald of the future. For this reason
musicians, even when officially recognized, are
dangerous, disturbing and subversive; for this
reason it is impossible to separate their history
from that of repression and surveillance.”4
Music is therefore inextricably linked to the
appearance of what Althusser called “the
ideological state apparatus”– in other words,
ideology. Attali offers us a fertile new terrain to
explore the subversive possibilities of music
which, as intangible data that can be broken
down into informational units, poses a threat
to the dominant social and economic powersthat-be, for the issue at stake is an industry that
moves billions of dollars each year.
We have only to consider the novelties that
have emerged in the area of music
distribution – radio, piped music, the transition
from vinyl to digital, Napster and Spotify – to
realize that the fight against illegal Internet
downloads is actually a desperate struggle for
the system’s survival, a war waged in the name
of capitalism. Once they have been made aware
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of the danger they pose to the status quo,
musicians should know that it is not the
contents of their songs that threaten to topple
the established order but rather the manner of
distribution. Bands like Radiohead with legions
of loyal fans have taken action in this arena,
although the alternative bands who upload
their songs on MySpace proclaim a different
but more contemporary anarchy than the calls
for social chaos issued by the “children of
McLaren”. For example, one would be hardpressed to find a more explicit example of how
this ideology works than the inquisitorial
persecution, conducted in the name of the
musicians and artists themselves, of
hairdressers and shopkeepers who dare to play
music in their places of business. Although the
most outspoken criticism – not without a
certain whiff of appropriative ambition – of
Attali’s theories has been voiced by postSchoenberg advocates (the term noise
practically invites it), the truly important thing
is their extrapolation to whatever musical
regime one wishes to address.
But music’s capacity to predict the future
can now be traced by travelling to the past: we
can listen to the Beatles and compare their
music with our present, something that would
be impossible without some kind of mediation
system capable of reconnecting the
intangibility of music with the material
substratum of our constructed environment.
In its own modest way, this essay aims to
provide some of that mediation. It is no
coincidence that pop music is the genre that
best lends itself to an analysis of its own
economic structure, with its “Top Ten”
formulas and other inventions that capitalism
is capable of fuelling. Pop music is a form that
has the ability to criticize the ideology of the
hegemonic establishment while also
rediscovering tender shoots of utopia in
popular culture. The status of pop as the
uncontested king of commercial music may
point out some of the contradictions in that
same mass culture. Pop music does not shriek;
It is no coincidence that pop music
is the genre that best lends itself to
an analysis of its own economic
structure, with its “Top Ten”
formulas and other inventions that
capitalism is capable of fuelling.
Pop music is a form that has the
ability to criticize the ideology of the
hegemonic establishment while
also rediscovering tender shoots of
utopia in popular culture.
it predicts a sweet future of pleasant melodies
and is associated with the steady flow of a
certain everyday monotony. More than any
other commercial music genre, it represents
and meshes perfectly with the market; in fact, it
actually symbolizes the very idea of the market.
Pop is by definition commercial music, but it
can be highly specific and tremendously
sophisticated. So we must ask ourselves this:
How can pop music, as a market product, serve
a utopian purpose?
We should take a closer look at the idea that
all musicians pose a potential threat to the
system, something that, in the realm of pop,
rarely takes the shape of a Messiah with the
talent of Paddy McAloon, the heart and soul of
the British band Prefab Sprout. After making it
big in the 1980s with songs like “Cars and Girls”
or “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” – tracks that
pertain to the realm of pop imagery in their
own right – Prefab Sprout released an LP in
1989 under the eloquent title Protest Songs, a
reaffirmation of their social engagement. For
McAloon, the redeeming power of pop is akin to
that of religion, and its secular good news
promises a communion between the tattered
subjectivity of the individual and the world
around him. However, Protest Songs (a slogan or
statement) was a deliberate oxymoron of the
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We need new categories to define
our period within the larger context
of post-modernity.
pop genre, finding its way to the top of the
charts without losing its political facet. Protest
Songs is as much a pop album as it is a critical
and rather ironic commentary on the
traditional protest song. But at this point no
one would dare to question Paddy, with his
blind faith in pop music as a vehicle for
broadcasting profound messages – Paddy the
saviour, who once claimed that he was a better
composer than John Lennon. That sophistipop
which floated so smoothly on the airwaves has
become a legend of itself and, far from clinging
to the pinnacle of success, it has evolved into a
kind of music for fans, nostalgia junkies and
other fans of the alternative. Not long ago, after
battling several serious health problems and
undergoing a secret confinement, we were
reintroduced to an almost unrecognizable,
hermit-like Paddy, sporting a look which has
also had its epigonic influence (and there is the
fake documentary on Joaquin Phoenix, I’m Still
Here, to prove it). After driving the music
journalists mad – quite literally – in 2009, Prefab
Sprout released Let’s Change the World with
Music, much to the delight of their fans. This
new statement of intent contained “Let There Be
Music”, an ode to the creative energy of music
with more than a few transcendental if not
openly religious reminiscences. But the most
interesting thing is that the tracks on Let’s
Change the World with Music were not new; they
had all been composed in 1992 and immediately
rejected by Sony. After almost two decades
collecting dust in a trunk, the songs sound both
contemporary and timeless. One wonders if the
numerous allusions to God, for example in “God
Watch over You”, might have made the
producers leery. But one thing is clear: with his
new anti-pop star appearance, McAloon now
looks more dangerous than ever, and while
music journalists speculate about the vast
amount of loot that Paddy might have in his
treasure chest, we must wonder about the kind
of futurity it holds.
The Sprouts defy the stereotypes of the
genre, such as the perennial politically engagé
protest song of the troubadour/singersongwriter – something that immediately brings
to mind Adorno’s defence of the autonomy of
art (or against the risk of a banal politicization of
culture). But perhaps we should examine that
other defining trait of pop, its contradictory
nature as something that is both timeless and
time-specific. Indie (or the new underground)
music gives us the best examples of a
postmodern culture that has made eternal revisitation its particular stronghold. This new
underground infects pop and electronic music
in equal measure and can no longer be
understood from the logic of commercial music,
nor from the secrecy of an exclusive community
that worships a new secrecy. Now that highbrow
culture has been abolished, and so-called mass
culture is increasingly more sophisticated, we
find ourselves at a juncture that we could aptly
describe as the perpetual present (or Dan
Graham’s Present Continuous Past). What do we
find in this present? Historicism, reference,
citations, tributes and revivals galore. The
majority of consumer products intended for a
wide audience is growing more sophisticated by
the day; they are neither highbrow nor lowbrow.
And indie culture, far from catering to a
minority, is easily accessible.
We need new categories to define our period
within the larger context of post-modernity.
The inexhaustible and enduring nature of
pop music has made it a pervasive element of
our culture (and has led some to invent theories
that define our entire cultural system as the
“after-pop” coined by Eloy Fernández Porta).5
Now we must determine whether the 1980s can
be viewed as a kind of golden age or if it should
be considered the decade of pop modernism.
What I am suggesting is the possibility that this
modernism might be on a par with the early
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20th-century renewal that swept through the
arts; we might think of it as a musical arsenal
that could extend decades into the future, just as
“classical” modernism was followed by late
modernism and ultimately led to the
postmodernism whose fundamental traits
define our current global system. Post-punk,
New Wave, disco and other trends took root in
an era that is still sending out shock waves today.
Although electronic music, trip-hop, drum ‘n’
bass, house and other celebratory liquid
fantasies flourished in the 1990s, their rapid
extinction in the following decades reminds us
that the agglutinating power of pop is limitless;
and this without having to resort to the
regressions and repetitions which are at the
heart of the very definition of popular music or
music for the masses. The legacy of the 1980s is
the best example of that contradiction, an
unmistakable periodizing capacity and a
seemingly incompatible timelessness rolled
into one.
There are two useful phenomena in this
definition. The first has to do with form, and by
this I mean the perfect song. The quest for “the
perfect pop song” (to which the Sprouts
contributed) was the primary concern of every
aspiring pop band. The ingredients of the perfect
pop song are common knowledge: schmaltzy
tempo, catchy sound, regular sequence, between
three and four minutes long… The song as a
closed monad, a time-space capsule and a
repeating loop whose distribution relies on that
very repetition. In this respect, the “Top of the
Top” is one of the greatest discoveries of
consumer capitalism – the place, the precise
frequency where the perfect pop song can be
heard. The second phenomenon has to do with
the experience of temporality and the
emergence of trends. This is the theory of the 20Year Cycle, the idea that two decades must pass
before the past can make a comeback as a
nostalgia-trend. The appeal of regression
associated with mass culture has managed the
experience of temporality since at least the postwar period and up to the “end of history” swan
... but what is pop if not this?
Repetition comes with its own builtin antidote, for the easy-listening
quality of the perfect pop song is
occasionally sabotaged from within
– for example, when bands seek to
reward fans according to the effort
they put into the listening experience
by composing songs that at first
might sound strange or seem to
deviate from the pattern but, when
played repeatedly, tend to grow on
the listener.
song intoned by Francis Fukuyama which played
such an important role in establishing neoconservative ideology. The perpetual present is
so closely associated with this “end of history”
and with the temporal continuity of pop that
what has now become imperative is a sacrilege –
namely, using pop as an anti-aphrodisiac for its
own internal instincts. This would be the
equivalent of glimpsing utopian impulses in the
mass media and mainstream culture, something
quite unacceptable for Adorno, who held firmly
to the idea that mass-marketed art could never
be truly revolutionary. In the realm of pop, the
dividing line between challenging the
establishment and the more comfortable option
of going with the flow is so thin as to be almost
imperceptible. The theory of the 20-Year Cycle
deals with the temporal categories of past,
present and future, putting them together in
every possible combination like a barman trying
to come up with a new summer cocktail (past of
the present, future of the past, etc.). This same
recourse to the past-present-future sandwich is
typical of pop, but we must remember that these
semantic games do not suggest a utopian
philosophy per se. On this topic, the latest album
released by the Spanish band Astrud, Lo Nuevo,
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includes a track entitled “Lo popular” (The
Popular) which says, “because the old is the new
/ and the sophisticated, popular”. With titles like
these and other slogans, Astrud creates theory
from practice, consolidating the 20-Year Cycle as
one of the most universal and enduring laws.
Some may think this formulization =
formalism of the perfect song rather hackneyed,
a repetition of repetition of repetition, but what
is pop if not this? Repetition comes with its own
built-in antidote, for the easy-listening quality
of the perfect pop song is occasionally
sabotaged from within – for example, when
bands seek to reward fans according to the effort
they put into the listening experience by
composing songs that at first might sound
strange or seem to deviate from the pattern but,
when played repeatedly, tend to grow on the
listener. Many tracks and even entire albums
were purposely designed this way, to act as
genuine boomerangs (think, for example, of
“Paranoid Android” and OK Computer by
Radiohead). The listener must “understand” the
music before s/he can savour it, in a reversal of
the conventional easy-listening experience.
Rewarding diligent listeners is the secret
weapon of ideology in music.
There is no need to bring up Adorno again
and his essay on the fetish-character in music
and the regression of listening – in other words,
the idea that the repetition and manner of
consuming “light music” (jazz for him, pop for
us) induces a state that causes the listener to
revert to a childlike way of listening.6 There is
an infinite recycling which takes place where
the superimposed layers sound like so many
things at once that isolating each one would be
a daunting archaeological undertaking. Nor
must we forget that pop’s natural ability to
produce icons goes hand in hand with their
subsequent demystification: indie bands
generate their own pop culture, consume it,
recycle it and serve it as a reheated by-product
that reminds us of everything which feeds and
fuels their art. This kind of pop would not exist
without its fetishes.
Pop Ideologies
Of all the isms, miserablism is one of the richest
in nuance. Postmodernism, post-colonialism,
Marxism and now miserablism as well.
Obviously this word is not found in any
dictionary, so what does it mean? The patent
might be awarded once again to the Pet Shop
Boys, whose double album Alternative (1995),
which contains all their B-side tracks released
up to that point, featured a song called
“Miserablism”. The target was Morrissey, former
lead singer of The Smiths, a band who
experienced their artistic heyday in the early
1990s. The track is a satire on what it means to
be a serious musician and how one must
cultivate a certain pious look in order to project
that appearance of seriousness. PSB ironically
comments on the posturing of those who
embrace self-conscious pessimism as a way of
life. We might call it the exploitation of one’s
own misery, something quite common in music.
It is, however, possible to delve into
miserablism and come up with other origins.
What the French called misérabilisme in the late
19th century was a term associated with
naturalism in literature. Naturalism followed the
evolution of Realism (or the realist novel), and
while the latter was based on the reflection of a
certain class consciousness, that of the
bourgeoisie, Naturalism revelled in the murky
depths of the most disadvantaged social classes,
the misery and poverty of the underworld, and
found its milieu among the lumpenproletariat
with its stereotyped characters (the
neighbourhood criminal, the prostitute, and so
on). This literature, this miserablism
(exemplified in Zola), denounced the social
order by criticizing a capitalist production
system which viewed the proletariat as a force
that threatened its very existence and
reminding society of the potential
consequences of an uprising by that same
proletariat. For the average reader of naturalist
literature, a middle-class citizen settled
comfortably in his armchair, miserablism was a
warning of the horrible things that could
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happen if the established order was ever
altered. We should not bend over backwards
trying to draw parallels between the
miserablism of the Pet Shop Boys and its
naturalist counterpart; rather we should recall
the long tradition of miserablism, not in music
and literature, but in the field of contemporary
art, where it seems to find its most fertile soil.
But all this miserablism has an aesthetic
background which we should now examine, for
its postmodern version could only find shelter
in cyber-punk and its dreams of an
overpopulated metropolis à la Blade Runner
where nocturnal rains, omnipresent mists and
1940s G-men trench coats take on new layers of
meaning. This aesthetic brings us to one of the
themes that has been largely ignored by pop
music and yet was one of the most persistent
motifs of the early 1980s: power. A good
example which illustrates this Foucauldian Uturn taken by pop is the post-punk band Gang
of Four. In 1983 they released Hard, a title which
functions as a negation. Gang of Four is the
quintessential intellectual band, revered for
having combined a rock sound marked by Andy
Gill’s staccato with lyrics that are obviously
influenced by the Frankfurt School. With Hard,
the band took a turn towards pop, towards a
softer sound (hence the negation in the form of
contradiction). The “hard vs. soft” dialectic is a
constant in punk and post-punk; embracing the
contradiction of Joy Division and New Order, or
Gang of Four’s Entertainment! and Hard, is a
trial by fire for fans, but that tension can also be
seen as one of the cornerstones off which every
rock and pop music theory rebounds. However,
Hard is relevant for other reasons. The opening
track, “It Is Love”, is a programmatic song about
one of the issues that the band had
deconstructed years before in the song
“Anthrax”– namely, love, or love as raw material
for the upbeat songs played on mainstream
music radio: “I don’t think we’re saying there’s
anything wrong with love / We just don’t think
that what goes on between two people should
be shrouded in mystery.”7
Just as Georg Lukács saw the great
19th-century realist novel as the
paradigmatic form which described
the bourgeoisie’s transition to a
new class consciousness, so pop
can be used by us, the archaeologists
of the future, as a form that models
the realist capitalism in which we
are immersed.
However, the central theme of “It Is Love” is
not the idealization of love but power: “The men
who own the city make more sense than we do.”
The music video sums up the elements of a
postmodern miserablist aesthetic; sunglasses,
nocturnal setting, complicit glances and an
architecture of personal relationships steeped in
commerce and transactions involving goods,
bodies and identities typical of a new neo-liberal
awareness that begins to manifest itself in this
look. “It Is Love” is the quintessence of the
postmodern aesthetic, with its background
vocals peppered with shouts, a black woman
with an iconic hairdo singing “It’s all right!”,
dancers dressed like hotel pages concluding the
music video... The salient feature of this
aesthetic is a geopolitical consciousness, a
spatialization of interpersonal relationships and
of the dialectics between the essence and
appearance of materialism which is also found
in other songs on the album, such as “Woman
Town” and “A Man with a Good Car”.
Gang of Four, who had given up writing
songs about love, oscillate between a critique of
production relationships and another kind of
criticism where (Foucauldian) power shifts from
micro to macro and back again. A change of style
always entails an alteration of the message. This
tension between the polished pop-funk style
and the subtle radicalism of the social and
political messages embedded in the lyrics is also
found in other post-punk bands like Scritti
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Politti, who sang, “I’m in love with a Jacques
Derrida”. Over the decades, pop contaminates
all musical styles, and the replacement of former
drummer Hugo Burnham with a drum machine
on Hard can be viewed as a technical and
ideological substitution. Both the left-wing
politicization of Gang of Four and Scritti Politti
and their transition from rock to pop can be
understood as symptoms of the coronation of a
single form as the most appropriate for
expressing a period or era. Just as Georg Lukács
saw the great 19th-century realist novel as the
paradigmatic form which described the
bourgeoisie’s transition to a new class
consciousness, so pop can be used by us, the
archaeologists of the future, as a form that
models the realist capitalism in which we are
immersed.
Most people are unaware of the ways in
which a critique of the dominant system can
materialize. On this point, my theory is that an
approach which sketches or defines a map of
capitalism as a whole – an approach that
“expresses” or depicts that undepictable
condition of capitalism – is in itself a form of
criticism, and more potent than most. Musically
speaking, Gang of Four’s “It Is Love” meets the
requirements of a post-Marxist, postmodern
cultural critique. Indeed, Fredric Jameson has
already pointed out that video, architecture and
dance are the most privileged arts within the
spatialization of postmodern culture, and all of
these art forms are concentrated in the music
video.8
The music video undoubtedly combined
pop and postmodernism in a single form. The
nostalgia mode and pastiche were two other
items to add to Jameson’s list of tics that would
ultimately define the dominant traits of culture.
However, music videos entered a downward
spiral in the 1990s and today, when YouTube has
effectively monopolized the extensive
audiovisual archives of the past century, the
music video is a struggling art form. It is no
coincidence that the most mainstream artists
(Lady Gaga) still produce music videos, but the
aesthetic has changed; narrative and invention
are absent, and the display of technical skill and
virtuosity, though still important, is not
proportional to the creativity employed in the
halcyon days. Yet the music video now presents
a golden opportunity for alternative pop artists
(such as Dorian or Sambassadeur), who see this
medium as a way of creating a low-budget
audiovisual production whose YouTubeization
will reap not insignificant benefits on the
international scene.
Pop Styles
An album cover is an object that can convey
complex semiotic ideas. The cover of Get Ready
by New Order is a work of apparent simplicity.
The photographs were taken in Thamesmead,
an area that was the object of speculation and
development plans in the 1960s and 70s and the
backdrop for several scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s
A Clockwork Orange. The cover photo (taken by
Jürgen Teller) shows a new Eve wearing a worn
pair of denims stained with paint (similar to
Helmut Lang’s jeans from the late 1990s) and a
dark, shabby T-shirt with small tears about the
neck – casual street wear with a hint of grunge.
The girl has access to technology. She looks at
the camera while simultaneously recording with
her handycam. The red strip on the bottom
looks like it might read “REC”. This is a New
Order cover, and the covers of both this band
and Joy Division are virtual temples to applied
graphic design. Peter Saville borrowed ideas
from art (Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus)
and other principles based on formal economics
to create his style. The Savillian red tape is like a
minimal label linking the present and past of
NO & JD. A cut-out from Saville’s formal
imagery and a symbol of what the definition of
style can represent in fashion, design and music.
And what of fashion? What connections can we
make between style and pop?
A time of sensuality and warmth in apparel.
Mid-1980s. Outskirts of Milan. The second
Italian revolution in the fashion world. As
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simple as combining a baggy linen jacket with a
pair of jeans or baggy trousers cinched at the
ankle. Collarless shirts, jersey-knit polo shirts
and naked torsos everywhere. A sign of
masculinity and of belonging to the oppressed
class. Slouched shoulders and hands in pockets.
A neo-Romantic touch. Casual elegance. A bit of
prêt-à-porter and a lot of Armani. It is also a
time when street brawls and left-wing
intellectualism shift towards a new style of dress.
The feminization of men, the absence of the
power symbols represented by the traditional
three-piece suit. The masculinization of women,
flat shoes, graceful double-breasted jackets,
wide trousers and a degree of androgyny. And
cardigans and coats lined in Afghan sheepskin.
All of these elements were part of a new “Made
in Italy” focused on redefining genders through
fashion and style and on a genealogical
divestment of avant-garde strategies. In this
context, outside the British hegemony of the
identification of styles associated with youth
subcultures, new cults and identities emerged
from attitudes in fashion. Style had to be
surreptitious. Elegance, dandyism and the game
of sexual ambiguity marked the point of no
return. Pop culture exerted an influence on
fashion and style, and these in turn influenced
music. In 1986, the Pet Shop Boys’ “Paninaro”
picked up this scent, processed it and fed it back
in a freshly stylized version. Today “Paninaro”
has become a reminder of an ephemeral youth
subculture. PSB captured the spirit behind the
styles of dress that characterized this era. The
first appearance of Armani suits as uniforms on
the Italian coast prove that style is a value which
unites different teen sub-groups. Style of dress
is a subversive weapon for undermining the
established orders and hierarchies. The
“paninaro” movement can be traced back to
Milan in the early 1980s. It was originally called
paninari, for according to legend its birthplace
was the Al Panino sandwich shop, where a
group of young people began to feast on
hamburgers and imitate certain traits of the
American consumer culture. This hedonism
arrived at a time when Italy was recovering
from the “Years of Lead”, a period marked by
terrorism and political and social turmoil.
The politicization of Italian society gave way in
the newborn decade to a growing indifference
to politics and a shift towards consumerism
that embraced the incipient signs of the
financial deregulation launched by Reagan
and Thatcher’s economic policies, which
would later evolve into neo-liberalism. Without
knowing it, the paninari were the heralds of
neo-liberalism, with their Timberland boots
and loafers, rolled-up jeans, checked shirts
and puffy anoraks with no shortage of belts –
preferably Moschino. The paninari found what
they were looking for in Duran Duran, Depeche
Mode or PSB by completely eradicating every
difference between, for example, these three
bands and embracing their stereotype as
epicentres of 1980s pop music. The paninari
subculture offers us a recycled version of what
was formerly described as the capacity of mass
culture to explain capitalism as a form.
Pop Forms
If Adorno had lived long enough to witness the
birth of the punk phenomenon with his own
eyes, he would not have held his tongue or
minced his words. He might have found
something positive to say about post-punk and
New Wave music, and we can imagine that he
may have identified Vini Reilly as the principal
champion of these movements. The fetishcharacter of consumer music stems from its
status as a product, and Adorno advocated
regressive listening as the solution to that
fetishism. Reilly certainly deserves a place in this
anti-fetishism. The Durutti Column emerged in
1978 as a pioneering band managed by Tony
Wilson (Factory Records), at the same time as
Joy Division. However, it is difficult to classify
The Durutti Column as a rock band. In fact, from
the outset Reilly deliberately dissociated himself
from everything that rock ‘n’ roll stood for, and
instead chose to embrace everything that the
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New Wave represented. In the post-punk
integration of jazz, folk, classical and avantgarde music, there was also a place for rock.
Reilly’s guitar sound situated him in a no-man’s
land where he still remains today. Vini Reilly is
not a familiar name to the general public,
despite the fact that he is one of the world’s best
composers and guitarists. He couldn’t care less
that Morrissey left him out of the credits on Viva
Hate, the latter’s first solo album for which Reilly
did more than a few arrangements. As early as
1981, during an interview in Belgium, Reilly
spoke about Stockhausen and about music
made for the mind. Eschewing all the usual rock
paraphernalia, Reilly still practizes the old
formula of proving what he can do before an
audience with a guitar and an amplifier.
Perhaps this would be a good place to insert
a meta-commentary on the reason for Adorno’s
possible affiliation with post-punk. I think he
would find it interesting because of this style’s
deconstructive yet perfectly audible nature:
fragments of jazz, krautrock, electronic and
classical music combined with rock in a style
that embraces the modern avant-garde practice
of breaking with all that has gone before (the
1980s as modernity once again). Listening to
The Durutti Column is like plunging into a
process of formal self-questioning and emerging
unscathed with your own style; it is more
reminiscent of the live performance ritual of an
orchestra or soloist playing classical music than
it is of the exacerbated communion between a
band and a typical punk/rock concert audience.
Knowing what Adorno would have thought is
only possible in the realm of science fiction, but
the important thing for us now is to observe the
referential dynamics of shifting ideologies.
Post-punk, with its focus on the past that has
little to do with the “no future” of punk, is an
intrinsically periodizing category: late 1970s,
early 1980s, perhaps between 1978 and 1985?
Once again, Saville’s design seems to hold the
key to the interpretation of style; old emblems
and labels combined with cold, elegant serif
typefaces (see New Order, Movement, an obvious
adaptation of the futuristic Fortunato Depero, or
Power, Corruption and Lies, with Fantin-Latour’s
floral painting). This referential quality reveals
the historicity of the period’s pop and post-punk
bands, who in their devotion to the pinnacles of
aesthetic modernism never cease to reproduce
and reinforce the meaning of postmodernism.
Post-punk, as well as cyberpunk literature and
nostalgia films, fits in perfectly with Jameson’s
cultural diagnosis of post-modernity.
The Durutti Column’s historicist ties are not
found in its direct reference to the Spanish
anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, who organized
the legendary “Durruti Column” to combat the
Fascist uprising during the Spanish Civil War, but
rather in the Situationist comic Le retour de la
Colonne Durutti, a four-page publication created
by André Bertrand in 1966 at the University of
Strasbourg. When the band released its debut
album in 1980, they borrowed the title of
Bertrand’s comic: The Return of the Durutti
Column. When they were just starting out, they
had already come back. This trait is very postpunk, by which I mean the über-awareness of the
historicity of musical movements and the
manipulation of clichés associated with trends as
a basis for the subsequent deconstructive
operation. Having said this, now we might even
examine post-punk’s instinctual tendency to
adapt names taken from the revolutionary left
wing, and to deliberately or unknowingly alter
their spelling in the process. For example, the
name “Durruti” ended up gaining a “t” and
losing an “r” in The Durutti Column, and Scritti
Politti was a deliberate adaptation of the “Scritti
Politici” (political writings) of Italian Marxist
Antonio Gramsci, which was changed to make
the name sound more pop if not openly rock ‘n’
roll (in the “tutti frutti” tradition).
I imagine that these appropriative licences
are exempted from inscription in the companies
register under the name of pop. But in order to
understand the true affiliations derived from
post-punk and Situationism, we must look at
another fundamental band that stands out
conceptually as a dialectical exercise which
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15
combines theory and practice in a caustic,
totalizing way: Stereolab. They undoubtedly
represent a stage of production where history is
given a solid form. Although Tim Gane and
Laetitia Sadier gracefully deflect the journalists’
questions about their influences, the answer is
patent in their music: Situationism, Marxism,
communism, etc. Stereolab does not represent
the political; they are political, by which I mean
that their music is a form of politics. Their sound
drinks from the bottomless well of history. The
band’s referentiality is not citational, nor is it a
commentary on the infinite musical styles at the
disposal of eclecticism (in a similar way to the
films of Jean-Luc Godard, who is not citational
although he resorts to citation). Stereolab offers
a historicity of form: a compression of all that
went before them, synthesized in a new
production marked by prolific output, countless
collaborations, parallel and unfinished projects –
in short, a unique production style. Godard once
said that around 1965 there were 100,000 people
in Paris who could view his films. After 1968, his
entire global audience did not amount to that
figure. And what can we say of Stereolab? In the
1990s this band could have gone in a more
commercial direction, but instead they chose to
stick to their characteristic mode of production.
Meanwhile, their lyrics speak of the class struggle
and of emancipation. But this is the content, not
the form. When Laetitia formed Monade in 1996,
their first album was entitled Socialisme ou
Barbarie. Statement of intent? And what of Tim
Gane, that alchemist of ideology? The lyrics of
“Ping Pong” are explicit enough: “It’s alright ’cos
the historical pattern has shown / how the
economical cycle tends to revolve / in a round of
decades three stages stand out in a loop / a
slump and war then peel back to square one and
back for more / bigger slump and bigger wars
and a smaller recovery / huger slump and greater
wars and a shallower recovery.”9 And Stereolab
has another great quality – it signifies a form of
collectivism. This may well be the next category
for a political pop. So should we continue with
something by Belle and Sebastian?
... This referential quality reveals
the historicity of the period’s pop
and post-punk bands, who in their
devotion to the pinnacles of
aesthetic modernism never cease
to reproduce and reinforce the
meaning of postmodernism. Postpunk, as well as cyberpunk
literature and nostalgia films, fits in
perfectly with Jameson’s cultural
diagnosis of post-modernity.
1. Criticism and Meta-Commentary:
http://peioaguirre.blogspot.com
2. Pet Shop Boys. “This Used to Be the Future”. Yes, Pet
Shop Boys etc., Parlophone.
3. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.
4. Ibid., p. 11.
5. Eloy Fernández Porta, Afterpop. La literatura de la
implosión mediática. Córdoba: Berenice, 2007; Barcelona:
Anagrama, 2010.
6. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music
and the Regression of Listening”, in Andrew Arato and
Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School
Reader, Vol. 1. New York: Continuum International
Publishing Group, 1978.
7. Gang of Four. “Anthrax”. Entertainment!, EMI / Warner
Bros.
8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
9. Stereolab. “Ping Pong”. Mars Audiac Quintet,
Duophonic.
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Album
Covers,
Sleeves,
Labels,
Boxes,
11
m
,
,
,
,
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Packages and Cases ...
Pedro G. Romero
Covers: Strategies Against
Architecture
In a recent debate a series of arguments came up
that are relevant to the academic consideration
of music as an abstract language. For example
the work of Situaciones was raised, the
Argentinean group that posed methodological
questions about militant research along similar
lines to those that Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre
Henry put on the table when it came to
institutionalizing concrete music. In both
instances it was a question of collecting sounds
and afterwards understanding how they were
emitted, of organizing them, with equal
attention being paid to semantic questions and
grammatical, phonetic and syntactic ones. “A
voice which was saying nothing, but shaped the
discourse without being in the least bit
rhetorical”, or “the sounds of a street market
that hide the words we wish to hear in the
foreground, underlining them”: with these
tracks they made Mal de altura,1 the book and
the video in which the Argentineans approached
the creating of new ways of understanding
political constructs in Bolivia. Those of us who
keep to these opinions are described as nothing
Einstürzende Neubauten, Strategies Against Architecture, 1984
less than economists and sociologists, thus
distancing this line of debate from what ought
to be central in questions of musical language.
The question of the political nature of music
particularly offends those who defend its
abstract formation. As formal language, any
interdependence between society and music
production is immediately denounced: “What
you’re doing isn’t music, it’s sociology.” I’ve
occasionally heard the opposite response, the
sociologist who alludes to the specialist in
statistics: “What you’re doing isn’t sociology,
it’s music.” The incorporation of a single
technological set of tools for both camps makes
the similarities easier. Computers are
constructing this similarity in such a way that
the return to analogical music is also a return to
the abstract cave. Obviously, this doesn’t mean
adopting one of the two considerations so
much as making this polemic productive.
“They’re the vestiges of a certain ‘Romantic’
sensibility”, Ivo Supicic2 and José Antonio
Rodríguez Alcantud3 point out, “to which such
approaches or explanations of some of the
aspects of music are repugnant. There is a
genuine fear that the artistic event, the musical
event and its intrinsic value, might be devalued,
a fear that the autonomy of creation of the
musician might be restricted, and even that an
analysis of this kind might reduce music to
events or values of another kind. The opposition
to sociopolitical reductionism has a strong
Romantic component, a movement in the
hierarchy of values of which ‘spirituality’
occupies the highest place. And whosoever says
spirituality means inspiration and genius, in an
anomic relationship that escapes conventional
social structures. The creator, due to his own
genius and his means of expression, would
remain outside of social structures.”
The curious thing is that the Romantic
argument that provided the basis for the
spiritual nature of musical sounds had also
contributed to the fact that in music there figure
natural landscapes of the “view of snowy peaks
in a storm” type or “huge waves violently
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lashing the coast”. Music, which appeared to be
embodied as a mere aesthetic arrangement of
the natural phenomenon, did not seek to
domesticate the world, to make it legible in the
same way science did, but to embody the very
violence of the natural order in an aesthetic
language.
It is these “figurations” that lead many
writers to situate the end of pure music with
Romanticism or with the appearance of figures
like Wagner or Verdi. However much one might
seek to take sound constructions from reality –
from the cannon in military music to tracks on
magnetic tape – the process of musical
concretion has, in parallel to technological
evolution, acted not so much as a “figural” or
“representative” element but rather as a
devastating tool of what those sounds were
trying to simulate, a veritable demolition of the
soundtrack of the real.
For that very reason, only on the basis of the
incorporation of “other” real sounds in the
sound spectrum of concrete music does this
political possibility begin to appear for music.
The intention of the IRCAM laboratories was,
rather, to do with demonstrating the abstract
essence of any reality, capable of being captured
in sound form. No type of semantic analogy may
be established so profoundly that the listener
could read the musical experience the way he
was executing it while listening. The workings of
the concrete – the identification of sounds,
geographical or material allusions, musical
quotes, etc. – were instead to serve as points of
support for destroying any figuration the listener
might come up with. Concrete music is aniconic,
however much it might open the door to sounds
being written, not only inscribed, in the real.
The crucial phenomenon for this conversion
of music into something social is, of course, the
industrialization of popular music. It is here that
the phenomenon is produced of the social
masses that incorporate, with the help of great
technological diversity, music in the business of
life itself; here music becomes necessarily
political. How many times have we heard pop
singers or rock musicians say, in reference to
their declamations and lyrics, that they, of
course, are not being political when they
perform, that everything is owed to the public or
to art. This view usually depends on the level of
audience and the status of the actual musician
who speaks, firstly, to his faithful followers (the
public) and, finally, directly with God (art).
William Washabaugh4 can help us pinpoint
the urgency of the political when speaking of
popular music:
“A great many musical moments spanning
the time from Richard Wagner to Bob Dylan
remind us that music mediates politics and that
popular music, in particular, has regularly been
used to spin political wheels. However, debate
persists about how, when, and toward what end
any music style is tied in with a political agenda.
The answers to these questions may come easily
where lyrics are obviously intended to incite
political movements, e.g. songs for labour rallies
or national anthems. But after one sets aside
these easy cases, the arguments about the
politics of popular music rapidly become dense
and protracted. My support, in these arguments,
inclines toward those who contend that the
visible politics of popular music is minimally
effective, and that the real potency of the music
lies below the waterline, where power is managed
through covert strategies and hidden tactics.”
The repertoire of gestures that go to form this
understanding of music, the performative order
that transpierces our living space, from the
concert hall to music in the lift, from the polished
tone of the guitar to the experience of the iPod, is
the true political material with which music is
made. It is essential to understand the experience
of the musical, be it in so-called serious music –
how do we understand the continuity of the Luigi
Nono of Intolleranza 1960 and Hay que caminar
soñando, otherwise? – or in so-called popular
music – if not how do we understand the
continuity in flamenco between the mythology of
persecution and the protest lyrics and the way
they fit into the most established notions of
Spanishness? – since only the labels, the data, the
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track listings and the visual signs change,
forming a single reference map.
In 1982 the German rock group
Einstürzende Neubauten included the track
“Gestohlenes Band (ORF)” on its Strategies
Against Architecture.5 This is a recording taken
from Austrian television, incorporated in the
musical repertoire in a way similar to how
laboratories of concrete music operated. A voice
in Italian states that everything is political, that
even when a musician refers to the fact that he
makes music and not politics, he’s somehow
involved in politics.
We are speaking of politics in the sense in
which music constructs standards of life in
the community, in the same way that,
etymologically, politics makes us construct the
city. In that same sense we are going to explore
the functioning of the artefacts that are album
covers, in relation to music, in relation to
sound. Record shops, discotheques, music
magazines, concert posters, flyers, gadgets,
video clips, staging and so on – all these are
album covers, the doors that, like track listings,
shape what is going to be heard. How do the
lyrics begin to articulate the voice? How does
the image go on to regulate the sound? We are
seeing, looking at, the covers we have before us,
as yet without listening to the songs or sounds,
without turning the record player on, far from
the dangers of the music.
Gilles Deleuze warned about the “fascist”
danger involved in all music experience, the
fascination that music produces in us, the
annulment of the critical sense to which sensual
experience subjects us. This appraisal goes
beyond the mass phenomenon of rock culture
or the new kinds of electronic music. It has to
do with the dangers of making language with
time, keeping time. In collaboration with Félix
Guattari he explored the figure of the refrain, or
ritournelle, “Deterritorialized sound, the refrain
is rhythm and melody territorialized”. The
refrain embodies the music in our lives, our
cities; it is what turns time into space. There is
no community with refrain.
19
A great many musical moments
spanning the time from Richard
Wagner to Bob Dylan remind us
that music mediates politics and
that popular music, in particular,
has regularly been used to spin
political wheels.
In that anchoring the refrain forms a precise
machine for making politics. Here, we might
reproduce a paragraph that is fundamental to
our concerns; it comes from A Thousand
Plateaus,6 the book in which Deleuze and
Guattari – let’s grasp to the full the referents the
two philosophers apply to music and painting –
consider the refrain:
“Our problem is more modest: comparing the
powers or coefficients of deterritorialization of
sonorous and visual components. It seems that
when sound deterritorializes, it becomes more
and more refined; it becomes specialized and
autonomous. Colour clings more, not necessarily
to the object, but to territoriality. When it
deterritorializes, it tend to dissolve, to let itself be
steered by other components. This is evident in
phenomena of synaesthesia, which are not
reducible to a single colour-sound
correspondence; sounds have a piloting role and
induce colours that are superposed upon the
colours we see, lending them a properly sonorous
rhythm and movement. Sound owes this power
not to signifying or ‘communicational’ values
(which would privilege light over sound), but to
a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that
operates in sound and makes it a cutting edge of
deterritorialization. But this does not happen
without great ambiguity: sound invades us,
impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave
of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a
black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It
makes us want to die. Since its force of
deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects
the most massive of reterritorializations, the
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We like the covers of albums as much
as the facile, catchy songs that we can
repeat and whistle in order to make a
disappointment in love or the loss of
a friend bearable. Of course, they
have an obviously didactic function
in relation to the sound of the record;
they transmit information, related
ideas, to us; they make the
affirmation of a seemingly elusive
musical whole concrete. They appear
to us in a sort of institutional critique
of the fascinating power of music, of
sound. They territorialize music,
articulate it politically.
most numbing, the most redundant. Ecstasy
and hypnosis. Colours do not move a people.
Flags can do nothing without trumpets. Lasers
are modulated on sound. The refrain is
sonorous par excellence, but it can as easily
develop its force into a sickly sweet ditty as into
the purest motif, or Vinteuil’s little phrase. And
sometimes the two combine: Beethoven used as
a ‘signature tune’. The potential fascism of
music. Overall, we may say that music is
plugged into a machinic phylum infinitely more
powerful than that of painting: a line of
selective pressure. That is why the musician has
a different relation to the people, machines, and
the established powers than does the painter. In
particular, the established powers feel a keen
need to control the distribution of black holes
and lines of deterritorialization in this phylum
of sounds, in order to ward off or appropriate
the effects of musical machinism. Painters, at
least as commonly portrayed, may be much
more open socially, much more political, and
less controlled from without and within. That is
because each time they paint, they must create
or recreate a phylum, and they must do so on
the basis of bodies of light and colour they
themselves produce, whereas musicians have
at their disposal a kind of germinal continuity,
even if it is latent or indirect, on the basis of
which they produce sound bodies. Two
different movements of creation: one goes from
soma to germen, and the other from germen to
soma. The painter’s refrain is like the flipside of
the musician’s, a negative of music.”
We can find these same theoretical
oppositions in other sets of ideas. For example,
they are in Derrida when he makes a difference
between “gaze” and “voice”, situating the
former in objects and the latter in the subject.
In that sense, “writing” appears as a condition
of the voice that culturally marks the gaze,
inscribing it; namely, inscribing it in the
framework of subjective vision. Similarly, the
voice is dragged by writing onto a terrain that is
not purely sonorous, acoustic, speech-like:
which is not subject. And to that image of
dragging we ought to pay attention.
Slavoj Žižek has clearly explained the
differences between Lacan and Derrida with
regard to “gaze” and “voice”. All that is
“interiorized” in Derridean writing is
“exteriorized” in the Lacanian system. We can
simplify things by saying that the trajectories of
the “subject” are a nucleus and orbit for the
atomic placement of the “voice” and the “gaze”.
What we want to focus on is this dragging.
When an electron bangs against the nucleus, a
dragging and subsequent explosion is
produced. If in Lacan it is the object that gazes
at us, its displacement necessarily has musical,
environmental consequences. The world we
see also gazes at us and would overwhelm us
were it sustained by our own gaze and thus
subject to our bit of reality. As an example of
this exterior, displaced gaze Žižek7 gives la voix
acousmatique, which functions as the
background music of two films: Brazil, by Terry
Gilliam, and Lili Marleen, by Rainer Werner
Fassbinder. In both, the background song
invades reality in an overwhelming, totalitarian
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way before becoming the unique element that
makes that same reality bearable. The same
thing occurs in Fallen, a film in which a pop
song by the Rolling Stones possesses the crowd,
at once one and multiple, in body and voice.
As in the famous continuity of the old Spanish
movie, María de la O, in which the whole
community, in the diversity of its leisure and
professional pursuits, sings the same song. As
in the refrain, we once again have a description
of music’s need to drag itself down to earth, to
make itself real in our hands, far from the fears
of the cacophony the world produces.
Let us observe for a moment the Goya
capricho that bears the inscription “The Sleep
of Reason Produces Monsters”. The
arrangement of the monsters in the visual
nightmare is musical; they are the sounds of
reason to which the artist, who was going deaf,
gives an order. The same has been said of the
musical representations of Bosch. Likewise,
psychedelic painting.
Let us not detain ourselves further. What
interests us most about album covers, about
the illustrations which feature on their sleeves,
that accompany our listening to them, that call
for our hearing them, that is to say, the function
of these images, of these bits of writing, has to
do with dragging the music down to earth. To
seize the sound, lower the volume of reality
with which it overwhelms us to the point of
making this bearable. We like the covers of
albums as much as the facile, catchy songs that
we can repeat and whistle in order to make a
disappointment in love or the loss of a friend
bearable. Of course, they have an obviously
didactic function in relation to the sound of the
record; they transmit information, related
ideas, to us; they make the affirmation of a
seemingly elusive musical whole concrete. They
appear to us in a sort of institutional critique of
the fascinating power of music, of sound. They
territorialize music, articulate it politically.
21
Covers: Albert Ayler
Beginning in the 1920s and 30s, the industry was
called on to invent different ways of presenting
discs made of shellac. They were entering the
regime of advertising, of course, but it was also a
matter of identifying different forms of life in the
records. Record labels, the circle of paper that
centred the information on the record, marked
this affiliation in graphic terms. Records of
popular music immediately began to make these
inscriptions more attractive, to differentiate
themselves from those other kinds of music
pertaining to the Western classical tradition,
which seemed to get along self-referentially,
given their exclusive musical status. Italian opera
and German lieder, above all the ones put out in
the United States, began doing things differently.
Band music, flamenco and jazz, in that order,
also began to invent their own graphic labels. On
the generic covers for records of popular music
put out by Columbia in the 1930s, they were
indiscriminately illustrated with images of
flamenco and jazz. It was a question of selling,
obviously, and so the evolving record industry
issued serious music without covers and popular
music covered in little drawings. The difference
Albert Ayler, New Grass, 1968
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The object of the singular record
appears by way of avant-garde artistes.
Listening is singularized. The cover
thus turns into information.
was so definite that it persists today: for the
former, generic company designs are employed,
while the latter personalizes each release, each
design, to the point that in the release of any disc
it’s the graphic support that costs the money. It’s
the image that makes the difference.
Alex Steinweiss8 was perhaps a pioneer: not
only did he make the cardboard objects that
would become album covers – he also
contributed to giving an identity to the contents
and the outside of the disc. The collections of
popular music that were to be promoted
followed his guidelines and codified their marks
of identity. A collection of discs functioned like
the music; it weakened our relationship to reality
by inviting us to take pleasure in the sound
alone. The object of the singular record appears
by way of avant-garde artistes. Listening is
singularized. The cover thus turns into
information, clues, data in terms of concrete
experience.
The Afro-American jazz musician Albert
Ayler,9 falling within the free jazz tendency, was
worried at the end of the 1960s by the excessive
intellectualization of black jazz and insisted on
the covers of his records being like those of rock
music. He observed how the political
identification of Afro-American music and
culture was passing from jazz to rock and roll,
although he considered that his music
functioned in the same way as Jimmy Hendrix’s
or Sly & The Family Stone’s. Little by little, he
moved his concerts in the direction of the
political effectiveness of the music, through
being something that gives true meaning to a
community. He changed the saxophone for the
electric guitar and ended up working with
marginal Afro-American communities in which
the music became a genuine object of
communion. He never believed that there were
differences between his jazz and the rock that
excited the black community. He put the
difference down to the image, the advertising, the
fetishization of the record as an interchangeable
cultural factor in the identity of different black
societies. It was obvious that thanks to record
company packaging the commercialization of
music led to ever more merchandise, taking its
lead from the image on the album cover, so that
his intention was also to make his musical mark
on that terrain, which he considered a form of
continuity in terms of the political demands of
the Afro-American community.
When one alludes to this commercialization
of the pop, but not popular, music of the youth
music industry, or to the fetishization and
spectacularization of music, one might overlook
a certain opposition between two terms that in a
sense compensate for and complement one
another. We could say that the fetish is the stone
of the real that we hold in our hands in order not
to let ourselves be dragged along by the
spectacular alienation that musical fascination
can exercise upon us, to the point of making
reality unbearable. It is true that fetish and
spectacle are connected, that they form a
religious whole, a totality that would surely
confirm, today, Walter Benjamin’s dictum that
has capitalism as the new religion of the 20th
century.
One of the renovations of that religious faith
has encountered in the disc, in the world of the
image that surrounds music, a way of
perpetuating, paradoxically, so-called youth
iconoclasm. In fact, on account of this the
dictionary has had to change the definition of
iconoclasm, and not only is the aggression
against an image given this name but also the
obscene and provocative presence of an image.
In other words, due to both disappearance and
appearance, the image of the disc is iconoclastic,
either in the formal clarity of the Wergo label, the
publisher of John Cage and György Ligeti, or in
Andy Warhol’s advertising campaigns for the
Rolling Stones. The periodic renewal that
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One of the renovations of that
religious faith has encountered in
the disc, in the world of the image
that surrounds music, a way of
perpetuating, paradoxically, socalled youth iconoclasm. In fact, on
account of this the dictionary has
had to change the definition of
iconoclasm, and not only is the
aggression against an image given
this name but also the obscene and
provocative presence of an image.
fashion and the market undertake of this
iconoclasm, the extraordinary mobility these
commodities have, their unquestionable
alienating power – none of this gets in the way of
considering album covers as a true comfort in
the face of the overwhelming fascism of music
and its potent technology in the construction
and organization of ways of life of all kinds.
The massive consumption of music products
is a direct result of the actual structure of music.
From the first it was understood that rhythms,
sequences, refrains and so on, contributed like
no other inducement to repetition in the
consumption of music. It was unnecessary to
introduce subliminal messages. The actual
sequence of the images of a collection implied
this monetary repetition. It’s like in Spain with
music in English: nobody understands the lyrics,
but the “hit” is repeated just the same, the
musicians repeat the tune whatever the
storyline. It’s the same, too, with art images:
nobody understands what they mean, but the
artists repeat gestures and styles so that things
“look familiar”. A consumer product with a
standard of consumption within, a bit like the
caption “Coca-Cola gets you hooked”, but
theorized in the 1940s in the hypotheses of
Adorno.
23
Well, against this surge in buying and selling,
as a consummate contradiction, there appears
the brake of the fetish-object, singled out,
constructed so as to narcissistically repeat itself.
Even the greatest market inflationists have
recourse to its specificity in order to fight music
piracy in the illegal market! The self-referential
condition of the fetish leads pathologically to an
anomaly in the ordered world of the commodity.
Walter Benjamin differentiated between the
collector of fetishes and the collector of
commodities. In the first, as if it were an
inclination of the personality, the collector’s
drive was thrown into confusion, randomly
remodelling questions of value and price,
buying and selling. The sentimental education
of the adolescent artist is realized today, and
following Benjamin, in these two models of
character and fate. The second are given over to
an alienated consumption whose only solace is
in repeating the act of consumption itself.
Aimed at them are the new MP3 downloading
models, the iPod, productive repetition. The
first, alienated in character, resist in the
iconoclastic brand name, in the differentiation
of products. The market has separated them
into spectators and artists.
Sleeves: Tamarán
In 1974 a Milan publisher launched Tamarán,10
by Canary Islands musician Juan Hidalgo. This is
a sort of minimal conceptual music that draws
inspiration from Cage, but on the sleeve there’s
the illustration of three bodybuilders in the
middle of exhibiting their biceps and triceps,
silhouetted against the outline of Gran Canaria
island, the mythological Tamarán, pioneer of
sexual tourism, the cult of the body and beach
boys. A close listening to the trickle of harmonics
the piece has recourse to over its forty minutes
forgoes poetry of any kind. Let us allow Juan
Hidalgo11 himself to comment on his work:
“Let’s talk now about Tamarán, Gotas de
esperma para 12 pianos de cola. [Tamarán,
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Drops of Sperm for 12 Grand Pianos]. Tamarán
is a composition 40 minutes long, plus a final 15
seconds of resonance on its own for harmonious
sounds produced by twelve pianists on twelve
grand pianos. Tamarán is an open work. The
pianists are told numerically how many
harmonics they have to produce, but not which
ones. The temporal structure is fixed, however,
as in the case of Música en cinta determinada,
although not in centimetres this time, but
chronometrically. The unit of time is the minute,
subdivided in turn into different fractions of a
second. For that reason the pianists make use of
normal chronometers instead of being guided by
the usual metronomic beat. We will not analyze
the method used for the composition of this
work here, but will speak of the spatial problems
it poses. In order to perform this piece publicly it
is essential to have a big space available,
preferably circular, where we can put the public
and place, at an appropriate distance, the twelve
grand pianos. Located at the centre of it, the
public will be surrounded by the pianos, which
will be set out in a circle like the numbers
engraved on a clock face. If the space possesses
the optimum acoustic conditions, it will not be
necessary to use any amplification. If not, the
amplification of each piano with absolute
independence of the others will be essential. If
amplification is necessary, each of the sources of
sound will be positioned between the piano
which amplifies and the public. In this way one
has the rain of harmonics produced by the
twelve pianos bombard the listener, thus
creating a sound pattern of maximum
effectiveness.”
In actual fact, we have the description of an
orgy before us: as in the final circus of a
pornographic film, all the partenaires come on
the body of the main protagonist, situated
strategically at the centre of the circle. The drops
of sperm, as the subtitle points out, refer to the
harmonics that literally bathe the expectant
public. As in the final scene in Behind the Green
Door, a classic of porn cinema by the Mitchell
brothers, the rain of sperm is in slow motion. Let
Juan Hidalgo, Tamarán, 1974
us read the subtitle in Italian: “Gocce di sperma
per dodici pianoforti”. The humorous
displacements are obvious: the pianoforte of the
bodybuilders, the sperm of the white key, the
enjoyment of the harmonics. Could we have
arrived at this “pleasure” without the explicit
references that appear on the cover?
Dominique Fernandez12 proposes the death
of music with the disappearance of Bellini and
Rossini, just before the appearance of Wagner
and Verdi, just before the irruption of the refrain
and the political. As Deleuze has pointed out,13 a
tragic disappearance is involved:
“Bellini will die in circumstances that remain
unclear, maybe from an illness unknown in his
time, maybe from some more sombre story, and
Rossini is about suddenly stopping. That
musician of genius who, at the height of his
success, decides to stop: now he will devote
himself to cooking. He’d always had two loves,
music and cooking; he was a great cook, and he
went mad. Fernandez comes out with a
statement of this type: music stops with Bellini
and Rossini. I don’t mean to say he’s right
because I don’t think he is. That said, what is it
that makes such a statement possible? He can
only mean to say one thing: something that
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pertains essentially to music will no longer exist
after Rossini and Bellini, the two last musicians.
What, even indirectly, does the disappearance of
Rossini and Bellini entail? What is the new music
around 1830? It is the advent of Verdi and of
Wagner. This means that Wagner and Verdi have
made music impossible. Fernandez goes as far
as to say they are fascists – it’s not the first time
this is said of Wagner. What is it that, being
essential to music, inseparable from music, they
have suppressed, according to Fernandez? (...)
Fernandez states that, as he sees it, music has
always been riven by a content that was a very
intimate part of it: the upsurge or the outstripping
of the difference of the sexes. And so, since in
spite of not being an analyst he does not forget
his analytic training, he says that music is
always and essentially a restoration of the
androgynous.”
“Evviva il coltello, il benedetto coltello” – the
Neapolitans protested against the Napoleonic
laws that forbade the practice of the knife in
barbers’ shop, namely the castration of boys
intended to produce sublime singers, the
castrati. This is the reason why Rossini,
composer of The Barber of Seville, abandons
music. This is what he confessed to Wagner in
their famous meeting in Paris. The
disappearance of the castrati renders the
continuity of music, of bel canto, impossible.
Víctor Gómez Pin14 has posed some apposite
questions about these events:
“What need is there to fill stages by recourse
to mutilation, if today, the brutal extirpation
being banished, it is possible to experience in
lyrical theatre the persistence of voices that
provoke identical emotion? The economy of this
argument is that perfect beauty can exist
without more than the ‘spiritual’ pole of the
human condition being in play. But one might
ask: what sustains such a benefit? If the shock is
salva veritate comparable, why does the matrix
have to be asymmetrical? Is it really possible to
imagine that the work of art (a recreation of the
wound that, at the heart of animality, sets man
apart, namely the impossibility of making links
25
without suffering) can be established at low
cost? And if the eventuality of such an economy
is rejected, wouldn’t it be possible to put forward
the hypothesis that mutilation, that particular
mutilation, the physiological castration as
enacted, was instead a symptom or symbol that
causes the wound, the genuine cause managing
to recreate or announce itself in another
symptom, in another symbol, each time a
modality of artistic creation reappears?”
What these readings make clear transcends
the biopolitical violence exercised in the realm
of art. The technologies that construct us have
their model in musical violence and the
mutilations continue without the need for quiffs
and makeup, tattoos or piercings. Mutilation is
connected with the economy of the fetish in
such a way that the object which points to that
fetish category can only be considered a riven
one. The ability to politically territorialize that
the fetish has is comparable to the one described
by Deleuze and Guattari in the refrain: “The
refrain emerges in the black hole, the child
intones his tra-la-la in the dark because he’s
afraid”.
Dominique Fernandez ends up blaming the
end of music on capitalism: the division of
labour, the predominant role of man in the
economy, his role in the factory replacing his
role in war, the Taylorist assembly line, and so
on. And yet he praises The Beatles and David
Bowie. While he cannot stand the English
counter-tenor, he praises the ambiguous falsetto
of English pop singers. After the Second World
War capitalism enters into another configuration:
the division of labour is dynamited by the
demands of the feminists, the predominant role
of consumption again situates women at the
centre of the economy, the assembly line gives
way to post-Fordist models.
One of the collaborations between Andy
Warhol and The Rolling Stones, perhaps the
boldest, occurs in 1971 with Sticky Fingers,
which presents a zipper ready to zipped down in
the fly of a tight pair of jeans. Obviously, it wasn’t
a sticky finger that was hopefully to be removed
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from this crotch. In Spain and many other
countries the sleeve was censored. As a
substitute we were presented with a more or less
Warholian tin of food, half-open, from which
there emerged some treacly mutilated fingers,
what the aficionado used to know as “dicks in
vinegar”. The repressed always returns.
Veneno, Veneno, 1977
Labels: Veneno
Music’s capacity for figuration has to do with
appearances. The relationship of an album cover
to its content is a guide, an invocation of what
ought to appear. The graphic design that
dominates in popular music has to do with these
indications, the why and the wherefore of all
imagination. In that sense the fragmentary,
miniature, micro-historical quality of the sleeve
prevents us from constructing an idea of totality,
an absolute world, with it. Here are the
programmatic groups, fan clubs, urban tribes,
creators of style, lines in tailoring, the aesthetic
– in short, everything collides with the disc.
Misunderstandings are the creators of album
covers and they construct duly anti-totalitarian
ways of seeing the world, since there is no
totality or project which sustains them. In 1977
the censors stopped the cover of Veneno’s record
from coming out. A block of hashish was
presented in the middle of its tin-foil wrapping;
burnt into the block was the word Veneno
(poison). The name of the group came from a
flamenco song: “In a little room, poison you’d
give me, poison I’d take”. Censorship called for
the photo to be blown up and the block of
hashish now appeared more abstract, displaying
its earthen composition and gritty texture, and
also the mark of the letters of Veneno. The
capacity for abstraction, we know, is one of the
qualities of censorship. Cultural Mudejarism is
characterized by this need for disguise, to
foreground contents that seemingly move
through another appearance. The debates
between fans about which is the best sleeve do
little to exhaust this visual strategy. If the cover
has to make exact figurations appear in order for
the music to sound a particular way, there is
nothing better than misunderstandings.
The group that made Veneno – endlessly
cited as the best record in the history of rock in
Spain – basically consisted of the brothers Rafael
and Raimundo Amador, afterwards Pata Negra,
and Kiko Veneno. They went into the studio full
of Bob Dylan, psychedelia and flamenco, and
ended up making a flamenco-style punk
record – the punk of the subalterns was never
wholly electric – in concert with the spirit of the
age. I have to say that my first live concert in
1979, in the Aracena bullring, was of the as yet
unnamed Pata Negra, and that their version of
“La muchachita”, the second track on the
record, was memorable. Those two gypsies with
the flamenco guitars invoked the stroll of the
“teenage girl with cheeks as fresh as cookies”
with the filthy intensity and adolescent
impudence of a girl from Ipanema. While they
were performing the song, they made continual
pleas to the audience, calling for the “teenage
girl” to appear, and that, singing the song in
unison, we’d get to see her physically. They
couldn’t accuse us of being paedophiles because
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we were equally as young. The sexual turmoil
and the intensity of the music clearly marked the
beginning of an emotional education. Afterwards,
I got the record, that cover, and the song, “La
muchachita”, followed by the impossible subtitle
“Canción nacionalista zamorana”, which led me
to the seminal book by Agustín García Calvo that
inspired the instrumental and had the stroll of
the fresh teenager come to an end on the
cobblestones of the May ’68 revolt in Paris.
Another misunderstanding, of course, and
although the track brought the two themes
together, they had nothing to do with each other,
at least up until that time; afterwards they did,
the record had a life of its own.
That imprint was a biographical milestone
comparable, probably, to Nietzsche’s
impressions upon hearing Bizet’s Carmen, the
passage of the habanera that had transferred
Iradier’s El arreglito to the language of high
opera, an erratic fragment with which to
demolish the totalitarian edifice being
constructed by Wagner, much admired by the
German philosopher until a short while ago.
Ángel González García reminds us of the
sentence Nietzsche pronounced against the
overture of Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Here begins
the twilight of opera”. This is odd, since it was on
that note of musical violence that Georges
Bataille and his accomplices on Acéphale kicked
off their plans to demolish that same fascism
“with the strains that opened Don Juan sounding
on the gramophone in the kitchen, while Masson
was cooking mongetas in blood on the stove”.
However, it was with Carmen that Nietzsche
honed his diatribes against Wagner, against the
totalitarian model of the world as machine that,
as put forward by Susan Buck-Morss – we’ll
expand on this later – was in consonance with
the conception of society as an enormous
factory, the fascism of the total work of art.
The second fragment of The Case of Wagner15
says this, and it is worth quoting at length:
“Bizet’s work also saves; Wagner is not the
only ‘Saviour’. With it one bids farewell to the
damp north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian
27
ideal. Even the action in itself delivers us from
these things. From Merimée it has this logic even
in passion, from him it has the direct line,
‘inexorable’ necessity, but what it has above all
else is that which belongs to sub-tropical zones –
that dryness of atmosphere, that limpidezza of
the air. Here in every respect the climate is
altered. Here another kind of sensuality, another
kind of sensitiveness and another kind of
cheerfulness make their appeal. This music is gay,
but not in a French or German way. Its gaiety is
African; fate hangs over it, its happiness is short,
sudden, without reprieve. I envy Bizet for having
had the courage of this sensitiveness, which
hitherto in the cultured music of Europe has
found no means of expression – of this southern,
tawny, sunburnt sensitiveness… What a joy the
golden afternoon of its happiness is to us! When
we look out, with this music in our minds, we
wonder whether we have ever seen the sea so
‘calm’. And how soothing is this Moorish
dancing! How, for once, even our insatiability gets
sated by its lascivious melancholy! And finally
love, love translated back into ‘Nature’! Not the
love of a ‘cultured girl!’ – no Senta-sentimentality.
But love as fate, as a fatality, cynical, innocent,
cruel – and precisely in this way ‘Nature’! The love
whose means is war, whose very essence is the
‘mortal hatred’ between the sexes! (…) Such a
conception of love (the only one worthy of a
philosopher) is rare: it distinguishes one work of
art from among a thousand others. For, as a rule,
artists are no better than the rest of the world,
they are even worse – they ‘misunderstand’ love.
Even Wagner misunderstood it. They imagine
that they are selfless in it because they appear to
be seeking the advantage of another creature
often to their own disadvantage. But in return
they want to ‘possess’ the other creature. Even
God is no exception to this rule.”
Let us momentarily identify – for it exactly
represented this – the suggestions of popular
music with lo español (Spanishness), what is
later called lo flamenco. Because that is the
emergence Nietzsche is capable of announcing
through Spanish music, the emergence of the
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The group of French artists, 4taxis,
were in Seville at the end of the 1980s.
Their guide to getting to know the city
was that same record by Veneno.
Among other qualities, they admired
its ability to portray a subaltern
world – gypsies and hippies, drug
addicts and drop-outs, prostitutes and
delinquents – without collapsing into
miserablism. There is always a sense
of dignity.
subaltern. And from here, from Nietzsche, there
is ignited the pathway of lo español, the journey
of the moderns along the anti-modern southern
route. That represents lo español; that is the
function of lo flamenco in the modern
imagination. And we don’t know the extent to
which this passion gets people’s backs up. The
extent to which these aficionados of lo flamenco
also meant a crisis, a calling into question, an
interference. Erik Satie was well aware of this,
tired as he was of the “fashion for Spain”, a
“pestilence” among French composers of his
time, to whom he dedicated the short piece
Espagnagna. Its score is accompanied by these
parodic lines: “A kind of waltz / Beneath the
pomegranate trees / As in Seville / The beautiful
Carmen and the hairdresser / Porte Maillot /
This good Rodríguez / Isn’t he the mayor? /
Place Clichy / Rue de Madrid / The women cigar
makers / At your service.”
Humour for humour’s sake, but at the cusp
the frivolous play on words, the joke, the tongue
twister, onomatopoeia, parody, the sainete,
nonsense, the gag. Nietzsche says it himself:
“You must not take what I say about Bizet
seriously. As sure as I exist, Bizet – I say it time
and again – does not interest me, but he acts
strongly as an ironical antithesis to Wagner.”
This is the modern imposture. Joy! Joy! A levity
that kills. Gags, boring jokes that are blindingly
obvious. Clement Rosset,16 perhaps the presentday philosopher who best understands
Nietzsche, summarizes things:
“That the intensity of joy is directly
proportional to the cruelty of knowledge is,
without doubt, a general sort of truth. All the
same, to underline here that in Spain this truth
encounters a privileged field of expression,
especially in cante flamenco, and is so precisely
because it is always accompanied by the lustre
given to it a contrario by the cruel sentiment of
the derisory typical of all existence, that which
shelters it from all complacency or
compromise… Exalting the joy of living, it does
not forget that this will never be more than a
miraculous resistance to death.”
But Nietzsche doesn’t stop there. After seeing
La Gran Vía, the zarzuela by Federico Chueca, a
masterwork that announces the entire musical
politics of the 20th century, he says:
“An important extension of the concept – the
Spanish operetta La Gran Vía, which I’ve heard
twice, a Madrilenean event of prime importance.
Something that simply cannot be imported; one
would have to be a rogue and the very Devil, a
fellow who was instinctive and solemn at the
same time… A trio of three solemn, old and
immense villains is the strongest thing I’ve seen
and heard… even in music: genius cannot be
formulated. Let us take as an example Rossini,
whose work – eight of his operas – I know quite
well and let us choose our favourite, La
Cenerentola, for comparison: well, when
confronted with the Spanish works it’s a
thousand times more innocent. Only a complete
scoundrel could conceive the actual plot itself;
the way in which the villains appear like
lightning on stage seems like a conjuring trick.”
In Chueca’s work the German philosopher
recognized the antithesis of the musical drama
that he had been seeking since his traumatic
break with Wagner. He managed to appreciate
the anti-operatic rhythm and the malice of
numbers like the Jota de los ratas, which
undermines the most deep-rooted aesthetic and
social mantras by recourse to an extremely
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penetrating theatricality and musical irony, as
the critics have recognized. And all that business
about “It’s when authority / pursues us / that as
calm as you like / we swindle more” might be
sung as a hymn. We shall not meet the exalting
of delinquency as a logical resistance to
capitalism again until Bertolt Brecht and Kurt
Weill’s Threepenny Opera.
Pive Amador, who went around at the time
with the group who made up Veneno, remarked
that, “It was an unrepeatable time, with Franco
dead, we political fugitives and criminals were
living as comrades, the Veneno song grows out of
that, there was no greater political freedom than
the freedom of that moment, freedom doesn’t
only have to do with the police, Los delincuentes
speaks about that moment”. The COPEL,
antipsychiatry and libertarianism – everything
resounds in that song, in fact; these are the
words the Spanish Transition should have had.
“Afterwards”, continues Pive, “came the
Constitution and that, at the time, was
something else, better perhaps, but redundancy
isn’t always a good thing.”
The group of French artists, 4taxis, were in
Seville at the end of the 1980s. Their guide to
getting to know the city was that same record by
Veneno. Among other qualities, they admired its
ability to portray a subaltern world – gypsies and
hippies, drug addicts and drop-outs, prostitutes
and delinquents – without collapsing into
miserablism. There is always a sense of dignity.
“One doesn’t do a portrait in black of the beggar,
he’s always your equal, one is never saying all
that about you’re in my song, but I’m the artist.
An equality such as we’ve never seen, which has
to do with who we are, our income and so on.
But also in how we look at each other. We’d like
to learn to look that way.” They attribute the
work of this gaze to Murillo; their project on The
Angels’ Kitchen by Murillo prefigures many of the
things Jacques Rancière17 says about the films of
Pedro Costa:
“Let us take the example of the films made
with the inhabitants of the shantytown
neighbourhood of Fontainhas on the outskirts of
29
Lisbon. There, a political will exists to bear
witness to the reality of dispossession. Also the
practice of making a film with the inhabitants,
including those whose behaviour in front of the
camera is unpredictable. There are two main
aesthetic positions: one is to blur the distinction
between fiction and documentary; the other is
to film, not the misery of the people, but the
palpable richness of their decor in the light and
the richness of their experience of life, in order
to restore it.”
Boxes: Commercial Album
A map of the colonial world in the mid-19th
century will provide us with the economic clues
as to how the different styles of popular music
have been formed in the 20th century. It is easy
to understand the musical basis of reggae, even
of flamenco, in this way. If we trace this map
back to the dawn of modernity we can also
understand the dawn of so-called serious music
in the West, which was clearly popular, local and
national music as well. What interests us right
now is to underline the renovation of the
The Residents, Commercial Album, 1980
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economic map that is produced on the basis of
recorded music, that is to say of the discs
conveniently slotted into their sleeves. It is a fact
that autochthonous musics reinforced their
identity by releasing their music creations
themselves in the ample commercial fabric of
the record industry. The “versions” typical of
Mexican or Indian music were reinforced by the
characteristic treatment given to the covers of
such albums. The reinforcement of musical
identity, the underlining of signs like those of
primitivism or exoticism, was mainly done
through the presentation of the records, while
the music content often escaped the straitjacket
of the images and functioned as a ragbag in
which the modern coexisted with the traditional,
autochthonous quaintness with international
fashion. Hence, the construction of an invented
identity has, in the album cover, the finest and
most efficient tool for the subcultures of urban
peripheries throughout the world. The
collections of Latin American album covers that
the Colombian artist Raimon Chávez presents or
the collections of flamenco album covers
presented in the exhibition Vivir en Sevilla at the
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in
Seville are prime examples.
These are often marginal productions,
peripheral situations of industrial production
that have their raison d’être in subaltern, illegal
economies. This economy of expenditure and
extravagance is intrinsically linked to the
construction of record imagery in pop music
throughout the world. The attention Georges
Bataille18 paid to flamenco and jazz was
endorsed by a whole series of subaltern graphic
elements that had still to blossom into the
images on album covers. The notation made by
Bataille19 stresses how these signs of poverty are
presented with all the pretension of the luxury
object. The baroque rhetoric, the kitsch, the
abuses of ornamentation, and so on, help draw
attention to that need for loss, for economic
waste for musics like the blues, son, reggae,
bossa, flamenco, tango and many more besides.
The economy of the spending and wastage of
abundance – “It is not need but its opposite,
abundance, that poses the basic problems for
living matter and for man”, wrote Bataille – are,
paradoxically, the tools of survival and resistance
of subaltern economies – peripheral, poor and
disregarded by various powers – in the face of the
general colonization by capitalism which we now
call globalization. This opposition has its entire
logic in the “general economy” of which Bataille
spoke, providing a different concept of
subjectivity, human rationality and its
communitarian ties. The need to acquire and
accumulate is not what uniquely or principally
moves human beings, but the desire to give and to
squander. As Antonio Campillo20 has pointed out,
“In opposition to interested egoistic calculation,
generous and disinterested squandering”.
This cultural logic directly inspired some of the
more radical applications of the artistic avant-garde
to the world of music and sound. The Cabaret
Voltaire that the Dadaists mounted in Zurich in the
1910s parodied, in the most original sense of the
word, these primitivist practices. They practiced
what Eric Hobsbawm21 has called an “invented
tradition”, in the same way that jazz musicians or
flamenco performers invented their own tradition.
Hugo Ball,22 who never got to experience the
commercial blossoming of album covers, referred
to the paintings, objects and photographs of the
Zurich period as “boxes” containing the sound, fury
and noise of those years of wartime oppressiveness.
It is obvious that in the era of consumer
capitalism we might, parodying the classic Max
Weber title, say something like we have entered a
Catholic phase of capitalism itself, in which ritual,
fetish and spending acquire another kind of
usefulness for the general religion of the economy.
In that sense, the publicizing and wastage of
images of massive commercialization seem to get
together in pursuit of the circulation of
commodities. Never has so much been bought
and sold. As we said before: today the record
industry spends much of its production money in
the interests of the image of the artiste, to the
point that when we buy a record – from the records
of Morton Feldman to the latest CDs of Falete – we
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What interests us right now is to
underline the renovation of the
economic map that is produced on the
basis of recorded music, that is to say of
the discs conveniently slotted into their
sleeves. It is a fact that autochthonous
musics reinforced their identity by
releasing their music creations
themselves in the ample commercial
fabric of the record industry.
pay more for the graphic elements of industrial
production than for the actual music content.
This rule is also applied to the general
representation of any music production; even on
the street, in the illegal market, the graphic copy
of the disc is more expensive for the pirate than
its musical support.
In San Francisco in the 1970s there appeared
an obscure music group called The Residents, in
principle a “marginal” group, which dynamited
all the rules of the business with a new and
exemplary trajectory and music. We take these
notes from their own publicity handout,23 but all
of them correspond to reality. And in case there
is any question of their self-production, let us
come to the conclusion that they sell records,
that their promotion is meticulous and studied
to the highest degree. Whereas show business
requires stars, people to be adored and offered
on a plate to the ecstatic masses, The Residents
only appear wearing masks. Indeed, the
American group – with a legend that its
members include Frank Zappa and Paul
Macharty, Andy Warhol and Kiss – is mainly
made up of designers and art students from
Louisiana – straight from the New Orleans
carnival – and began to work on popular and
classical music using visual concepts –
photomontage, scratching, solarization, and so
on – applied to the circulation of music and its
selling as popular music. In 1980 they released
31
their Commercial Album,24 a collection of forty
songs of a minute each that function as sinister
advertising jingles, their personal vision of what
commercial music ought to be, to wit: “To our
music we’ve been able to apply the concepts we
apply to our visual imagery, and when the music
circulates without images these tunes can
function as the covers of our future albums”.
Sleeves: Goma
The unexpected hit record by Los Payasos de la
Tele, Gaby, Fofó and Miliki, made so much
money for the Movieplay label that they decided
to start a music label that would address, in a
grown-up sort of way, the new musical impetus
they detected in the moribund Spain of General
Franco. In April 1975 they talked to the novice
producer from Seville, Gonzalo García Pelayo,
who had created successful radio and TV
programmes for the “new youth”, as it was
called, to whom Gonzalo explained his
methodology: “I don’t know if I can make a good
record, but if you let me make ten I can
guarantee one will be a hit”. Thus was born
Goma, 14 abril, 1975
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Movieplay’s Gong label,25 with the intention of
making room for underground and experimental
music, Andalusian rock and the wilder kind of
flamenco, new singer-songwriters and
progressive music, Cuban nueva trova and
Sevillanas. “Quantity for quality” was the motto
and out of this there came records by Goma,
Triana, Lole y Manuel, Dieguito de Morón, José el
Negro, Joselero, Pau Riba, Vainica Doble, Amancio
Prada, Luis Eduardo Aute, María Jiménez, Benito
Moreno, Carlos Cano, Azahar, Elisa Serna,
Carrete, Granada, Gente del Pueblo, Gualberto,
Agujetas, Hilario Camacho, Inti-Illimani,
Labordeta, El Lele, Luis Pastor, Manuel Gerena,
Pablo Guerrero, Eduardo Polonio, Olga Manzano
y Manuel Picón, Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez,
Quilapayún, La Susi, Victor Jara, etcetera.
A basic consideration for Gong were the
covers of their albums; in fact Gong is the first
Spanish label that stipulates that their sleeves
had to be as important as the music. Máximo
Moreno was the art director of the collection and
he directly produced masterpieces like Lole y
Manuel’s first record, with those two impressive
photographic registers, or the first two records
by Triana, El patio and Hijos del Agobio, with
designs that are a combination of psychedelia
and social critique. There are other
collaborators: the Rafa Díaz cover for A la vida,
al dolor by Gualberto is masterly, as is the one
for Vericuetos with paintings by Jessica Jones.
Also Iván Zulueta’s for the Vainica Doble
masterpiece Contracorriente or for Licors by Pau
Riba with a design by Ana Carmona. Even so,
what is most interesting is the project, the
assumption of the visual contribution of the
covers in relation to the product, to the music, to
the figuration of the world projected therein. A
whole economy of art applied to record design,
with a basic idea of narration, the need to tell a
story with each of them, and, moreover, the
material armature of the covers, their physical
quality as objects. This poetics of “cardboard
recycling” was defined by Gonzalo as a matter of
duration: “We were at the crucial move from the
culture of the single to that of the LP and the
records had to be cheap, the playing time was
not only to be a matter of minutes, the
cardboard cover, the photography, the weight of
the object, all this had to count for something,
had to do with those the music was meant to
feature. Later on, Gong came to an end and it
ended when that way of understanding music
fell apart; not the records, though, the way of
understanding music.”
The album cover project comes face to face,
then, with an artistic dimension which, more
than aestheticizing the lives of various
generations, has, of course, helped make them
more artistic. The utopia of technical
reproduction, an object printable thousands of
times, which circulates in all shapes and sizes,
an object without qualities but with great
symbolic meaning – all this served to fulfil the
objectives of the most radical economies of art.
Moreover, the narrative possibilities, the
capacity for figuration and abstraction that were
established in relation to the music, endowed
the object with possibilities that complied with
information and expression as maxims of a
certain way art works. In relation to the music,
the record thus fulfilled a number of minimum
requisites of plasticity, at the frontier of the
figurable, of the art object, of the book, of vital
experience. It almost, we might say, functioned
like the transformational masks of the Northwest
American Indians, as described by Claude LéviStrauss. Designed and elaborated as mediation,
the object of use has the capacity to become
autonomous and in that particular journey to be
transformed with its own laws, being returned to
us with conditions that now forever condition
listening to the music, the visual experience of
the surroundings and the project of a form of
life. Finally, how many works of art aspire to just
such a moment of autonomous profanation?
Let us look at a concrete example. García
Pelayo had an all-embracing obsession with
transforming political hymns into intense love
songs. This was no coincidence. In his film Vivir
en Sevilla one of the characters says it clearly:
“He listened to those songs of combat and
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struggle with a lover’s desperation, songs of
forever falling in and out of love”, while the
young man listened time and again to the record
of “Hasta siempre comandante” dedicated to
Ché Guevara by Carlos Puebla y Los
Tradicionales. He performed the experiment on
various occasions – I’m thinking of “Como tú”
performed by La Susi – but in none did it work as
radically as in Silvio Rodríguez’s “Te doy una
canción”, a revolutionary theme dedicated to
Cuba and its revolution, sung by María Jiménez.
She was a jovial flamenco-style nightclub singer,
whose nickname La pipa, given to her by
journalist Emilio Romero in praise of her sexual
power, had to be both promoted and parried.
The cover of her first record had to combine
those two worlds with little more than a
photograph. The record was to be full of versions
of Latin American themes, a common practice in
flamenco bulerías and rumbas at the time, but in
this instance another type of projection was
involved. The Máximo Moreno photograph
presented the cuplé singer as a sort of
committed singer-songwriter, and the whole
force of the photograph bursts forth in that
impossibility. But there is no meaning – that is to
say, if you don’t listen to the rumbita there is
nothing, a forgotten dusty record, with
something of the nondescript object about it.
But that was the intention: to lead to melancholy
and not to deception. It wasn’t even necessary to
consider the subject matter; the important thing
is that when recalling the theme, when walking
along the street humming it you would think of
María Jiménez: “I give you a song and I say my
country”, and there appears the infinite promise
of pleasure, that dubious thing we sometimes
call happiness.
“All of you have, like me, been visited, I’m
sure, been obsessed to the point of nausea,
possessed to the point of exhaustion by one of
those ‘catchy’ melodies, one of those songs heard
by chance, that is to say of necessity, on the radio,
in cafes, in the supermarket. One of those ‘big
hits’ that henceforth never leave us, that are on
our lips when we awake, that lend rhythm to our
33
A basic consideration for Gong were
the covers of their albums; in fact
Gong is the first Spanish label that
stipulates that their sleeves had to
be as important as the music.
steps when we walk down the street or that often
manage to upset, without us knowing why, a
chain of thought, of intimate reverie.”
Thus Peter Szendy begins his masterly
treatise Tubes, La Philosophie dans le juke-box,26
an attempt at thinking, in tune with Walter
Benjamin, about the things that make up the
world and mark our everyday life. Of course,
read in accordance with these notes, record
covers turn into the mediating factor devised by
those big hits in order to be in the world. When
Szendy brings us nearer to the relationship of
these ditties to money, to their capacity for
mediation, what else can we hold on to?
Following, in a literal way, the reading Szendy
makes of Marx’s famous text “The Fetishism of
Commodities and the Secret Thereof”,27 it is
obvious to think, instead of songs on record, of
album covers. “A commodity appears, at first
sight”, writes Marx, “a very trivial thing, and
easily understood.” It is a thing that is used to
satisfy certain needs, and as such seems to have
nothing “mysterious” about it. But endowed,
among other things, with this “use value”, the
commodity as such behaves in a special way: as
Marx argues, taking a table as an example, as a
commodity, “this indulges in whims that are
even more extravagant than if it had proceeded
to dance”. Because like all commodities, the
table-commodity is not only something useful: it
consists of, sums up or embodies, “a definite
social relation between men”; that is, a type of
relationship among those who produce it with
their work. The commodity, for example, is the
product or expression of a certain labour time
and of a certain organization of that labour.
However, this social relation, deposited, so to
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speak, in the commodity, is forgotten: for men it
is “the fantastic form of a relation between
things”. And the power products have to “appear
as independent beings” is the power Marx calls
“the fetishism which attaches itself to the
products of labour”: “(…) the relations
connecting the labour of one individual with
that of the rest appear, not as direct social
relations between individuals at work, but as
what they really are, material relations between
persons and social relations between things”. In
the exchange market the commodity lives, in
effect, from its exchange value, which seems “to
truly belong to it”, as a property that it would
possess naturally, thanks to a forgetting of the
relations of production that have caused it to be
born. It appears to have an autonomous
movement and a rationale when it circulates
from exchange to exchange. Like a real fetish,
the commodity seems henceforth to be
endowed with a psyche, that “soul of the
commodity” Marx ironically alludes to. And, in
order to demonstrate its illusory quality, Marx
makes this soul speak: “Could commodities
themselves speak, they would say: our use value
may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of
us as objects. What, however, does belong to us
as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse
as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each
other we are nothing but exchange values.” Just
as in these famous pages of Marx’s, album
covers also lend their voice to musical
commodities in general, in order to make them
speak and sing about their nature as fetishes:
what we might call the musical self and the
lyrical self of the song would be, then, the voice
of the actual commodity that is talking about
itself. Because in effect it is the phantasmagoria
which appears as an album cover: the song as a
musical commodity understands or recognizes
itself; it enters into a relation with another song,
which is nothing short of a new version of itself,
with which it enters into an exchange.
The first Gong record had to fulfil the
condition of “being money”. The job was
entrusted to Alberto Corazón who, happily, had
still not made a distinction between his activity
as an artist and a designer. Linked politically to
Seville, at the time his works were habitual in the
cultural life of the city: his poster for Alfonso
Jiménez’s Quejío, put on by La Cuadra, or the
book La vida en el Barrio for the Pro-Sevilla
group, are a couple of exemplary instances. The
group gathered around Seville’s M-11 art centre,
with Quico Rivas and Diego Carrasco among
their number, served as a link for the work in
hand. Rehearsals took place in the gallery and the
record had that artistic ambition from the first.
Goma was the name of the group, with musicians
who came from the mythical Smash or from an
even stranger group, Chicle, pipas y caramelos.
Their music took off from experimental jazzrock, and lo andaluz, the typically Andalusian,
was vaguely invoked. 14 abril was the title of the
record, a subversive date in 1975 since it invoked
the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931.
The lyrics got past the censor by recourse to
tongue twisters and absurd meanings: “A new
April, without salt, hindering and without heat,
possession and shrewd, like the look of a
balloon”. What did not pass was the purple of
the Republican flag which was meant to feature
on the cover. The whole design revolved around
the icon of the dollar, the Masonic pyramid, the
eye of God and its repetition ad infinitum. The
illustration of money, like the illustration of the
record and like the illustration of the sleeve,
were all meant to revolve hypnotically, like a
gyroscope. The graphic elements were assembled
by Miguel Gómez, who resolved things with the
censors. These visual fragments were used
afterwards by Pive Amador, the group’s manager
at the time, on dozens of posters that announced
other luckier groups and musicians like Pata
Negra, Imán, Kiko Veneno and Silvio. “We used
to call it a sleeve back then. The record didn’t
work, but its sleeve did, becoming an identifying
mark of both the label and a way of
understanding the music.”
Among others, Corominas28 identifies the
following definitions for his etymology of carátula
(cover): “mask”, “the histrionic profession”. From
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the ancient carátula, “witchcraft”, and this from
the Latin character, in the sense of a “magic
sign”. It arrived at its modern meaning by
proceeding from the paint-daubed face of
wizards and magicians; and at the American
meaning of a “book cover” through comparison
with the mask covering the face.
Covers: The White Album
It is obvious that the maximum refutation of the
Walter Benjamin essay “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction”29 is found in
the work of Andy Warhol. Let us remind
ourselves of the ending of the essay: “This is the
situation of politics which Fascism is rendering
aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing
art.” Well, capitalism has embodied this
dichotomy between art and aesthetics in order
to create its politics. Hence, the converting of
aura into “credit” has enabled the serial
pictures of Warhol to apply for the “art
standard” with the same intensity with which
our Visas or Mastercards function in terms of
the gold standard. The linguistic effectiveness of
his work operates by encountering, in these
financial transformations of the political
sphere, areas of exploitation for marginal
cultures, autonomous ways of life and minority
identities. One does not usually speak, in Warhol,
of aura but of glamour, yet capitalism’s
mechanism of “technologies of the self” remain
its most effective tool of social assimilation in
our societies. This is why Warhol’s works for the
covers of pop industry musicians from The
Velvet Underground to Miguel Bosé function
paradigmatically when one attempts to draw a
map of the visual arts and music.
The value of the image in the era in which the
technological copy enables it to reach greater
circulation was the subject of wide debate in
the period in which Walter Benjamin wrote his
essay. In Spain a fin de siècle writer like Silverio
Lanza – the mentor, among others, of Ramón
Gómez de la Serna, to the point that Jorge Luis
35
Borges himself confused the work of the two
writers – noted down the occasional interesting
idea in that respect. Corpus Barga recounts it:
“Ricardo Baroja, Valle Inclán and the young
painters close to them were arguing about the
values of great painters and masterpieces.
Silverio Lanza began outlining his proposition
by attributing it to a young stockbroker and
student of homeopathy, of anarchist medicine.
If a painting by Velázquez, El Greco, Tintoretto,
Titian, Raphael or Leonardo, whoever it is, I’m
citing the names you cite, the one each of you
chooses, finds a viewer, the one that each of you
has chosen, the maximum rapport will occur,
one and the same, the first and most complete,
but if a bad print finds a viewer, who goes with
it to the same extent as the one before in terms
of the masterpiece, the same view will also
prevail. 100,000 billion divided by 100,000
billion is the same as one divided by one – it’s
always one. The stockbroker with aesthetic as
well as stock market values was right. He was
right, the rightness of geometric progression,
which in aesthetic proportions is the unit,
democratic and individualist. The young
libertarian was right.”30
The Beatles, The Beatles, 1968
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The periodic critical waves that shake
the relations of representation in the
field of art, from punk to institutional
critique, help to create a stenography
that ends up strengthening the
corridors of power they are fighting.
The simplicity with which Lanza resolves the
troublesome issue of technical reproduction and
the work of art, the famous aura that Benjamin
saw being lost, can only proceed from a real
understanding of the economic laws of
capitalism that define the identity of art. A clarity
akin to that of Karl Marx’s text on “The Fetishism
of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”31 that we
cited above. The Jewish angels that frightened
Benjamin had served, years before, to make
Marx’s vision more acute: “A ‘commodity’
appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and
easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is,
in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in
metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.
So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing
mysterious about it, whether we consider it from
the point of view that by its properties it is
capable of satisfying human wants, or from the
point that those properties are the ‘product’ of
human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that
man, by his industry, changes the forms of the
materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as
to make them useful to him. The form of wood,
for instance, is altered, by making a table out of
it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that
common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as
it steps forth ‘as a commodity’, it is changed into
something transcendent. It not only stands with
its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other
commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves
out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, that are
even more extravagant than if it had proceeded
to dance.”
It is obvious that Marx describes a table like
those that began dancing around in spiritualist
séances. In our own time that table is the dj’s
and the connotation in the form of the dance
would include the social mass as a whole.
Silverio Lanza saw it clearly – it is a pity that
only a few of his Economic Tales have come
down to us – and not without a certain humour,
and with a certain sarcasm, even: “The value of
the image is a merely economic value”. His
thinking was not far from the imperative Giorgio
Agamben32 read in the work of the Situationists:
“The ‘becoming-image’ of capital is nothing
more than the commodity’s last metamorphosis,
in which exchange value has completely
eclipsed use value and can now achieve the
status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty
over life in its entirety, after having falsified the
entire social production. (…) The first duty the
Situationists assigned themselves was to wake
up from this nightmare.”
Conscious of the role their productions play
in the design of the current system, visual
constructions only need to act accordingly. They
can feel themselves to be privileged because
from the outset their activity was a parallel
model to the strategies of capital and would turn
into the best placebo for the latter. It seems quite
difficult for visual productions to be able to
renounce the founding characteristics of their
own activity, but if the predominance of
exchange value leaves us in a dead end, it is in
the recovery of use value that a critical relation
with the real may be rediscovered. In that sense
album covers provide the work of art with an
exceptional vehicle for releasing the tensions
between fetish and commodity, luxury object
and democratic merchandise, that spreads ways
of handling and understanding life, codes of
identity, in short political narrations, throughout
the community.
If factors of abundance, spending and
wastage have served to turn the cover into a
privileged tool for the democratic circulation of
the work of art, what is the use value of that
which seeks to establish itself beyond all use? If,
as Bataille wished, the value of art is related to
the concept of abundance, engenders
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abundance in some way, the potlatch would
have to be carried out with greater
assiduousness. We ought to give in to
destruction more bravely. One is prepared to get
just as emotional about the baroque imagery in
a procession as about churches in flames. This
would be one of the constants in the renewal of
the modern. The records of the Sex Pistols
coexist with the reappearance of Gregorian
chant. Does it not seem excessive that while this
doubt persists, while this debate about the use
values of art is maintained, there exists such a
degree of unanimity in attributing a rising
exchange value to them?
In the meantime let us stick to the evaluation
of the stock exchange. It is all very well to turn
shit into gold, but it is not something exclusive
to artists or musicians. They are the best
instructors, of course, but right now this is the
basis of the world economy. The artistic
principle transposed to the social dynamic has
provided a few solutions, but it is also
responsible for the current status quo. The
periodic critical waves that shake the relations of
representation in the field of art, from punk to
institutional critique, help to create a
stenography that ends up strengthening the
corridors of power they are fighting. The closed
circularity and self-satisfaction that occurs in the
many worlds of the field of the visual arts and
music, prevents the transference of the
undoubted political achievements attained – in
autonomy, representation, and so forth – to the
rest of society. The marginal ways of life that are
constructed around reggae or electronic dance
music, experimentation in the languages of
concrete music, and their instrumentalization in
everyday usage, are just a few examples of the
loss of political energy in a society that tries to
keep the diverse spheres of production separate.
As Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out,33 the
factory was the contrast to the opera house in
the world of work, a sort of counterphantasmagoria based on the principle of
fragmentation, not on the illusion of totality.
Marx’s Capital, written in the 1860s and
37
therefore contemporary with the operas of
Wagner, describes the factory as a total
environment: “Every organ of sense is injured in
an equal degree by artificial elevation of the
temperature, by the dust-laden atmosphere, by
the deafening noise, not to mention danger to life
and limb among the thickly crowded machinery,
which, with the regularity of the seasons, issues
its list of the killed and wounded in the industrial
battle.” Wagner’s “total work of art”, intimately
related to the disenchantment of the world, is an
attempt to produce an instrumentally totalizing
metaphysic by using every available technical
means. This is true for dramatic representation
and for musical style. In Bayreuth the orchestra,
the means of production of the musical effects, is
hidden from the public by constructing the
orchestra pit below the eyeline of the audience.
Supposedly interested in “integrating the
individual arts”, continues the reading by BuckMorss of Adorno’s Wagner, “the execution of
Wagner’s operas finally attains a division of
labour without precedent in the history of
music”.
Accordingly, in Critique of the German
Intelligentsia,34 Hugo Ball again contrasts a life
that persists in the grandeur of the German
music of Wagner to a life that is endured with a
programme like the ones handed out in the
Cabaret Voltaire. Corresponding to the BuckMorss image, the part confronts the whole: the
fragmentary as a weapon of reconstruction of a
total economy of presenting the world. Ball’s
proposal works in a simple way, in absolute
opposition to Wagnerian “totalitarianism”. As
If factors of abundance, spending
and wastage have served to turn
the cover into a privileged tool for
the democratic circulation of the
work of art, what is the use value of
that which seeks to establish itself
beyond all use?
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The cover of the record did not
function, now, in relation to the
music, but in relation to the other
record sleeves that came out during
that year and in relation to the
general iconography prevailing in
pop culture.
against the absolute model of society that seeks
to cleanly represent the social whole as a mirror,
it is proposed to work in different kinds of noise,
in the tensions of the violin bow, in in-between
spaces, in the dirtiness of the world. And in
music, against the location in which an absolute
scene is built in order to represent the world,
there is pitted the warmth of a simple album
cover, the vinyl broken, without even giving us
the chance to listen to it.
When Paolo Virno35 puts forward the social
virtuosity of pianist Glenn Gould as a model,
which virtue have we to consider? The peerless
genius, capable of constructing absolute worlds
on the basis of his interpretation of, for example,
Bach’s Goldberg Variations, or the same genius
of social destruction who in Thomas Bernhard’s
The Loser leads his closest colleague to suicide
and the other friend to the lowest form of
writing? Or is it a question, instead, of that other
Glenn Gould, who managed to value the
awkward nature of his dexterity, the damage his
fingers caused to the democracy of technique,
and who abandoned the space of representation
of the concert hall in order to transmit his music,
technology and craftsmanship being
indiscernible, through recordings alone?
In actual fact, it wasn’t just a matter of
making use of the symbolic potential of the
record, of taking the relationship between
democratic circulation and a marvellous fetish
for increasing audiences as exemplary, or even
of abusing, as has been abused, the political
potential of such a popular element and of
introducing slogans and propaganda for good
causes. All that was involved, of course, but also
contributing rigorous language, critical
interweaving, a questioning of work itself, a
political event. Were it not so, what meaning
would it have to put a collection of album covers
together at precisely the moment these
supports, the covers of LPs, cassettes and CDs,
are beginning to disappear? What example of a
tool would they now be, when with these
supports a thing of the past, the task shifts to
other shared forms of relating and
communicating? Faced with the museum that
contains collections of junk of all kinds, it is hard
not to repeat Mairena’s dictum, “We praise what
we lose”.
In 1968 Richard Hamilton designed the
sleeve of the double LP The Beatles, known as
The White Album36 on account of its plain white
image. He was contacted through gallery owner
Robert Fraser – the same person who appears in
police custody with Mick Jagger in another
famous work by Hamilton – who had previously
convinced Peter Blake and Jann Haworth to put
together the famous cover of Sgt. Pepper’s.
Hamilton had it easy, since he already knew the
commercial workings and iconic expansion
involved in the Lonely Hearts Club Band record.
In this instance it wasn’t a question of operating
with the music – such as the contamination
between psychedelia, carnival and image
denoted in Blake’s work – since the operational
framework had already been transcended. The
cover of the record did not function, now, in
relation to the music, but in relation to the other
record sleeves that came out during that year
and in relation to the general iconography
prevailing in pop culture. Thus, this image
without an image – the first design proposed the
mark left by a coffee cup, later on by the stains of
apple pulp – the white record identified by just
its serial number, would again drag the ethereal
music – a set of songs without any relationship
to each other, since the group had ceased to
exist – towards the concrete, taking it in the
direction of the iconic artefact that had ceased to
be. Hamilton didn’t even listen to the record
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39
before proposing his cover. Its visual impact
even contributed to the legend of Charles
Manson and his demented crimes. As it is, The
White Album is the album of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-LaDa”, but also of “Helter Skelter”, “Back in the
U.S.S.R.”, “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9”.
17. Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé. Paris: La
Fabrique, 2008.
This text is an enlarged version of the one published in
Diedrich Diederichsen, Jean-Ives Bosseur, Mark Jamieson
and Pedro G. Romero, Vinil. So i col.leccionisme. Barcelona:
MACBA / Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2006.
20. Antonio Campillo, Contra la economía. Granada:
Comares, 2001.
1. Colectivo Situaciones, Mal de Altura. Buenos Aires: Tinta
Limón/UNIA, 2005.
2. Ivo Supicic, “Sociología musical e historia social de la
música”, Papers, no. 29, Barcelona, 1988.
3. José Antonio González Alcantud, El rapto del arte.
Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2002.
4. William Washabaugh, Flamenco: Passion, Politics and
Popular Culture. Oxford: Berg, 1996.
5. Einstürzende Neubauten, Strategies Against Architecture.
Herne: Mute Records, 1983.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis & London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987.
7. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques
Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT,
1991.
8. Jorge García, Jazz gráfico. Valencia: IVAM, 1999.
9. Albert Ayler and others, and Michael Snow, 1016 New
York Eye and Ear Control. New York: ESP-Disk, 1966.
10. Juan Hidalgo and Antonio de Gregorio, Tamarán. Milan:
Cramps Records, 1974.
11. Juan Hidalgo, De Juan Hidalgo, 1957-1997. Gran
Canaria: CAAM, 1997.
12. Dominique Fernandez, La Rose des Tudor. Paris:
Julliard, 1976.
13. Gilles Deleuze, Derrames, entre el capitalismo y la
esquizofrenia. Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2005.
14. Víctor Gómez Pin, La escuela más sobria de vida.
Madrid: Espasa, 2002.
15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner. Edinburgh &
London: T.N. Foulis, 1911.
16. Clément Rosset, Le Principe de cruauté. Paris: Éditions
de Minuit, 1988.
18. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings,
1927-1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985.
19. Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology 1937-39.
Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press,
1988.
21. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The
Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983.
22. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. New York:
Viking Press, 1974.
23. Adolfo Marín, La nueva música. Barcelona: Teorema,
1984.
24. The Residents-Pore Know Graficcs&Rex Ray,
Commercial Album. San Francisco: The Cryptic
Corporation, 1980.
25. Félix J. Santana, Un paso atrás por la serie Gong de
Movieplay. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2001.
26. Peter Szendy, Tubes. La Philosophie dans le juke-box.
Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008.
27. Karl Marx, Capital. Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 35.
London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996.
28. Joan Corominas, Breve diccionario etimológico de la
lengua castellana. Madrid: Gredos, 1961.
29. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Schocken
Books, 1969.
30. Corpus Barga, Los pasos contados. Barcelona: Bruguera,
1986.
31. Karl Marx, Capital. Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 35.
London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996.
32. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics.
Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press,
2000.
33. Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin, escritor
revolucionario. Buenos Aires: Inter.zona, 2005.
34. Hugo Ball, Critique of the German Intelligentsia. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
35. Paolo Virno, Virtuosismo y revolución. Madrid:
Traficantes de sueños, 2003.
36. The Beatles-Richard Hamilton, The White Album.
London: Apple Records, 1968.
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Annika Ström
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Personal Delivery
Jonathan Griffin
Guitar slung low, legs spread wide apart, neck
craning up towards the microphone, the young
man screws his features into an expression that
looks like something between grief and sexual
ecstasy. He sings:
“I - will be - the one - to turn you on!
On the bed
I - will be - the one - tonight.”
Between the assembled bar crowd and the
shallow, six-inch high stage, in front of clusters
of people clutching bottles of beer and raising
their voices to the ears of their friends, in front
of other people who stare expressionlessly at the
singer, surrounded by movement and noise,
stands the singer’s mother, holding a video
camera which she points at her son for the
whole duration of his performance.
No one seems to find this strange, or
embarrassing, or worthy of comment.
This was a small concert that I saw just two
weeks ago, but I’ve wondered many times
before: what is it about the special zone of
performance that allows us to observe such
extraordinary heights of emotion and
vulnerability in strangers – or even, sometimes,
in our loved ones – without flinching or turning
away in shame and embarrassment? Normal
rules of privacy and discretion no longer seem to
apply. The peculiarly distancing effect of a stage,
and of the dissipation into a crowded room of
words that, anywhere else, would be troubling or
provocative, is a mysterious and wonderful
phenomenon. It has become so normalized in
our culture, however, that most people no longer
even notice it. In its contemporary form, it is a
structure that rises from the popular music of
the past half-century, but it also has foundations
in theatre, in Spoken Word Poetry, Live Comedy
and Conceptual art. Annika Ström makes art that
exploits our familiarity with its conventions in
order to thrive on its strangeness.
Annika Ström, Ten New Love Songs, 1999
Sometimes she sings songs. The songs are
not dissimilar to many pop songs, in that they
are mostly delivered in the first person and are
addressed to an unspecified “you”. Whatever
their lyrical content – “It’s my fault”, “I get so
sad”, or “I didn’t do anything wrong”, for
instance – we cannot help, because of their form
and because of what we know about songs that
start with “I” and end in “you”, interpreting
them as being about relationships.
In other ways they are nothing like pop
songs. Ström does not perform these songs with
a band, but accompanies her own voice with the
preset chords and rhythms of a small electronic
keyboard. She rarely occupies a stage, preferring
instead to stand on the same floor as her
audience, and she usually finds herself singing
in art galleries. Sometimes people don’t even
notice her at first; at one particularly busy
private view, Ström recalls, only the security
guard heard her while everybody else continued
chatting. The minimalist delivery of these songs
is, in part, due to the fact that Ström does not
consider herself – nor has any ambition to be – a
musician. Her musicianship is aggressively
amateur, not in a punk way but more akin to the
intimate tradition of folk songs. But it is also
shaped by the formal conventions of Conceptual
art, which, by and large, is less concerned with
technical virtuosity than resourceful
autodidacticism.
Another strand of Ström’s artistic output, her
text works, fit more squarely into the aesthetic
category of Conceptual art. They consist of
phrases, normally no more than a few words,
transcribed in a neat, sans-serif font onto sheets
of paper or, occasionally, onto a wall. She rarely
uses punctuation or capital letters except for the
word “I”. Although their words are different to
Ström’s songs, they often have the feeling of
song titles or lyrics. Please help me. All your
dreams have come true. I love to live but not with
me. What these phrases share with pop songs in
general is their combination of emotional
directness and impersonal ambiguity. For
instance, when the text says “I”, does that mean
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Annika? If so, when she sings “you”, does she
mean us? We hope not, but the possibility for
such intimate personal address is troubling and
elevates the work beyond the cerebral chilliness
of the art that it formally resembles.
Ström’s text works are also comparable to the
idiom of the pop song (though perhaps not
Ström’s own songs) because of the distance that
their formal constraints – their font, their size,
their concision – place between them and us, the
audience. The hot words are insulated by their
cool presentation, not unlike the cordon
sanitaire where the stage meets the auditorium
in a performance venue. However, in her texts
this membrane is only partially effective. In
certain pieces, Ström uses humour to punch
little holes in it, as with a modest-sized text that
announces itself to be a “major work”, or the one
that says Excuse me but I need to lie down here
and think about my next piece of art. In this case
and in many others, she uses the text to talk
about itself, and to undermine the surety of its
own pronouncements.
A performance or an artwork grows
extremely powerful when it acknowledges the
limits of its own frame. If it allows its subject to
talk about itself objectively – from outside the
frame, as it were – it effectively appears to
remove that frame altogether. For instance,
when Kanye West raps “I’m on TV talkin’ like it’s
just you and me” he implies that now it is just us
and him. Sometimes this objectivity can become
the subject of the work itself: Ström has made a
video of people talking about other videos by her
that they have either been in or cut out of, and a
sound piece in which she describes other
exhibitions she has made. Where, really, is the
artist in all this?
In a recent work, Ström disappears from
view, and dissolves the distancing structure of
the stage – real or metaphorical – altogether. The
Upset Man was a performance devised for her
exhibition From the Community Hall, in Temple
Bar Gallery in Dublin, 2010. For the exhibition,
Ström had built a stage, or rather a life-sized
sculpture of a stage, on which she had displayed
some of her work and Swedish textiles, and on
the back of which was written the script of a
heated conversation between a couple. At an
unannounced moment in the exhibition, an
actor began to speak into his phone, becoming
more obviously distraught as the conversation
went on. He was performing the script written
behind the stage, but he did not ever venture
onto the stage itself. The man appeared not to
acknowledge the boundaries of his performance
at all; despite the quietness of the gallery visitors
around him, he loudly continued his
conversation as if completely oblivious to his
surroundings.
The effect for the confused members of the
audience was profoundly embarrassing. At first,
it was embarrassing because the man (who they
assumed to be a regular gallery visitor) had
become a performer unintentionally; a private
exchange was being enacted in public, and the
man was so engrossed in his personal situation
that he ceased to be aware of his context. The
failure to see oneself objectively (like when you
have food on your chin or your trouser flies are
undone) is embarrassing for those around you,
precisely because it is not for you. As the
performance continued, and people realized
that the man was in fact an actor (perhaps when
they remembered the script on the back of the
stage), it remained uncomfortable because the
normal conventions of performance were not
being followed. Gradually, an unspoken
consensus formed that it was appropriate to be
silent and still, and to listen to the conversation,
but the man still refused to acknowledge his
proper role as a performer. When he finally hung
up the phone, the crowd clapped to re-establish
their distance from the proceedings, and to put
space between themselves and him.
Ström has said that all her art, whatever its
nature, is embarrassing in one way or another.
She doesn’t say for whom, but it is clear that the
embarrassment of the performer and of the
audience is closely intertwined. Ten Embarrassed
Men was the title of a work Ström made for the
2010 Frieze Art Fair, in London. It seems strange
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Annika Ström working on This is a song for you, for you, but you will never hear it. CAAC, 2011. Photo: Guillermo Mendo
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Annika Ström, I Am in Love, 2004
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to call it a performance, although that is what it
was, for the men were actors and they were
playing to an audience, even through (especially
through) pretending not to. A group of ten
identically, blandly dressed men shuffled in a
tight group through the bustling crowds of the
art fair. Some stared at the floor; others hid their
faces behind their hands; all generally avoided
eye contact with passers-by who looked intently
at everything, many of whom were also hoping
to be looked at themselves.
An art fair is not a place for the scopophobic.
Things fight for visual attention on all sides – not
just pictures and objects but faces and bodies.
Equivalents between finance, power and (the
predominantly male) pleasure in looking are
easy to draw. That heterosexual male collectors
enjoy having images of female bodies on their
walls is no secret, and art fairs are always
packed with work explicitly catering for male
taste. A comparable dynamic also plays out in
traditional modes of performance – theatre and
cinema, but music too – in fact whenever an
audience is permitted to watch other people on
stage from the security of a darkened
auditorium. Sigmund Freud, in his essay
“Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), asserted
that voyeurism is unhealthy because the
scopophilic does not admit the object of his
desire into his sexual satisfaction; he is insulated
against intimacy, and takes only the image of the
other person (through looking) against her will.
Voyeurism does not map quite so neatly onto
the kinds of performance I’m discussing,
however. After all, performers, whether singers,
actors, comedians or athletes, not only submit to
the gaze of the audience but actively thrive upon
it. Typically, their exhibitionism nullifies the
unpleasanter associations of their being
watched. Ström’s work, however, tends to distort
and invert these dynamics in order to disrupt the
comfort of the conventional viewing space. In
The Upset Man, for instance, the actor is seeking
the attention of the audience before they even
realize they are an audience; instead, they
believe (at least at first) that they are observing
this deeply personal and traumatic scenario
without the man’s consent. And that is both
captivating and shaming for them. Something
similar happens with Ten Embarrassed Men,
except that in this case the actors seem actively
to want to evade the attention of those people
around them. That in itself makes them an
object of curiosity, especially in an art fair.
When Ström records herself singing for the
soundtracks to her videos, as with Ten New Love
Songs (1999), she sounds as if she’s singing to
herself. It’s not the first time that a performer
has pretended not to be performing at all, as
we’ve just seen. But it does confuse any
associations we might make between the singer
and the extrovert impulse. The problem with
extroverts, generally speaking, is that they are
insincere; they will say or do something just to
get a reaction, rather than because they mean it.
In order for a singer such as Ström to convey the
sincerity of her words, she must deliver them in a
way that is emphatically introverted. Is then this
quietness, this modest way of sharing, also an
act? The answer must be that yes, in a way it is.
But it makes no sense to describe Ström as
insincere, any more than we would call a Method
actor a faker. (In fact she herself jokingly admits
that she takes the stereotype of the tormented
artist suffering in her studio to ridiculous
lengths.) The opposite is true: Ström is concerned
with finding ways to make her sincerity
conveyable to a deeply cynical audience. Perhaps
it is most valuable to think of Ström’s art as being
about sincerity. Pushing this thought further, it
seems that throughout her work, one is, in every
instance, made aware of the vehicle for such
sincerity: language. It is the problems of
communication, and of the inadequacies of
language in conveying personal experience,
which Ström’s work brings into the light.
It is never wise to dwell too much on
biography, but it is worth noting that Ström is a
Swedish artist who has lived outside the country
of her birth for the last twenty years. This
displacement places her at a remove from both
her native tongue and her adopted, second
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language (English – which, like many people
around the world, she first encountered through
the lyrics of pop songs). Sometimes, her texts
handle language awkwardly, and sometimes
Ström’s foreignness becomes a strategy of
confusion, whether deliberately or inadvertently.
(She has noted that when she showed people her
text piece This work refers to Joseph Kosutt, she
sensed them wondering whether she knew she’d
spelt his name wrong.)
Central to her experience as a non-native
speaker, however, is her vivid awareness of those
things that cannot be said. Often this is for
linguistic reasons; All my dreams have come true
(2004) is a video of her parents struggling with
the translation of the work’s title into English, a
Annika Ström, Dirk the Stand In, 1997
phrase that is apparently not so commonly used
in Sweden. In other cases, the untranslatability
of words is down to cultural or social factors.
Ström notes that, while the English words “I love
you” are bandied about so often that now they
are almost meaningless, in Sweden, to say “jag
älskar dig” is almost forbiddingly heavy (the
phrase is still relatively unscathed by popular
culture, and so is hesitatingly used even in the
most intimate circumstances).
When I first saw Ström’s pink and orange text
piece Wait, I need to think about these words, I
took it for a clever, ironic comment about voids,
about the facileness of most artistic products
and the pressures of creativity. Now I realize that
it is absolutely sincere.
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Ruth Ewan
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Smash Hits
Chris Fite-Wassilak
I met Fang when I was looking for buskers. I went to
an event at the Southbank where I spotted him and
went up to him as I thought he looked quite
interesting. He took part in Did You Kiss the Foot that
Kicked You?, and during that I got to know him a bit.
For his audition he came in and sang Black Sabbath’s
“Paranoid”, it was amazing. He thinks the Fang Sang
project turned him into a local celebrity, but he was
already a celebrity, he’d done that for himself. He’d
taken this name Fang, actually changing his name to
Fang by deed poll, it says it on his bank cards and
stuff. He’s created this amazing identity for himself,
wearing a set of false teeth in his ear, and incredibly
rude things on his t-shirt. He was a front man in a
band for ages and used to wear ladies underwear on
stage. He says the gods named him Fang before time
existed. I don’t know when he changed his name, he’d
never give you a straight answer on something like
that, he doesn’t tell people how old he is or what his
real name is.
We did an open mic night after the Fang Sang project;
some students from the Byam Shaw School of Art
sang, and Fang sang the tune of k.d. lang’s “Constant
Craving” mixed with the lyrics of “Anarchy in the
U.K.”, so it was “Craving Anarchy”, and it just did
something really weird, it was so much better than any
of these mash-up remixes, it was really beautiful. We
were packing up when one of the young librarians
said, “I’d like to sing a song.” He sang “Ain’t No
Sunshine”, it was really surprising in such an unlikely
situation. Some of Fang’s old bandmates came as
well, he hadn’t seen them in 20 years, they performed
together.1
---
Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, 2007.
Photo: Thierry Bal
“Wurlitzer really smashes them!” the
advertisement exclaims exuberantly, while a
man hefts a sledgehammer over his head down
on the splintered shards of what used to be a
jukebox. In an action and a forthright promise
almost unthinkable today, the company
gleefully make this guarantee, to “enable
Wurlitzer Music Merchant everywhere to make
more money”. In 1938, the emphasis was the
future, on inventions, innovations and
improvements imminently arriving; part of
their self-perception of integrity was to simply
destroy any jukebox models that had been
superseded. They openly promote their violent
destruction of the past; today, it seems taunting
and ludicrous to willingly erase these cultural
artefacts. Their clerical decision tells the story
they want to present: that every Wurlitzer you
encounter will be a new one, the latest model
to the highest standards. They happily disclose
the mechanisms through which they enforce
the narrative. But behind that is the sound of
thousands of destroyed jukeboxes.
“Conscious tinkering and remaking is only
a small part of the shaping of the past. When
we look closely at the construction of past time,
we find the process has very little to do with the
past at all and everything to do with the
present. Institutions create shadowed places in
which nothing can be seen and no questions
asked. They make other areas show finely
discriminated detail, which is closely
scrutinized and ordered. History emerges in an
unintended shape as a result of practices
directed to immediate, practical ends. To watch
these practices establish selective principles
that highlight some kinds of events and
obscure others is to inspect the social order
operating on individual minds.”2
It is the “noisy silences” that help inform
Ruth Ewan’s practice. Hidden corners,
suppressed figures, and forgotten facts from
the past make some of the starting points for
her work. These cultural moments are reanimated and re-placed in the present, often as
a series of actions, events and performances,
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which then curiously branch in two diverging
but interrelated directions. On one hand, they
work on an impersonal, historical level. Dealing
with archives and records, her practice seems to
work against the grain, throwing up the
incongruous and unexpected, things unfamiliar
to us in the present. Not so much about explicit
suppression or subversion, there is more the
sense of things that could or should have been
better remembered, or might have had more
importance. This is the strongly historiographic
element to her work, her research which informs
a broad structural critique. It exposes a similarly
violent, but quieter, version of Wurlitzer’s
operations. In seeing these forgotten words and
marginalized figures, we can become aware of
the forces of institutional amnesia, of the
undisclosed mechanisms that allow us to see
these things in the first place. Exposing these
structures, this aspect of Ewan’s practice
questions how dominant histories are created,
and how other stories are both actively and
passively allowed to be forgotten.
---
Wurlitzer advertisement, 1938
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One of the buskers was called Anna-Maria Tkacz,
an IT programmer who had been a junior
accordion champion as a kid. When she won, she
was like, “Well, what do I do now?” She put her
accordion away in the attic. When she saw the
advert asking for buskers, she said she’d always
wanted to busk but she’d never had the
confidence. So she decided to do it, and she got
her accordion out. She hadn’t touched it for
15-20 years. She told me a bit about the history
of it; it has such an odd place, a completely
anachronistic thing. It’s mentioned in literature
placed in the wrong time period; it wasn’t actually
patented until late 19th century, but it appears
in things like “Pirates of the Caribbean”, which
is supposed to be set in the 18th century. My
mum told me, after I’d completed the busking
project, that she’d found out that her uncles, who
were Italian immigrants to Scotland, busked on
the streets of Glasgow with accordions. That’s how
they made their money.
Loads of the buskers who took part in Did You
Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? still sing the
“Ballad of Accounting” song. One of them said,
“I only know three songs, this is number four!”
Rachel from Artangel, who commissioned and
managed the project, was at a squat party in
Camden a few months ago, an open mic event,
and someone had said, “I was involved in this
project a few years ago...”, gave this little
introduction and then played the song, so it’s
still germinating. Some natural collaborations
came up as well on the rehearsal days. There’s
no busker’s organization where people can come
together, loads of buskers are quiet loner types
anyway. Even on the underground network, the
buskers don’t know each other even though some
have been playing on the underground for thirty
years. Then, all of a sudden, they’re in this one
room together, so they started performing
together. There was an amazing African drummer
and this young vocalist who got together to do
their version of the song and they got offered a
gig when they were out performing.
Working in ambiguous opposition to the broad
historical sweep of Ewan’s work is the
punctuation of irrevocably intimate moments.
Her carefully researched and constructed
actions and installations stop at some point, to
give way to melodies that stir up rousing
emotions, or coincidences of accidental
discovery. The utopian, socialist dream might
be at the heart of many of the figures and
historical moments she explores, but in being
replaced in the present their political force is left
open and ambiguous. If she creates structures
within which to re-release these moments from
the past, they are only activated and made living
by moments of personal insight by those who
participate and experience the projects. It is
these personal moments of insight, connection,
and reverberation that lie within each of her
works, numerous but often hidden and
unrecorded. It is a few of these moments I have
collected and tried to let them be heard here.
“Thus the presences and absences embedded
in sources (artefacts and bodies that turn an
event into fact) or archives (facts collected,
thematized, and processed as documents and
monuments) are neither neutral nor natural.
They are created. As such, they are not mere
presences or absences, but mentions or silences
of various kinds and degrees. By silence, I mean
an active and transitive process: one “silences”
a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a
gun. One engages in the practice of silencing.
Mentions and silences are thus the active
dialectical counterparts of which history is the
synthesis.”3
---
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It is at the back of the Jukebox of People Trying to
Change the World, or maybe at the very front,
that we find the song of “The Cutty Wren”.
Though its origins are unknown for certain, it is
the song dated back the furthest in the Jukebox’s
catalogue. The story, which has innumerable
variations on its lyrics, tells of two men on their
way to hunt for the diminutive wren, also known
as the “king of birds”. It has become known as
the first protest song, sung in association with
the peasant’s revolt of June 1381. But like the
song, the origins of this claim are elusive,
themselves mythologized. In a pamphlet
published in 1944, A.L. Lloyd, a writer and singer
central to the folk revival of the 1950s, gave a
brief history of folk protest music. “The Cutty
Wren” is the very first song he mentions. With a
dramatic and quite cinematic backdrop to the
song, he says, “The outbreak of lawlessness
which followed the dislocation of town and
country life, with its consequent labour troubles,
filled the green woods with outlaws and rebels. It
was about this time that people began singing a
song called ‘The Cutty Wren’... Pretty certainly
this was originally a magic song, a totem song,
which about this time took a strong
revolutionary meaning.”4
I’ve known Fred for six years, he was only four when I
met him. Fred and I spoke about the content of the
song “The Cutty Wren”, and did some research into
the Peasant’s Revolt. It was oddly appropriate,
because Richard II, the King at that point, was
fourteen years old and that’s one of the reasons the
revolt happened. His tax men were trying to take
control of things from this kid. Fred went off and did
his own research, and got on with it. The day before
the royal wedding in April, his primary school was
having a “royal” party, and he said to his mother, “I
don’t want to go to it, because I’m anti-monarchist”.
So he made a placard, and wore his ripped jeans as
an act of rebellion. I spoke with him about the wren,
what the symbol of the wren is, and how there’s some
disagreement about what it means. He said he
thought it represented the King.
---
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Ruth Ewan, A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World, 2003 (ongoing project)
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I bought the first jukebox from a pub in Sunderland.
All the ones I’ve got from pubs really stink, of smoke.
You open them up and this smell just hits you. The
jukebox in Seville, it’s the same, or a very similar
model, to the one that’s in the Rover’s Return pub in
the television soap-opera, Coronation Street. It’s a
very British jukebox; when people from other
countries see it, they say it looks like a cigarette
machine. The thing with CD jukeboxes is that they
actually don’t hold that much material, so I constantly
have to edit. I could convert it to mp3, a digital
jukebox, but then it’s changing the form. I quite like
it being sort of in between technologies, it’s such an
uncomfortable proposition, the CD. It’s like the digital
and analogue joining up together. Sound Leisure from
Leeds make the oddest models, they’ve not gone for
that Americana diner bubble jukebox, they just do
quite wild designs in their own way, or at least they
did for a period in the 1980s-1990s. They’re still
producing, but they do these digital jukeboxes that
are centrally controlled and you can’t just add your
own homebrew. That’s what someone called my CDs,
“homebrew” CDs.
At the New Museum the staff – particularly the
security and cleaning staff – really enjoyed listening
to it and all had their own favourite tracks. It was
their piece of work, and when the museum opened
really early in the morning the cleaners were cleaning
the shop space and they’d turn it on to listen to it in
the background. The New Museum kept it on after the
Younger Than Jesus exhibition for another 6 months
or so for the staff, because people at the front desk,
and the security guys were like, “Yeah, Tool’s on
there!” There was a whole section of songs about
“Work”, so I hoped they’d be listening to union songs
but they were probably just listening to Beyoncé.
In Escape the Overcode, Brian Holmes states
that, “when a territory of possibility emerges it
changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood,
or a volcano do in nature. The easiest way for
society to protect its existing form is simple
denial, pretending the change never happened:
and that actually works in the landscape of
mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it
isn’t elaborated, constructed, modulated,
differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs
and conjunctions.”5 Within Ewan’s layered
releases, resoundings, and reverberations, what
comes forward is the attempt to give sound to
these silences, to play them out loud so that
these elaborations, differentiations, and
breakthroughs might occur. Her work asks what
we make of the potential when we quietly catch
a few lyrics, humming words that carry
something for us privately; can this moment
also have a wider meaning? Ewan reposes the
paradox of how a song can potentially mean
something both historically and personally, on
how it can resonate on both levels at the same
time. It is at this juncture Ewan makes the space
for a series of individual moments that gather to
the possibility of an active, aggregate cultural
meaning in the present.
1. All quotes in bold come from an interview between
the artist and the author conducted on 2 May 2011.
2. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY:
Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 69-70.
3. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, quoted in Charlotte Line,
Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 196-7.
4. A.L. Lloyd, The Singing Englishman. London: Workers
Music Association Ltd., 1944, pp. 7-8.
5. Brian Holmes, Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the
Control Society. Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 2009,
p. 14.
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Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, 2007
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Alonso Gil
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Libertarian Artist
Raj Kuter
I have no desire to usurp a title that is not my
own, that of the art critic, even if this role can
essentially be boiled down to “an honest
exercise of the profession of seeing”, as Quico
Rivas said in one of his deprecations back in the
1980s. I am here to speak of Loncho – or the
artist Alonso Gil, if you prefer – and of his work,
and what I have seen in it from the perspective
of affinity. We have shared various artistic and
libertarian adventures, no doubt all the more
thrilling since Quico was there to complicate
them: from the Salón del Carbón to Copilandia
and Archivo Q., the free practice of art and the
free circulation of ideas have been their primary
common denominators. At the same time, I will
also unravel the skein of a relationship that has a
bearing on my chosen subject: that of art and
flamenco as manifestations of an openly
libertarian expressivity.
As in art, what is sung in flamenco music is
a reconstruction of life – an unorganized life,
with no agenda or message, that leaves traces
and intuitions in its wake. Art has more to do
with a process than with the usual objects we
find hanging on walls or lying in dust-free
display cases. For anarchy, too, the creative
process, the quest, has always been more
important than the end result,1 the finished work
which, because it is finished, denies all the
richness of its potential, all that it could have
been and no longer is. With regard to flamenco,
everyone knows that no two songs are alike and
that a flamenco singer never sings the same
copla in an identical manner. Flamenco song
defies systematization and notation; traditional
sheet music is technically incapable of capturing
its nuances. Ever versatile, it is not repetitive and
refuses to settle for mimesis, although for some
time now the term improvisation has been
missing from its vocabulary.
However, we can speak of experimentation
and search. Loncho began his quest back in the
1980s, setting out on journeys of initiation to
explore the Old Continent with his inseparable
companions, the artists Federico Guzmán and
Victoria Gil. His first German foray took him to
Hamburg and Munich; from there he moved on
to Venice and then, accompanied by Esther
Reguira, jumped across the pond to New York,
where the two lived from 1994 to 1998.
“At the time, Robin Kahn and Kirby Gookin
were working on the Disappearing Act project,
thus called because all the works were ephemeral,
they could be eaten and drunk." Loncho recalls.
“They also invited me to disappear, so they
produced my alarm clock concert which I had
originally presented in Ceuta in ‘97 as part of the
Almadraba project. In New York I did it at the
Bound&Unbound Gallery (...) I used two
hundred speaking clocks that announced the
time out loud... every hour, all in a display case
and with visiting hours, so people could go hear
the concert whenever it was convenient for
them: Symphony of the American Dream.”
Later, in Mexico (between 1999 and 2001),
Loncho experimented with magic mushrooms
because he was interested in their ability to
heighten perception and expand the senses.
He related his experiences in a text entitled Los
Santitos y el ocio personalizado (The Little Saints
and Personalized Recreation), which opened
with the following words:
“Journeys have always opened doors to new
ways of seeing the world. (...) When you take a
drug-induced trip, such as I took with magic
mushrooms, the journey becomes an expedition
and takes you to another place where perceptions
differ from those found in the sphere of the
experience of reality. / The best part is that those
perceptions heighten the senses, and we begin to
understand reality with other parameters. (…)
Because of this ability to create new and
different images of the world… I decided to
investigate with hallucinogens…”
His pupils grew more sensitive on these trips,
with the probing capacity of one who intuits that
reality has many facets. “The possible is part of
the real”, as Rafael Barrett, that lost boy of the
Generation of 1898 who became an anarchist in
the Americas and embraced the struggle of the
disinherited to reclaim their freedom, once said.
And he added, “Sooner or later, time will bring
Alonso Gil, Flasheados – Cree en las ruinas; pronto serán ruinas pintorescas
(Flashed – Believe in the Ruins; Soon They Will Be Picturesque Ruins), 2003
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us the possible, and perhaps the impossible.”
“Art and anarchy all day long” is the formula
proposed by Loncho, which can be summed up
in: daily contact with the artistic act, noncompetitive games, presiding over or enriching
every event in life.
Art operates in a similar way, through
searching, combining and crystallizing, as a
process that unveils hidden realities. And the
artist is one who reveals the different possibilities.
Rimbaud granted poets the capacity to translate
mystery into will (after freeing themselves of
reason), but it was Isidore Ducasse, Count of
Lautréamont – of whom Loncho painted a
magnificent portrait which he showcased in the
exhibition 6 asaltos 6 (6 Rounds 6) at the Suffix
Gallery in Triana, Seville, in 2008, converted into
a boxing ring for a pictorial combat with Miguel
Cabeza – who understood that art is not the
exclusive property of the artist but that it is made
for everyone. The widespread rumour of flamenco
is nothing less than the shared life of humanity,
and the sole task of the singer (or the artist) is to
pass it on to those who have not already heard.
Loncho says, “I, like many of you, am an
artist who works 24 hours a day; I work even
when I sleep”. Art is not a 9-to-5 job where one
can clock in and out. The artist’s workday never
ends. And although anyone who creates by
inventing is theoretically an artist, art requires a
constant sensibility and observation, a profound
appreciation of things with finely-tuned
perceptive skills – concentration in dispersion,
centrifugation.
In a text about Alonso Gil written on the
occasion of his impressive 2006 exhibition/
installation La celda grande (The Big Cell) at the
MEIAC in Badajoz, rich in libertarian irradiations,
Quico Rivas accurately described Loncho as “a
worker who paints (...) with the attitude of an
alchemist: the artifex who, in the esoteric
tradition, is both demiurge (creator) and
technites (manual labourer)”. And Quico called
upon Arturo Schwarz, friend and cataloguer of
Marcel Duchamp, to remind us of the four
convergent paths – Surrealism, tantra, alchemy
and anarchism – which are found combined in
Alonso Gil’s working method: “The alchemist,
like the artist, is the archetype of the rebel not
only because he seeks the youth of the gods and
their power to create, but because he has
understood that youth is a creator, and hence that
revolution and youth are two aspects of the same
matter. Just as the mind is the most evolved form
of matter, so revolution is the most evolved form
of youth. Revolution is man’s youth...”
I believe that Loncho, the libertarian artist,
knows that youth is not necessarily diminished
by the degradation of matter. Since boyhood he
has worked to pass that revolutionary, critical,
playful, effective and gratuitous creative activity
on to others. And he sings as he works, as my
readers will soon discover.
The Singing Artist
Some artists, though not musicians themselves,
research and work with sound as just one more
component of their work, attempting to place it
in a new aesthetic dimension. Some of Alonso
Gil’s projects fit this description, although I
would not say that he is a “sound artist” in the
usual sense of the term. He is also interested in
the latest artistic trends that seek to create
multisensory effects. However, from my
perspective I would venture to say that he is
more an artist who can be heard – in other
words, a singing artist.
Allow me to explain. My first impression of
Loncho’s painting was that it sings – and how.
I am not saying that Loncho has ever deliberately
attempted to “toot his own horn”. Often
combined with photo printing techniques, his
painting, with its amalgamated waves of flowing
hues (garden greens, bellicose pinks,
aquamarines, turquoises and sky blues) or
explosive, dazzling, unheard-of colours (new
pigments and phosphorescent tones), sing with
remarkable joy while also encouraging us to view
the world critically. Happily, the artist has long
since ceased to be that dark figure tormented by
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his inner demons, and creation is no longer
torture. His friend Federico Guzmán
“mentioned a picture [by Loncho] in which the
sprites seem to ooze from every pore; the
portrait of Silvio, painted like a glowing ember.
(...) Oranges, greys, greens, yellows and the
colours of plant-fuelled fire, alight and radiating
warmth like a blazing hearth”. And then we have
the large-format graffiti series dedicated to the
familiar iconography of our popular culture,
Graffiti Celestial (Heavenly Graffiti, 2008),
featuring the faces of Camarón, Vicente Amigo
and Fosforito which, because they were created
on the streets of Córdoba’s working-class
neighbourhoods, also suggested other ways of
articulating everyday experiences.
Music and songs whose magic stimulates
growth, a magic that can never be entirely
extinguished. In theory, we do not have any
tool for associating a sound or tone with a
specific colour. But other underground
traditions tell us of synesthetic relationships
and analogies. If music is, as Langer asserted, is
“a tonal analogy of emotive life”,2 then the same
is true of painting.
However, we belong to a generation (or
whatever you want to call it) that grew up to the
rhythm of pop, punk and techno music, and
many of us formed bands of an inventive and
experimental (but not commercial) nature,
blending vibrations with theatrics, imbued with
rock animalism and happening-esque gesturality
in equal measure as an antidote against the overspecialization of a society that categorizes,
delimits task and channels preoccupations (and
whose prototype is the expert in his most
aberrant disciplinary specialization). Many have
dismissed this activity as a mere hobby or even
an extravagance, arguing that the artist could
only really shine or be a true artist in one facet of
his life. It seems to me that the artist has many
facets, and although he may invest more time in
one – or even two or three – they are all
complementary. This comes as no surprise to
Loncho, who is skilled at using what we might
basically call tools.
Alonso Gil, Silvio, 2008
In all of this there is a large element of fun,
which is nothing to sniff at; if we didn’t have fun,
what would become of us in this life? As Nietzsche
warned us, in our world the “spirit of gravity” has
progressively displaced the “gay science” – in
other words, fun science. Laughter as a critical
form of direct action, as Quico Rivas proposed,
is found in many of Loncho Gil’s works. In a
performative line we have the example of
Chigate, a masked band of musicians and deejays
which, according to Loncho, was primarily an
amusement: we turned the machines up as high
as they would go, we recorded the interminable
sessions, and then we performed for a live
audience. The whole idea was to make noise and
use the environment.
A very different kind of distortion takes us to
the urban intervention that Loncho and Francis
Gomila presented at Madrid Abierto in 2007
under the title Guantanamera. The work has
resurfaced in his show at the Carthusian
Monastery in Seville this year, which offers a
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Alonso Gil and Francis Gomila, Guantanamera, 2007
selection of past creations and new productions.
With an evident social and political
preoccupation, the artist reflects here on the use
of music as an instrument of torture. The title
refers to the maximum-security prison at
Guantanamo, a place not of this world that
operates outside the framework of international
law. His next intervention in the public space,
the more kitsch and convention-defying
Tunning cofrade (2008), was a mobile project
that involved driving around the city of Seville in
a tuned car – a car modified to the user’s liking
and equipped with a powerful sound system
which he used to blast recordings by the
different bands of the religious Holy Week
brotherhoods that had been remixed and spun
together with flamenco, electronic music, punk,
rock and techno.
Montage is undoubtedly the great invention
of the 20th century, used in every field from film
and photography to visual and sound art. Much
of the best contemporary art is based on
transformations and distortions. The artist uses
a variety of media (paint, video, etc.) and mixes
them up, experimenting with the formal
possibilities to achieve a broader expressivity.
Imbued with an irremediable social
engagement, Alonso Gil understands that these
media are weapons. Painting like a man entering
the ring, with boxing gloves or the handled
palette knife of the working-class artist, the
artifex... Loncho engages in many different
games of equivalency with an attitude that is
halfway between ludic and Luddite. Swinging
back and forth between formal research, the
modes and manners of unveiling, and its
function as a “social sensor”, art acts as an
antidote against the common place; it has a
liberating power of inertia. So does flamenco, in
the sense that it overflows with a contagious
creative rhythm that is caught by all who see or
hear it. Music in its tribal sense, an expression of
collective merrymaking. And what is a party
without music? I’d really like to know.
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Flamenco and the Visual Arts
Throughout the two centuries of its existence,
flamenco’s relationship with the visual arts has
been less intense and productive than most
people think. Painting, engraving, poster art and
photography saw flamenco primarily as a theme
that they could use to their own ends, recreating
characters, scenes and stages. Street musicians
and travelling flamenco artists were the
protagonists of the drawings that Doré produced
on his trip to Spain in 1862. There are many
other examples of this folksy illustration, which
began when flamenco song moved from the
neighbourhood greengrocers’ to the taverns, and
from there to the cabarets, eventually spreading
across the peninsula and throughout the world.
From the moment Alonso Gil first settled in
Seville, his eye was drawn to the figure of the
flamenco hustler or street performer, and this
curiosity was re-modernized in a dual sense.
Born in the province of Badajoz, one of the
natural boundaries of flamenco territory,
Loncho’s interest in capturing the intangible
aspect of this atmosphere was more of an innate
characteristic than something acquired over
time. This was not the Romantic quest for
exoticism – conveniently staged with background
and props – that so appealed to European
travellers. On the contrary, Loncho was
determined to invert the traditional perspective.
In Flasheados (Cree en las ruinas; pronto serán
ruinas pintorescas) (Flashed [Believe in the
Ruins; Soon They Will Be Picturesque Ruins]), a
video shot in 2003 in Seville, stigmatized and
stereotyped as the prototypical tourist town, he
revealed the contrast between this “collective”
of foreigners – the tourists – and other kinds of
foreign presences in our cities, such as
immigrants, refugees or exiles.
While the quintessential predator that is the
tourist entertains himself by consuming a
standardized cultural difference, Loncho turns
his attention to both the foreigners and to the
displaced natives, those who have been
overlooked or forgotten. These have lost their
exotic appeal and ability to spark curiosity, and
despite their authenticity they are an endangered
species because there is no room for them in the
spectacle of the cultural industry. I am referring
to the outskirts, the marginalized, far removed
from fashion circles and the international art
world. Other set-ups. If flamenco is a vital
exhalation before the blinding spotlights of the
stage, then Loncho is determined to explore its
ordinary, everyday space, particularly the part
we call making a living – earning one’s breadand-butter is such a tiresome, tricky thing.
Seville has seen its share of these ways of life, or
of joyful survival in an increasingly hostile and
precarious world, of this back-alley scheming.
On its way through the Puerta de la Carne, a
traditional gathering place for rogues, rascals
and beggars since the days of Cervantes, now
gentrified thanks to urban renewal plans tainted
by the inevitable suspicion of speculation and
overrun by the hordes of tourist terrorism, the
“Orchestra of Miracles” and its daily shining
moments provide ample proof of this.
In this vein, An Error Occurred (2001) offers
us a video recording of the performances of
several street musicians who present their
“expertise” to anyone who wants to listen
(though most would rather shut them up). It is
generally assumed that music “aims for the
ear” – well, this kind aims for the pocket. “The
Orchestra of Miracles,” writes Quico Rivas, “is
made of up of those musicians whom we often
give a few pence, not so that they will play but so
that they will go away, not so that they will sing
but so that they will be quiet, for the specular
vision they offer us is often quite unbearable.”
“The gypsies have always gotten I-don’tknow-how-much from I-don’t-know-what, this
from that”, say Jorge Cano and Carlos Simón, the
heartland friends who broadcast La Voz de tus
Muertos each week, a very jondo flamenco radio
show. Flamenco song must be inspired; the
important thing is for the song to come out as it
is. When flamenco is sung to please an audience,
it becomes entertainment. When it is sung to
lighten the workload, balancing out a physical
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activity with an emotional one, it is a situational
art form, the product of life experience rather
than of performance. Ruskin defined art as the
expression of man’s joy in his work, and this is
precisely what La felicidad en el trabajo (Joy in
Work, 2008) is all about. As its title indicates, this
documentary-style video installation addresses
the idea of finding joy in work through flamenco
song. This work, produced in Andalusia and
Extremadura, shows (on eight monitors with
simultaneous images but independent
soundtracks) people in various professions who
sing as they go about their work. The song grows
fainter as the muscles concentrate on the task at
hand. The song’s rhythm matches that of the
manual labour; the power conveyed by the
former drives the latter.
It is to this spontaneously emerging rhythmic
beat of language and labour, where creation is
constancy, tradition born in the fluctuating
memory of what has already been seen and
practiced, that Loncho dedicates these
“‘flamenco video songs’, these (visual) essays of
air and beat” in the words of Pisco Lira, who
reminded us that the unpremeditated simplicity
of the gesture in work and its shadow are by no
means unfamiliar to the artist. At the same time,
Loncho invites us to notice “the diverse ruses of
subversion, the different methods of fending off
discouragement”.3
Appearances and Disappearances: Nomadic
wanderings that take us back to the beginning,
constant reinvention
The time of art can be compared to that of life
as a journey. A process that the artist pursues in
solitude – in the studio, in the lab, at the
workshop – and in solidarity – on the street, on
the road, out of doors – to the ebb and flow of
encounters, needs and loves. A time that has
more to do with the wanderings of the nomad
than with the regulated intervals of the stopwatch.
A time on camelback. A very different kind,
because it is imposed, is the frozen time in which
Los abandonados (The Abandoned Ones) hope
to come into focus once more. This photographic
series created by Alonso Gil for PHotoEspaña’09
was a product of the time he spent with the
Sahrawi people at the refugee camps of the
Algerian Hamada in Tindouf, after participating
in the Artifariti International Art Encounters in
the Free Zone of the Western Sahara. To produce
these almost ghostly photographs, Gil wreaked
havoc on the chemical developing process,
tinkering with the liquids and making sure to do
a sloppy job on the fixation, in order to achieve
fading and disappearing effects in the images. In a
paradoxical and metaphorical way, this technique
highlighted the disappearance of conflicts that
make the power-that-be uncomfortable in the
mass media.
Upon his return, Federico Guzmán, Loncho’s
travelling companion on the sandy paths of the
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Sahara together with his sister and fellow artist
Victoria Gil (who, by the way, is now presenting
her portraits of Sahrawi friends sketched against
a bright yellow background), said, “The trip [to
the Sahrawi camps] was like moving towards a
mirage that showed us a warped reflection of our
society of ostentation, waste and ignorance. We
passed through it and found among the Sahrawi
people a joy, generosity and endurance in the
face of adversity that we have long since
forgotten. I am beginning to realize the value of
the lesson that the Sahrawi taught us, and to
understand that the road to freedom for the
Sahara is the road to our own freedom.”
Flamenco, with its rich legacy, also speaks to
us of the need to assert that those dead are not
really dead, that they populate and inhabit, and
that without them we would be a wasteland of
plastic and shopping-centre glitz.
Loncho has just opened a new studio on a
back street in the old Jewish quarter, very near the
Puerta de la Carne where he lives and works.
After a long period spent shifting, coming, going
and sharing on necessary nomadic wanderings
that took him to the desert, it seems that the time
has come to combine what he brought back from
his latest travels and experiences, rediscovering
his facet as an alchemist. Now we must look
forward to discovering his developing process.
1. Quico Rivas, “Alonso Gil: El alquimista en su celda”.
Grazalema, Seville, Paris, December 2006 / January 2007.
2. S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner &
Sons, 1953.
3. Francisco Lira, “La felicidad en el trabajo. El cante y los
oficios: Quien canta su mal espanta. Sobre algunos tientos
visuales de Loncho Gil”. Seville, La Carbonería, August 2008.
Alonso Gil, La felicidad en el trabajo (Joy in Work), 2008
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Matt Stokes
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No Way Back
Matthew Collin
Nervous, pure nervous. A twilit Victorian street
in the Lace Market district of Nottingham, at
that time still dour and ill-used, a few years
away from gentrification. Fear and anticipation.
One of us is holding a couple of bottles of cheap
supermarket champagne, the other, a small bag
of white pills. A siren wails in the distance: we
hold still for a second or two, then hurry across
the road to the photographic studio in a disused
textile factory where we’re about to hold our
first illegal party. The summer of 1990, only a
few days after parliament adopted new
legislation to clamp down on outlaw raves.
Good timing...
Inside, a sweet surge of electronic noise as
the needle falls on the first record – “LFO” by
LFO – and when the bassline drops hard,
shuddering through the white room, a feeling of
relief and rising joy: it’s going to be alright. This
is how it started, how it would always start.
The photo studio was a rather conventional
venue by the standards of the time. After the
Ecstasy-fuelled dance scene began to sweep
through Britain in 1988 – “acid house”, we called
it then, before it became known as the “rave
scene” and then simply “dance culture” – people
began to search for ever more outlandish places
in which to hold illegal parties where they would
not be bound by the strictures of Britain’s World
War One-era licensing laws, which at that time
dictated that most nightclubs must close by
2am. So they occupied derelict warehouses,
farmers’ fields, aircraft hangars, film studios –
anywhere to establish a temporary autonomous
zone where time would be suspended in a
blissful frenzy of noise, light and writhing
bodies. In the case of the outlaw ravers
documented in Matt Stokes’ Real Arcadia, a cave
in the Lake District was transformed into a
nocturnal Wonderland, something that one of
them called “a nightclub in a mountain”, but
which was so much more than that to many of
those whose lives it touched.
Rave culture moved into spaces abandoned
during the recession of the 1980s, when Britain’s
manufacturing industries were devastated.
Matt Stokes, Real Arcadia (Archive), 2003 (ongoing)
Industrial towns in decline became techno
meccas, like Blackburn, the focus of the illegal
party scene in the North West due to its
abundance of disused factories in which a sound
system and lights could be quickly and cheaply
installed. Locks cracked, power on, people in;
and then in the morning a quick escape into the
breaking daylight as if nothing had ever
happened. The illegality was part of the thrill,
and it felt like some kind of victory when the
flash of blue lights didn’t bring the music to an
untimely end.
Media reports in the late 1980s likened the
M25 motorway which encircles London, to a
kind of carousel of oblivion, a merry-go-round
from which ravers would spin off, hurtling down
country lanes, towards parties deep in the Home
Counties, only discovering the secret location at
the last minute through frantic calls to the
organizers from roadside telephone boxes (at
that time, mobile phones were relatively new,
expensive and rare). It was hard to match the
experience of rolling to the peak of some rural
hill, to see lasers strafing the darkened skyline
and hear the soft thunder of sub-bass rhythms; a
fairground big wheel spinning its glow through
the darkness, behind it the black tower of
speakers already pulsing with sound… and the
promise of a long night’s journey into dawn…
But while the huge, spectacular events, with
their “top DJs”, “blinding lasers” and “turbo
sound systems” (as the technicolor flyers used to
say) were staged close to Britain’s biggest cities,
people were doing things for themselves on a
much more personal and altruistic level all
around Britain, putting on small parties which
were often free, or subsidized by drug sales. Like
the Cave Raves, they didn’t achieve national
notoriety, although they became a vital focus for
emerging alternative cultures in their areas. They
were products of sheer enthusiasm, attempts to
democratize metropolitan bohemia by taking
electronic music and psychedelic drug culture
into the heartland of the “beer monster” and the
ritzy discotheque. Or so many thought at the
time.
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Yet more parties took place in far less
glamorous surroundings: the back rooms of
pubs or high street nightclubs whose tacky décor
and dodgy names still reflected their origins in
pre-Ecstasy, six-pints-and-a-Bacardi-and-coke
nightlife. When the Cave Crew weren’t raving in
the quarry, they frequented the rather more
traditional surroundings of places like the Stag’s
Head pub in Bowness-on-Windermere. This was
hardly unusual. People would drive for miles
around the Midlands and the North West to pack
into a glitzy discotheque called Shelleys in
Stoke-on-Trent; a venue called The Osbourne in
Manchester which looked like a working men’s
club and became a notorious techno sweatbox
known as The Thunderdome; even the first acid
house club in Britain, The Project, was held at
an unremarkable suburban “nitespot” in an
unfashionable district of south London. In
between the rave spectaculars, the party had to
go on. Intoxicated by the moment, nobody
wanted the music to stop – it felt somehow as
necessary as a heartbeat, and just about
anywhere would do. There seemed to be, as
Hunter S. Thompson once said about 1960s
California, madness at any hour, in any
direction.
It was a time of profound optimism, and
profound derangement. The names of some of
the raves tell the story: Sunrise, Live the Dream,
Fantazia, The Trip, Apocalypse Now. Normal
rules seemed to be suspended – an impression
heightened by drugs, youthful innocence and
the sense of belonging to some kind of secret
society. Stokes’ interviews for Real Arcadia
capture comments which could have been made
by so many others over the decade: “You know
like when you were a kid and you go up to
someone in the playground and you’d say
‘alright mate, what’s your name, what do you do,
where do you come from...’ And that’s what it
was like. There were no inhibitions whatsoever...
everyone was on the same level, and everyone
was really happy...” It was a feeling that many
thought would last forever – although of course
it could not and did not.
Rave culture was rooted in new technologies –
musical and chemical – but it also sampled and
remixed ideas, as well as sounds, from a variety
of pop-cult sources: the Saturday Night Fever
traditions of gay disco and the Amphetaminefuelled northern soul scene, the do-it-yourself
ethics of punk, and vague hippy philosophies
handed down from 1960s psychedelia (although
cut loose from the protest politics of that era).
However, it could not help but reflect the time of
its birth, at the high watermark of Thatcherite
free-market materialism: this was an
entrepreneurial culture which was energized
by the small-time business activities of party
promoters, record producers and drug dealers.
And yet while the rave scene enthusiastically
embraced Margaret Thatcher’s urge to
entrepreneurialism, it implicitly rejected her assertion
that there was “no such thing as society”. It was driven
by a deep and powerful desire not only for
transcendence, but also for community: to be part of
something greater, a feeling amplified by the empathyenhancing effects of Ecstasy. There was also a
widespread desire for it to “mean something”,
although nobody could really give a convincing
explanation of exactly what it meant, and the search for
meaning was in some cases little more than a human
need to rationalize what seemed to be such a
momentous experience. Hence some of the myths that
grew up around Ecstasy, like the suggestion that it
ended the football violence of the 1980s when loved-up
hooligans from opposing teams began to hug each
other at raves instead of slashing each other with razorblades, or the belief that it promoted multi-cultural
tolerance.
Effectively, in the absence of any ideological
gurus, people brought their own beliefs to the
party, and saw the rave scene in terms of those
beliefs. So it became home to some dedicated
anarchists who believed it was part of a rebel
crusade against the capitalist system, and to a
few intrepid young Conservatives who saw it as
an expression of radical libertarianism – as well
as to many more who would speak vaguely about
“sharing” and “togetherness” and “love”, about
celebrating as one, beyond the British divides of
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Matt Stokes, Real Arcadia, 2003 (ongoing). Exhibition view
class, race and regional origins. However,
perhaps for the majority of those involved, there
was no attempt at analysis or any need for it:
this was simply the most exciting thing that had
happened to them in their young lives.
The spectacular rise of this new youth
culture was hard to ignore, and inevitably the
backlash started almost as quickly as the scene
itself, with the first shock-horror newspaper
headlines and reports of police raids appearing
towards the end of 1988, only a year after the
first acid house parties were held. After that, the
outrage flowed in consecutive waves, following
the traditional sequence of moral panics about
renegade cults corrupting the minds of Britain’s
youth. First the scandalized press despatches
and the calls for “something to be done”,
followed by police action and government
legislation. But it turned out that much of the
agitated media coverage simply acted as an
advertisement. All-night dancing, hypnotic
rhythms, mind-warping chemicals: many found
such sweet but forbidden fruits tempting
indeed.
The police were initially caught unprepared
by the strange stirrings in the countryside, but
eventually they set up specially-equipped units
to combat what they prosaically referred to as
“pay parties”. The experience of the Cave Crew
in the Lake District was not unusual: concerned
reports in local newspapers and on regional
television about the threat to young people’s
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safety, then the erection of police roadblocks –
“We are not killjoys, we are trying to preserve
life”, the words of the local police chief, were
typical of the time – and finally the suggestion
that the caves should be dynamited to put a stop
to the madness. By 1997, parliament had passed
three separate pieces of legislation aimed at
curbing the wilder excesses of the rave scene.
When combined with the introduction of more
liberal licensing laws, they contributed to both
the ultimate commercialization of the scene as
well as the radicalization of a small but
dedicated outlaw fringe who even now continue
to travel the roads staging illegal parties –
although none of the new laws would halt the
irrepressible growth of Britain’s drug culture.
And it was inevitable that any culture based
on illegal drug use would have even more
serious repercussions – legal, medical and
psychological. Many people ended up with
criminal records; everyone knew someone who
had been arrested after being caught with a bag
of pills, and those who thought they were simply
helping friends to have a good night out soon
realized that the law regarded them as drug
dealers like any others. The fact that Ecstasy was
illegal also attracted those who could organize
large-scale imports of the drug: serious
criminals, men with weapons and few scruples,
and – as in the case of the Cave Raves – low-life
thugs wielding baseball bats who wanted to
make a little easy cash by using their muscle to
“tax” illicit parties. Yet few wanted to talk about
the criminal empires which were being built
upon their pleasures.
The drug itself had its own complications
too; although Ecstasy wasn’t addictive, for some
people it represented an introduction to the
wider world of recreational chemistry. Some
ravers who chased the buzz a little too hard
developed psychological problems – “lost it”, to
use the slang of the time – and a few, endlessly
seeking the next rush, became addicted to Heroin.
But then there was worse: some time around
the start of the 1990s, it became clear that small
but significant numbers of people were dying
after taking Ecstasy, mainly people in their teens
or early twenties who thought they were about
to have the time of their lives but ended up in
the ground. Many ravers were reluctant to
blame their beloved, life-affirming “happy
pills”, pointing out that most of those who died
had expired through heatstroke after not
drinking enough water. But the fact remained
that if they hadn’t gone out and taken Ecstasy,
they would probably still be alive. Year by year, a
little more innocence was lost. The story of the
Cave Raves, again, serves as a kind of parable
for these times: some of the people connected
with the Lake District party crew have since
served prison time. One is dead.
The dance scene reached its peak as a mass
movement sometime in the mid-1990s. But
apart from fuelling a mass drug culture in
Britain which continued to grow even
afterwards, its legacy remains hazy and difficult
to assess, particularly for those who were
involved. There is the music, of course, captured
in hundreds of wonderful recordings and
thousands more dreadful ones. There are the
careers in pop culture and media which grew
out of the scene. There was the development of
computer-aided do-it-yourself creativity and
spontaneous, ad hoc networking which fed into
the obsessions of the internet age, while the
technology used by outlaw raves was deployed
with more serious intent by the environmental
road-protest movement of the 1990s.
And yet even now, two decades after the first
acid house record sounded its urgent call to
action, the lingering question –“so what did it
all mean?” – still evades an answer. “They were
special times, really special times”, one of the
Cave Crew says – but was that all that they were?
Many people went through life-changing
experiences – they are the ones who still glow
with nostalgia while talking about how they
discovered new ways of seeing the world, found
routes out of dead-end jobs, forged new
friendships and relationships. But others will
speak of mental illness, prison and death, and
it’s no surprise that some of the people who
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Matt Stokes, Real Arcadia (Archive), 2003 (ongoing)
Stokes tried to contact for Real Arcadia simply
didn’t want to talk about those times again: for
whatever reason, they didn’t want to remember.
And then there are those who say it was nothing
more than youthful hedonism, a necessarily
limited period of liberty before entering the
adult world of responsibilities and obligations.
But perhaps what it really “meant” can never
be captured in words – and to do so would only
devalue the intensity of that indefinable feeling.
Perhaps it was no more than a moment of pure
communal abandon, lost in the music with no
way back, transported into raptures beyond
rational thought. Perhaps that, in itself, was
more than we ever could have hoped for.
© Matthew Collin 2007. Originally published in Matt
Stokes: Lost in the Rhythm. Edinburgh: Collective
Gallery and Sunderland: Art Editions North, 2007.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
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Matt Stokes, The Gainsborough Packet, 2009
11
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The Ballad of Britain: Folk Music and the Holy Grail of Authenticity
Will Hodgkinson
Humanity’s desire for spiritual meaning is so
strong that, in the absence of religion, the
prosaic aspects of life become sacred. One of
these is folk music. Depending on your
viewpoint, folk in Britain is either a tradition
(ancient ballads from a pre-industrial past,
rarely written down and passed on through oral
history), a social purpose (the communion of
singing songs and making music together) or a
style (acoustic guitars, real ale, dysfunctional
men with bladder issues). But folk music takes
on a religious significance in a way that, say,
Crazy In Love by Beyoncé doesn’t. I suspect this
is because deep appreciation of it requires a
leap of faith, which then leads to the
application of dogma.
Having not been brought up in the Church,
I’ve often wondered if today’s Christians really
do believe that Mary was a virgin and that Jesus
died, came down to Earth, danced around a bit
and then went back up to Heaven again. You are
asked to believe something rational thought
tells you is entirely impossible. Empires are
built and wars are fought defending such
unbelievable beliefs. The folk world rarely
reaches such levels, although the guitarist Bert
Jansch did get chucked out of folk overlord
Ewan MacColl’s Singers Club in the early 60s
for playing an instrumental called Anji, but it
can be similarly strident in defending what,
essentially, doesn’t exist: authenticity.
There are two Holy Grails of authenticity in
folk music. The first is the ancient ballad,
written by nobody and fashioned from the
elements. In reality, the ballads were the pop
songs of their day and were written to entertain
and make money, and have only become sacred
as they gained the patina of age. They might
carry gossip about a murder or an unwanted
pregnancy in the village, eulogize heroes of the
Napoleonic wars, or tell tales of ghost stories
and supernatural happenings. Many started life
on broadsides, the 16th to mid-19th century
precursors to newspapers. The best have
survived into the present because of the
strength of their melodies and the beauty of
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their words, but not because they have any
particular authenticity. One could guess that a
great modern-day pop song like Rehab by Amy
Winehouse will be a traditional ballad of the
22nd century because it gives a representation
of our contemporary reality. These are the songs
that, according to the great English composer
Ralph Vaughan Williams, “lived in the minds of
unlettered country men, who unknown to the
squire and the parson were singing their own
songs”.
The second Holy Grail is the traditional
singer. This is the man or woman, ideally
elderly, low born and living in the countryside,
with a repertoire of ballads they learned at their
parents’ knee. They might be farm-workers or
gypsies and few will make any money out of
singing, which is a natural outlet for daily
expression. The argument is that someone like
the late Shropshire stone-waller Fred Jordan is
a traditional singer, while Maddy Prior of
medieval folk-rock minstrels Steeleye Span is
not – even if they sing the same songs – because
the first is the real thing and the second is an
entertainer.
This is a fantasy, albeit an attractive one.
Fred Jordan was a great entertainer, hence his
appeal. The Scottish traveller Jeannie Robertson
was one of the great ballad singers, frequently
recorded by the BBC after the folklorist Hamish
Henderson discovered her in Aberdeen in the
late 50s, but her singing style got ever more
theatrical as her fame grew. There’s an amazing
depth of feeling to the way the mid-60s singer
Anne Briggs approaches old tunes like
Blackwaterside and She Moves Through the Fair,
and the fact that she was a revival singer who
didn’t grow up with these songs but discovered
them in her late teens in no way lessens the
power of her voice. There is no such thing as
authenticity, and the folk world is full of rules
about what you can and cannot do, in an
attempt to preserve something that never
existed in the first place.
The idea of folk music as a genre or culture
really started in the mid to late 19th and early
20th century, when academics and classically
trained musicians like Francis Child, Cecil
Sharp and Vaughan Williams sought to save the
songs of pre-industrial, rural Britain from
extinction by notating them, using their
melodies for classical compositions and
encouraging their use in schools. Cecil Sharp in
particular wound his way through pubs,
vicarages and farms in Somerset in search of
songs passed down through oral history that
captured the land and its people.
Sharp had passed 40 before he discovered
there even was such a thing as folk music. On
22 August 1903, he was visiting the vicarage of
his friend Charles Marson in the village of
Hambridge in Somerset. Marson’s gardener, a
labourer’s son from the neighbouring village of
Westport called John England, was singing a
song called The Seeds of Love. England probably
learned the song, which has pretty words about
gathering up the seeds of love in the springtime
as small birds sweetly sing, when he was
labouring in Dorset as a young man, and didn’t
think too hard on it. To Sharp it was a
revelation. Over the next two years he collected
1,500 songs in Somerset alone, which he then
published in the five-volume edition Somerset
Folk Songs. In 1911 he founded The English
Folk Dance Society, which remains in operation
in Camden, North London to this day,
continuing Sharp’s goal of preserving the sword
dances, morris dances, folk tunes and ancient
pagan traditions of England that had, until
Sharp and fellow Victorian collectors came
along, often existed only in the shared memory
of the people that performed them.
Sharp came with an agenda, though. He did
want to preserve the folk music of rural Britain,
but only in a version that could be taught in
schools without fear of reprisals from outraged
parents or churchmen – and a song like The
Seeds of Love is quite obviously about sex.
“When every English child is, as a matter of
course, made acquainted with the folk songs of
his country then, from whatever class, the
musician of the future may spring in the
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Will Hodgkinson / The Ballad of Britain: Folk Music and the Holy Grail of Authenticity
Matt Stokes, The Gainsborough Packet, 2009
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national musical idiom”, he writes in English
Folk Songs, but he could hardly offer a
traditional Somerset ballad like The Keeper,
which celebrates rape, to the music teachers of
primary schools the country over in the hope of
getting their young wards to perform it at the
end of term pageant. So he sanitized the words,
turning what was once organic into something
refined and fashioned, and sharpened up the
melodies which, having previously only existed
in the oral tradition, changed according to the
person singing them. But by notating English
folk songs and writing piano parts he created a
body of national music for schoolchildren to
learn, thereby strengthening the artistry and
identity of England itself. He was also adapting
the songs to reflect his own contemporary
reality, which the malleability of folk song
allows for.
Cecil Sharp and his ilk believed that they
had found the authentic voice of Britain. Half a
century later a new generation upheld
traditional music as the authentic voice of the
working people. While the American folklorist
Alan Lomax travelled throughout Britain
making field recordings of traditional singers,
hard-line communists such as the journalist
and broadcaster A.L. Lloyd and the actor,
playwright and singer Ewan MacColl began to
lay down rules on how folk music had to be
approached. Together they formed Centre 42, a
touring arts festival that aimed to ensure folk
music was performed throughout the working
class towns of Britain. MacColl and his wife
Peggy Seeger started The Singer’s Club in
London, where performers were only meant to
sing songs from the place they came from; a
joke, considering MacColl was from Salford but
sang in a Scottish accent in honour of his
ancestral roots.
It seems that folk music, like religion, is
forever about rules, but the great appeal is that
it has something that cannot be tamed. The best
ballads and the best singers contain a spirit that
can be compared to the Holy Ghost: impossible
to get a hold of and only there if you feel it. That
spirit can take any form and withstand the
vicissitudes of time while remaining essentially
the same. It’s actually impossible to define
since it really comes down to a personal
reaction you might have. When I hear the
Yorkshire singer Mike Waterson singing the
supernatural love story Tamlyn in his really
weird and frankly totally out of tune nasal way,
for example, it never fails to make me shiver.
There are other versions of that same song that
make me long for the excitement of filling out
my tax return, but to say that one is more
authentic than the other because of my own
personal reaction to it is meaningless.
Shirley Collins’s 1970 rendition of the tragic
loneliness song Are You Going To Leave Me has
a heartbreaking power – and the fact that
Collins had just been left by her husband at the
time of recording has something to do with
that. Applying rules to something as anarchic
and haphazard as folk music is pointless. It’s
only that feeling we are left with.
One of the most important aspects of the
old ballads of Britain is that they are there to
serve you. Nobody owns them, and although
plenty of people have tried, nobody has the
right to tell anyone else how to approach them.
One argument in the folk world is that to sing
these songs in ways that veer away from what
has gone before is to show disrespect to the
traditional singers whose notated or recorded
versions introduced them to the world at large
in the first place. This is totally spurious. Alan
Lomax’s field recordings from the 50s and 60s,
which are now often used as the guidelines on
how to approach the old ballads, were the result
of chance encounters, usually in pubs, and the
songs came out the way they did because the
people singing them were frequently drunk out
of their minds. If you look through the
traditional material Vaughan Williams collected,
you will find ten different versions of the same
song. Nobody knows which the original one is.
There is no such thing as a definitive version.
Over the spring and summer of 2008
I undertook a mission to travel through Britain
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Will Hodgkinson / The Ballad of Britain: Folk Music and the Holy Grail of Authenticity
and make field recordings myself, in an attempt
to discover if there was such a thing as folk
music in the age of mass communication. And
what I found was that as long as you ignore the
old ideas of authenticity, folk music has never
been healthier. Everywhere I went I found
diversity and a musical connection to the land
and its past, but an expression of a present
reality too.
One encounter sticks in the memory in
particular. In the heart of Bradford’s Muslim
neighbourhood I met a shy, quietly spoken 21year-old woman called Stephanie Hladowski.
The daughter of Polish immigrants, Stephanie
discovered that she loved singing after landing
the role of Dorothy in a school production of
The Wizard of Oz. A few years later she heard
the folk-rock group Pentangle’s version of Willie
O’ Winsbury and was transfixed by the sad, lilting
melody and the strange story this ancient
Scottish ballad tells – on discovering his
daughter is pregnant the king says he’ll hang the
rake she slept with, but when Willie O’ Winsbury
is brought to the court the king is so struck by
the young man’s beauty that not only does he
give his blessing; he even wishes Willie were a
woman so that he might lay him too.
Stephanie was living with her mum and dad,
unemployed and thinking about becoming a
teaching assistant. She had no particular
connection with folk music. Her boyfriend was
into dub reggae. She felt a greater kinship with
Polish than English culture. And yet something
happened when she sang the old ballads.
“There’s a quality about these songs that does
stir up an ancient memory”, she said, before
embarking on the most spine-chilling version
of Willie O’ Winsbury I have ever heard.
Is folk music still relevant? I would say that it
most certainly is, as long as it is accepted as an
organic, ever-changing form that cannot be
contained within the strictures of dogma.
There’s nothing better than standing in a pub
with people singing all around you, and the real
value of the music is its egalitarianism: there’s a
strong feeling of community that comes from
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singing songs that stretch deep into the past and
that, with their universal themes of love,
betrayal, hardship and mystery, belong to the
present – and to all of us.
To some extent, folk music does belong to a
subculture. It remains outside of the mainstream
and has its own community, although perhaps
not the one of popular cliché (bearded men
smelling faintly of wee). And its great strength is
the fact that it can’t be captured. It’s rather like a
butterfly. It is only beautiful, it only has value,
when it is flying free. Pin it down and you render
it lifeless.
Originally published in Matt Stokes: The Gainsborough
Packet &c. London: Zabludowicz Collection, 2009.
Reprinted with permission of the author.
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La Chanson
John Baldessari, Jérôme Bel, Johanna Billing,
Phil Collins, Discoteca Flaming Star, Alonso Gil,
Marta de Gonzalo & Publio Pérez Prieto,
Douglas Gordon, Jeleton, Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa,
Susan Philipsz, Mathias Poledna, Paul Rooney,
Mika Taanila
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Towards the Transformation of Ways of Life
Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
Why, one might ask, was this group exhibition
given the title La Chanson? The show, which
features a variety of visual and sound
installations, takes its name from the French
music movement of the 1950s and 60s
spearheaded by Édith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Boris
Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco, Georges
Brassens and Léo Ferré, among others. It was
not chosen in an attempt to draw parallels
between past and present, but rather to
highlight something essential to most of the
protagonists of the chanson movement: the
juxtaposition of opposing elements which they
used quite naturally in their songs. For example:
the use of irony combined with melodrama; a
wholehearted dedication to romantic themes
without ever forgetting their political
counterparts; simplicity and directness in
conjunction with theatricality and metaphor;
and an intense interest in personal emotions
accompanied by an equally intense concern for
social issues. These conflicting elements,
combined with apparent ease by the chanson
movement, are the focal point of this collective
exhibition. Like its companion shows in the
session dedicated to song as a force of social
transformation, this exhibition attempts to
analyze the often catalytic role that pop music
has played in recent decades, triggering major
changes at both the individual and collective
levels.
While the influence of rock music on
contemporary art has already been evaluated in
several exhibitions – most notably Sympathy for
the Devil, a title borrowed from Godard’s film
about the Rolling Stones, at the Chicago MCA
in 2007 – this show aims to reassess the crucial
influence of pop music movements, and of song
in particular, on the changes that took place in
the second half of the 20th century. These
changes were cultural, affecting individual and
group customs, ways of expressing sexuality, of
dressing, of relating to others, and of thinking
and sharing certain moments, as well as sociopolitical (inspiring or associated with certain
labour movements and collective protests, for
example) and socioeconomic (the birth and
expansion of what for years was the most
powerful cultural industry in the world,
responsible for the rise and subsequent
propagation of intangible capitalism).
Consequently, as a collective exhibition La
Chanson attempts to reveal how the personal
and the political can be combined in a single
musical format – the melodic song – reused as a
medium by countless contemporary artists who
see it as a way to challenge pop culture using a
cultural format that is deeply ingrained in our
everyday lives and has effected numerous
changes in both the private and public realms.
Not only does the chanson proclaim, like the
feminist movement, that the personal
(including love) is political, but it also tells us
that life brings these apparently antithetical
themes together in a perfectly natural way. The
song, the chanson, the melodious tune, pop
music, or what you will, has comprised the
soundtrack of our lives for years, but it has also
aided and abetted profound changes in our
mentality and way of life on countless occasions.
Even now, in the midst of a sector-wide crisis
and the loss of its hegemony as the leading
cultural industry, pop music continues to
appeal to contemporary artists as a powerful
tool of communication, propaganda and
transformation. This group exhibition features
several such artists, creators who in recent years
have addressed the theme of the song from
different perspectives and using different
aesthetic and conceptual approaches.
The work entitled Concierto para puño
alzado (Concert for a Raised Fist, 2007) by Juan
Pérez Agirregoikoa is about a choir, a rather
monotonic ensemble of deep male voices.
Seeking inspiration in the musical traditions of
his native Basque Country, the artist worked
with an ochote (vocal octet) which performed a
number of popular Spanish and Basque tunes
whose lyrics had been altered. The artist
changed the words in order to alter the meaning
of the songs: the audiences recognized the
melody but not the lyrics. The strangeness of the
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experience was accentuated by the fact that the
new lyrics were actually quotes from the works
of French materialist philosophers like Jacques
Lacan. This new protest song about revolution
and authority bears a certain similarity to John
Baldessari’s 1972 recording entitled Baldessari
Sings LeWitt. In this performance recorded on
video, Baldessari made a modification that
produces a sense of defamiliarization when it
is watched again. In his day, Baldessari also
changed the words to well-known American
songs – including the national anthem – and
replaced them with a series of pronouncements
on art made by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. In
this specific recording, the new lyrics were sung
by John Baldessari himself, with the stated
intention of making LeWitt’s maxims easier to
understand; however, despite its apparent
seriousness, the piece has an undercurrent of
irony and mockery that is also present in the
work by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa. Another
contemporary artist with ties to Baldessari’s
historic creation is Annika Ström – whose work
is featured in an individual exhibition at the
CAAC – and her concomitance with the
conceptual. However, Ström’s manner of relating
the song to conceptualism is probably the
opposite of Baldessari’s approach. The decision
to extract repetitive maxims and interpret them
melodically stems from sentimental rather than
philosophical reasons; indeed, it is only when
they are removed from that context that they
acquire a philosophical or conceptual value.
Pop music is a constant part of our life, even
before we are born. This is what British artist
Douglas Gordon seems to say in his 1994
installation Something between My Mouth and
Your Ear, which invites us to interact with a
selection of songs that his mother probably
listened to while pregnant with him in the year
1966. Although Douglas Gordon is primarily
known for his film-related works and
cinematographic installations, this piece from
his early years reveals pop music as just one of
the many influences – together with inherited
and social traits – that determined his particular
way of seeing and experiencing the world.
Jérôme Bel also appropriates all kinds of songs –
tunes that we have heard throughout our lives,
willingly or unwillingly, accepting them or
hating them as a gift or a curse from the music
industry. Bel’s background is in contemporary
dance, and his approach to pop music focuses
on how this music is perceived and received by
its audiences. The Show Must Go On is one of
his best-known works and has been performed
around the world. In this exhibition, visitors
will be able to view certain moments of the
performance, which in its entirety includes a DJ
spinning famous songs (from Queen to David
Bowie), a group of actors/dancers on stage, and
the audience who identifies with them and
becomes emotionally involved, as we all have
some kind of reaction to music that we’ve heard
a thousand times before. Meanwhile, Mika
Taanila investigates the world of piped music –
specifically focusing on an American company
called Muzak which specializes in this field –
and how it has been used to achieve certain
goals, primarily of an economic nature, and
especially to boost productivity on the job or
stimulate consumerism. In other words, what
Taanila analyzes is the use of something we
have grown so accustomed to that we barely
notice it but which is deliberately designed to
modify our behaviour. Taanila’s projects have
to do with the retro-future: something that was
designed for the world of tomorrow but is now
the archaeological ruin of what could have
been and only was in part, or at least not in
the way that its designers had planned. Gordon,
Bel and Taanila all plunge into the murky depths
of the music industry, attempting to shed light
on how music influences and changes us in a
rather subliminal way.
Songs can also be reinterpreted and take on
new meaning depending on who sings them
and how, as well as on where the voice is coming
from or the area to which it has spread. This is
the case of Susan Philipsz and Johanna Billing,
who both prefer to resurrect songs written by
others. Every space has connotations derived
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Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes / La Chanson: Towards the Transformation of Ways of Life
from its past – or the memory of an event
associated with it – and present, as well as from
other less obvious sources. Susan Philipsz has
put this fact to good use, exploring the darkest
corners of memory, of our own memory, of the
history of a place and of that which persists in
the form of melancholy, nostalgia or longing,
that which is present by virtue of its absence.
It is there where the political references in some
of her works become visible: through the poetics
of the place, the sound intervention, the song
chosen and performed, the intention, or all
these things at once. In contrast, Johanna Billing
prefers not to use her own voice; instead, she
asks others to sing pre-existing songs in many
of her works. In this case, the song is from 1968
and its significance varies depending on the
physical location of the artist, the performers
and the listeners. In any event, the song speaks
of a time of transition and change, whether
political or personal. The experiment we see
here took place in Zagreb in the aftermath of the
Balkan conflict, at an old cultural centre from
the communist era. Melancholy and
defamiliarization are two powerful tools for
exploring signifiers of transformation.
In a different way, we might say that karaoke
is the common thread linking the works
presented by Phil Collins, Discoteca Flaming
Star and Jeleton in La Chanson. The first is a
karaoke experience in the literal sense
organized by Phil Collins, who decided to invite
fans of the legendary British band The Smiths to
perform a song from the album The World Won’t
Listen before the camera on a set decorated in
the style of the 80s, when Morrissey’s group was
in its heyday. A call for volunteers was issued in
three rather complicated cities (Bogota,
Istanbul and Jakarta), allowing participants to
become their idol for a brief moment while
simultaneously revealing the global expansion
of the British music industry and how a group
that was considered a cult band in its day can
expand its sphere of influence and fame thanks
to the ubiquitous nature of music and the
phenomenon of globalization. Meanwhile,
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Discoteca Flaming Star homes in on issues
related to music and songs in particular, as well
as to the concept of reinterpretation.
Consequently, the term “hardcore karaoke”
which some have used to describe their style is
not only fitting but also an eloquent
summarization of how they craft and later
distribute their creations. In any event, film,
sound and performance all converge in their
installations, which serve as memory banks of
process-based and collaborative projects. They
brought this project to life at the Stock
Exchange in Valparaíso, Chile, combining the
energy of the location itself with the convulsions
of the local and global financial markets. The
project has been condensed in a workshop and
a performance piece involving various elements
which ultimately channel the abstraction of the
set design into bodies and finance. Finally, the
two members of Jeleton (Gelen Alcántara and
Jesús Arpal) tackled the task of teaching
themselves to play an instrument (drums and
guitar, respectively) as a performance project for
a residency in Paris. The result was, among
other things, a video which shows them
attempting to play French music as part of that
learning process. Inspired by Dan Graham’s
famous Rock My Religion, they also produced a
publication which attempted to combine pop
music and conceptual art, thus joining the path
blazed by John Baldessari and followed by Juan
Pérez Agirregoikoa in the exhibition La Chanson,
and also taken by Annika Ström in her solo
show. Thus, in this case karaoke is a means
rather than an end.
A quality that most of the artists featured in
La Chanson undoubtedly share is their amateur
approach to pop music, an approach that has
its consequences even when they take a step
towards composition. This may well be the case
of Paul Rooney and the duo comprising Marta
de Gonzalo and Publio Pérez Prieto. Both
produce projects/songs in which the writing
and audiovisual presentation of the lyrics are
fundamental, as is their shared concern about
labour situations in the era of late capitalism.
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Paul Rooney presents a creation that defines his
relationship with song, always tinged with a hint
of melancholy (as is the work of Susan Philipsz
and Johanna Billing) but also with the hope
implicit in the dreams and aspirations of those
who perform essential yet undervalued jobs in
the service industry. The repetitive, monotonous
nature of their tasks contrasts with the workers’
desires, which are illustrated based on their
descriptions. In this respect, a museum whose
programme explores the transforming power of
song cannot avoid this theme, for some of the
members of its staff may identify with what
Rooney describes. Marta de Gonzalo and Publio
Pérez Prieto also focus on a very specific group
of people, a collective that often seems invisible
yet without whom the experience of visiting and
viewing a museum (or of using and inhabiting
any other public or private space) would be very
different and even distressing. But this reference
to the ranks of cleaning professionals, to whom
the song is partially dedicated, segues into a
more general commentary on the asepsis that
permeates every aspect of life in contemporary
societies; our zealous endeavours to hide the
pollution and filth that is a by-product of the
social organization typical of late capitalism
reflect a desire to keep up appearances and
eradicate any trace of what lies beneath.
The last two works included in La Chanson
have to do with recording, at least in part. The
piece by Mathias Poledna quite obviously
revolves around this theme, for he focuses on a
specific space, a legendary California recording
studio from the 1960s that is still virtually intact.
Any traces that the voices and sounds of the past
might have left behind are in the recordings, not
in the soundproofed rooms of United Western
Recorders. However, in Poledna’s exercise in
recreation, the past lives on in the present
thanks to a new rendering of the 1969 song “City
Life” by Harry Nilsson. With new singer and a
similar aesthetic, the countless different shots
remind us of the ubiquity and timelessness of
music thanks to the possibility of re-performing
and reproducing it. In addition to his solo show,
Alonso Gil is represented in La Chanson by a
work from the CAAC Collection, in line with our
efforts to create dialogues between our own
pieces and guest works and to contextualize the
works in the museum’s collection. In this case,
Gil’s decision to record what goes on in the
streets, the things that happen around us every
day, was not motivated by a desire to portray
survival or create a Decalogue of various musical
aptitudes in which a virtue is made of necessity;
rather, the choice to record reveals a yearning for
the endurance of life experiences, and therefore
an affirmation of life itself and of the capacity for
survival.
As a result, La Chanson oscillates between
the personal and the social, exploring recording,
amateur composition, karaoke and the
possibilities of performance, and the
melancholy and strange, but also the
underhanded efforts of the music industry to
maintain the status quo and the conceptual
alteration that some artists have chosen to make.
The difference between La Chanson and the two
previous exhibition sessions at the CAAC
(featured in issues 0 and 1 of this magazine),
where the group shows attempted to reinforce
the significance and coherence of the other solo
exhibitions, is that in this case it is the individual
shows (Annika Ström, Ruth Ewan, Matt Stokes
and Alonso Gil) that set the tone – halfway
between political and sentimental – of the entire
programme. La Chanson, the group exhibition of
this session, merely provides the background
vocals for the soloists, thus broadening the tonal
range and creating a richer polyphony.
8
9
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84-85
92-93
86-87
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88-89
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81. Annika Ström, Danke (Thanks), 2003
82-83. Matt Stokes, Cantata Profana, 2010
Courtesy of the artist, Lüttgenmeijer (Berlin, Germany), Workplace Gallery (Gateshead, UK) and ZieherSmith (New York, USA)
84-85. Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, 2007
P. 84, Copyright Gaultier Deblonde. P. 85, Photo: Thierry Bal
86-87. Alonso Gil, La orquesta de los milagros (The Orchestra of Miracles), 2004
88-89. Discoteca Flaming Star, Silver Banner, 2010, and video still from El valor del Gallo Negro, 2010
Courtesy of the artists and Freymond-Guth Fine Arts Ltd., Zurich
90-91. Susan Philipsz, Stay With Me, 2005
Installation view at Malmö Konsthall. Photo: Eoghan McTigue
92-93. Mathias Poledna, Western Recording, 2003
Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna; Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin; Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles
94 up. Paul Rooney, Around and Between the Gallery Song, 2001
Courtesy of the artist and LUX, London
94 down. Jeleton, Rock My Religion Annoté (publication) detail of the installation Répétitions anotado, 2010
Photo: CA2M
95 up. Johanna Billing, Magical World, 2005
Courtesy of the artist and Hollybush Gardens
95 down. Marta de Gonzalo & Publio Pérez Prieto, Canción de la armonía y el mundo (Song of Harmony and the World), 2004
96. Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa, Concierto para puño alzado (Concert for a Raised Fist), 1997
AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 98
DATE
BAND
Thursday, June 30
Basia Bulat
Wednesday, July 6
Rainbow Arabia
Thursday, July 7
Depedro
Wednesday, July 13
Binary Audio Misfits
Thursday, July 14
Lacrosse
+ guest band: Los Alimentos
Wednesday, July 20
Pelle Carlberg
Thursday, July 21
Hidrogenesse
Wednesday, July 27
Micah P. Hinson & The Pioneer Saboteurs
vs. Trompe le monde by the Pixies
+ guest band: Falso Cabaret
Thursday, July 28
Lonely Drifter Karen
Saturday, July 30
The School
+ guest band: Motel 3
Wednesday, August 3
Alondra Bentley
Thursday, August 4
Triángulo de Amor Bizarro
Wednesday, August 10
Klaus & Kinski
Thursday, August 11
Arizona Baby
Wednesday, August 17
Christina Rosenvinge
Thursday, August 18
Fiera
Wednesday, August 24
Francisco Nixon
Thursday, August 25
Julio de la Rosa
Wednesday, August 31
Coque Malla
Thursday, September 1
Maga
Concerts at 10 pm. Tickets: 5 €
Nocturama, Hello Cuca’s concert, 2009. Photo: Juan Francisco Angulo López
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11
100
OPENING CONCERT
JULY
Thursday, June 30
Wednesday, July 6
Thursday, July 7
Basia Bulat
Rainbow Arabia
Depedro
As the daughter of a piano teacher,
Basia grew up surrounded by
musical instruments (she plays the
guitar, the sitar, the flute, the
piano, the ukulele, the saxophone,
the banjo…) in a home where only
the oldies were played (Motown,
The Beach Boys, The Beatles,
Sam Cooke, etc.). From the time
she was a small girl, her brother
Bobby accompanied her on the
drums just as he does today. In
2007 this youthful Canadian singer
and songwriter released her debut
album on the Rough Trade label,
Oh My Darling, a collection of
beautiful, fantastically arranged
tracks performed by a prodigious
voice.
Now she has presented her
second LP, Heart of My Own, where
we discover an even more selfconfident Bulat, with a voice that
is just as comfortable and
exhilarating when the songs swell
to their most epic proportions as
when they plunge into intimacy
and melancholy. Her compositions
verge on traditional folk music with
hints of other styles (jazz, soul,
pop, etc.).
The husband-and-wife team
formed by Danny and Tiffany
Preston created Rainbow Arabia,
inspired by the sounds of the
Middle East. After their debut EP,
The Basta, was received with great
critical acclaim in 2008, and after
touring with Gang Gang Dance,
they released the 7” Omar K and
the EP Kabukimono, in which
African and Caribbean rhythms
were added to their sound palette.
Now they’ve come to Seville to
offer us their first LP, Boys and
Diamonds, a dazzling blend of dub
punk and world pop, AfroCaribbean beats and synth-pop,
hip-hop and electronic music.
This perfectly assembled puzzle is
sure to delight fans of MIA,
Santigold or even Vampire
Weekend.
Jairo Zavala, former lead singer of
La Vacazul, presents his second
solo album under the Depedro
alias. The tracks on Nubes de
Papel were written between shows
while touring with Calexico, a band
in which he has played guitar for
the last four years, and while
travelling around the world to
promote his debut album. Nubes
de Papel features two tracks
recorded with Joey Burns, John
Convertino and Jacob Valenzuela
from Calexico, and Vetusta Morla.
When listening to Depedro, we can
hear echoes of John Barry’s
soundtracks, frontier tunes, African
guitars, a pinch of Brazilian music,
a dollop of The Beatles from the
“Let It Be” era, Vainica Doble and
M. Ward.
www.basiabulat.com
www.rainbowarabia.com
www.depedro.net
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101
Wednesday, July 13
Thursday, July 14
Wednesday, July 20
Binary Audio Misfits
Lacrosse
Pelle Carlberg
Binary Audio Misfits was created
when two highly original bands
from different cultures and
continents found each other on
MySpace. In the winter of 2007,
the French rock band Expérience,
an old acquaintance of Spanish
audiences, contacted the Texan
hip-hop group The Word
Association to ask if they would be
willing to participate in a track for
the album that Expérience was
working on at the time. After the
recording session, the two bands
were thrilled with the end product
and decided to work on a few more
songs together. The result was
B.A.M! LP, the first album of the
Binary Audio Misfits, a head-on
collision between belligerent hiphop and prickly rock.
This band’s debut album, This New
Year Will Be for You and Me,
inspired critics to use words like
“euphoric”, “upbeat” and
“sunshine pop”. It was named
album of the week by Rough Trade
and received stellar reviews across
Europe. Bandages for the Heart,
a second album with the same
euphoria but a much sharper edge,
confirmed Lacrosse’s talent and
took them on a lengthy European
tour where they earned a reputation
for explosive live performances.
Two vocalists with amazing
energy, incredibly mellow guitars
and dazzling melodies are the
band’s weapons of choice. Barely
restrained madness hides behind
the appearance of a fundamentally
upbeat pop style.
www.myspace.com/
binaryaudiomisfits
www.lacrosse.nu
Pelle Carlberg has been making
music since 1985, playing with
bands on the Swedish scene like
Amanda om natten and Edson, with
which he recorded three albums.
In 2005 he embarked on a solo
career and has since released three
albums, two of them on the
prestigious Labrador label.
His influences are varied,
ranging from Cat Stevens, Simon &
Garfunkel, ABBA and The Beatles
to Echo and the Bunnymen, The
Smiths, Teenage Fanclub, Belle &
Sebastian, The Velvet Underground,
The Beautiful South, Doktor
Kosmos, Jens Lekman and
Suburban Kids with Biblical Names.
And although it’s hard to believe,
his music has a lot of each of them;
his compositions are pop songs
with an undercurrent that is surreal
in some cases and hermetic in
others, but almost always luminous.
Photo: Sebastian Tim
www.pellecarlberg.se
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11
102
Thursday, July 21
Wednesday, July 27
Thursday, July 28
Hidrogenesse
Micah P. Hinson & The Pioneer
Saboteurs vs. Trompe le
Monde by the Pixies
Lonely Drifter Karen
As the band’s own website
proclaims, Hidrogenesse is an
“electronic art-rock duo,
composers of populist pop songs,
producers of romantic-sexual
mantras, authors of Situationist
dance tunes, performers of the
mystical-comic genre…
Hidrogenesse is Carlos Ballesteros
and Genís Segarra. Since the end
of the last century, they have
released a number of albums,
including Así se baila el siglo XX,
Eres PC/Eres Mac, Gimnàstica
passiva and Animalitos”.
Carlos and Genís are currently
participating in an exhibition at
Fundació Joan Miró with an
installation entitled Moix, for which
they have recorded a new track.
www.myspace.com/hidrogenesse
At “We Used to Party” concerts,
a well-known solo artist or band
performs all the tracks on an album
by an artist or artists whose music
has been a special source of
inspiration and pleasure for them.
In this case, Micah P. Hinson, who
has become a kind of icon among
Spanish indie and not-so-indie
audiences, is coming to Nocturama
to perform his version of one of the
best alternative rock albums ever
released, Trompe le Monde, which
signalled the end of the Pixies’
recording career in 1991. This
adoptive Texan (born in Memphis)
will become Black Francis for an
evening to belt out classic anthems
like “Planet Sound”, “Head On”
and “The Sad Punk”, accompanied
by the Zaragoza-based band
Tachenko.
www.micahphinson.com
The person hiding behind the
pseudonym of Lonely Drifter Karen
is Tanja Frinta, born in Vienna in
1979 and currently living in
Barcelona. This album, named after
a character in Lars von Trier’s The
Idiots, features the tinkling ivories
of Majorcan pianist Marc Melià.
Marc is a fan of Jacques Brel and
the chanson, whereas Frinta prefers
German cabaret and Kurt Weill,
but all of these disparate influences
come together in music full of
evocative melodies and sinuous
arrangements.
The band's debut album, Grass
Is Singing, was released in 2008,
and last year they presented their
second project, Fall of Spring.
www.myspace.com/lonelydrifterkaren
Photo: Sandrine Derselle
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103
AUGUST
Saturday, July 30
Wednesday, August 3
Thursday, August 4
The School
Alondra Bentley
Triángulo de Amor Bizarro
Combining a love of indie pop and
the most brilliant music of the
1960s, The School’s style is a
British version of sunshine pop
that blends light and shadow to
produce a contagious, ultra-melodic
pop sound that you can dance and
cry to simultaneously. Their
sophisticated, upbeat tracks with
a hint of melancholy are inspired
by The Beach Boys (and the
fantastic American Spring produced
by Brian Wilson), The Beatles,
Phil Spector and 60s girl bands.
Not to mention, of course, other
more modern groups who share
similar roots and also wrap their
dulcet melodies in marvellous
string and keyboard arrangements,
such as Belle & Sebastian,
Saturday Looks Good to Me,
Camera Obscura or Lucky Soul.
Alondra Bentley, a Spanish singersongwriter of English extraction,
burst onto the music scene in 2006
with a handful of songs written in
her mother tongue which quickly
became a hot topic of conversation
among professionals of the Spanish
music industry. That same year,
her demo was chosen as one of the
season’s best by the Disco Grande
show on Spanish National Radio,
hosted by the prestigious music
critic and journalist Julio Ruiz.
After this promising beginning, in
2009 Bentley released her first
album, Ashfield Avenue, which
confirmed Alondra’s success with
music journalists and listeners
alike.
Listening to Ashfield Avenue
brings to mind the great women of
music history, evoking artists of the
stature of Joni Mitchell and Nina
Simone, but it also reminds us of
male vocalists like Nick Drake.
Thanks to the success of her debut
album, Alondra set out on a tour
which has continued for nearly two
years now, and she was invited to
perform at some of the most
important music events in Spain
and England, including the
Benicassim International Festival,
Primavera Sound, Sonorama and
La Mar de Músicas.
The prehistory of the then-quintet
began with the making of the demo
Salud y belleza in 2004, an
explosive device wrapped in teddybear plush that earned them a spot
among the finalists in Proyecto
Demo. Even before the release,
word-of-mouth had made it one of
the most anxiously awaited debuts
of 2007. The band’s war cry –
“Now the free world wants a
blazing fire” – struck a chord with
their audiences: this trio from the
country set the online forums on
fire and rattled music pundits with
their live songs, deafening sound
and powerful lyrics. Before the year
was out El hombre del siglo V was
released, an album that ended up
becoming a compilation of oddities
and included tracks from their early
demos, new recordings and a few
songs that no one had heard before.
Confirmed as the most important
new Spanish band of the year on
every music ranking, they continued
to give non-stop performances
throughout 2008.
Año santo was released in May
of 2010, and even with the
handicap of a debut that topped
every list of the decade’s best
Spanish albums, the press
unanimously acclaimed it as their
best work yet.
www.myspace.com/alondrabentley
www.articapro.com/artistas/triangulo
-de-amor-bizarro
www.theschoolband.co.uk
Photo: Blanca Galindo
Photo: Thomas Carret
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11
104
Wednesday, August 10
Thursday, August 11
Wednesday, August 17
Klaus & Kinski
Arizona Baby
Christina Rosenvinge
The first line in the story of Klaus &
Kinski was written almost by
chance, when Alejandro convinced
Marina to sing a Beatles cover so
that he could test the home sound
studio he had set up, way back in
the summer of 2005. Five years
later, Klaus & Kinski have two
albums under their belt, a large fan
base and the respect of the music
critics. Those who know Alex best
say that he belongs to the new
generation of young people who
have been abducted by technology,
which is quite true; however, it is
equally true that he has proven to
be one of the most talented
composers of the Spanish indie
music scene to emerge from that
same generation. His well-known
proficiency on the guitar and his
wise choice of travelling companions
are two additional factors that
helped make Klaus & Kinski the
sensation of the 2008-09 season.
In April 2010 the duo released
their fantastic second album
entitled Tierra, trágalos, which was
enthusiastically received by both
audiences and critics, and since
then they have been busy
presenting their latest work on
stages throughout Spain and at
events like Festival do Norte,
Contempopranea, Sonorama,
Lemon Pop, etc.
The biggest surprise of the year
shoots off acoustic bullets and
basic philosophy. They are Arizona
Baby, a trio that has shaken up the
Spanish music scene with an
irresistible adventure of desert
epics and evocative fantasies called
Second to None. Barely five weeks
after its release, this album of dustcoated beauty and Spartan
austerity was already being
identified by the majority of
national journalists, from the most
mainstream to the most indie, as
one of the top three albums of the
year. From Mondo Sonoro to
Rolling Stone, Arizona Baby’s
recordings and live performances
have rocketed to the top of every
best-of-the-year list. They’ve also
received several national awards in
the best new band category and the
UFI (Independent Phonographic
Union) Special MySpace Band of
the Year Award. Arizona Baby is an
acoustic rock trio capable of
making even the best electric band
quake in their boots, with a look
that’s appealing and impressive.
They hail from Valladolid and have
been playing together since 2004.
The female vocalist par excellence
of the Spanish indie scene started
out as one-half of the duo Alex &
Christina and later as lead singer
of the rock band Los Subterráneos,
two projects which made her
tremendously popular in Spain and
South America in the 1990s. In
2000 the artist moved to New York,
where she launched a solo career
with three albums recorded entirely
in English. After returning to Spain,
she began writing lyrics in Spanish
again and released Verano Fatal,
an album co-composed with the
Asturian singer-songwriter Nacho
Vegas. One year later, Christina
conquered all and sundry with her
sublime Tu labio superior (Warner,
2009), whose songs kept her
hopping from one Spanish stage to
the next for nearly two years, after
which she set out on a South
American tour of Argentina, Chile,
Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico.
Her latest album, La joven
Dolores, was released by Warner in
January of this year.
www.myspace.com/klausandkinski
http://arizonababyrocks.
blogspot.com
Photo: Ricardo F. Otazo
www.christinarosenvinge.com
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105
Thursday, August 18
Wednesday, August 24
Thursday, August 25
Fiera
Francisco Nixon
Julio de la Rosa
Fiera is a band comprising Pablo
Peña, Daniel Alonso, Darío del
Moral and Javier Rivera (members
of Pony Bravo). Their most
immediate influences are postpunk bands like The Fall, PIL,
Suicide, Liquid Liquid, Pere Ubu
and Palais Schaumburg, and
Spanish groups such as Derribos
Arias and Parálisis Permanente.
They also looked to now-legendary
bands like Einstürzende
Neubauten when choosing the
combination of instruments that
produce Fiera’s unique sound.
Fiera made their first
appearance at Nocturama (CAAC,
Seville) in August 2008, where the
audience heard the first versions
of the songs composed by Pablo
Peña, the band’s vocalist, bassist
and lead writer.
After years of hard work, Fiera
finally cut their first LP, which was
recorded by Raúl Pérez at his La
Mina Studio. Déjese llevar (2010)
was released by El Rancho Casa de
Discos, a company created by the
members of Pony Bravo to handle
their professional activities. Like
everything that El Rancho
produces, Déjese llevar was
released under a Creative
Commons licence and can be
downloaded free of charge from the
band’s website.
Francisco Nixon is the stage name
used by Fran Fernández (Gijón,
1971), former singer and songwriter
for two iconic Spanish indie bands,
Australian Blonde and La Costa
Brava.
Since launching his solo career
as Francisco Nixon in 2006, he has
released three titles on the Siesta
label: Es Perfecta, El perro es mío
and the mini LP Gloria y la belleza
sureña, aided by his regular
guitarist of choice, Ricardo Vicente,
formerly of La Costa Brava.
Like all of Fran’s previous
undertakings, Nixon has become a
fixture on the Spanish music scene.
His name regularly appears on the
bills of Spain’s most important
music festivals, and he is
considered one of the best Spanish
pop songwriters. His “Erasmus
Borrachas” was named the Best
Song of 2009 at the Independent
Music Awards organized by Unión
Fonográfica Independiente (UFI).
Julio de la Rosa made his first
appearance on the cover of one of
his studio albums, La Herida
Universal, the first to be co-released
on the national indie labels Ernie
and King of Patio, and the fourth
of his career since his band, El
Hombre Burbuja, broke up.
Julio has inhaled and perspired
Jerez, Seville, Manchester, Istanbul,
New York, Barcelona and Madrid,
observing, creating and sharing,
writing part of his musical and
personal history in the ebb and flow
of these cities. His poetry is like his
vision, like his entire life – real,
incisive, stimulating, cynical and
romantic. His music is unique,
playing with time, sound and
silence. Julio de la Rosa has known
love in myriad forms: true love,
mirror love, reflected love, brotherly
love, generous love, devastating
love, labyrinthine love… all of
which he had to experience so that
today we, the listeners, can feel,
hold our breath, float, and dance
with a secret smile or howling with
laughter. Julio de la Rosa is one of
the most genuine musicians we
have, and La Herida Universal is
his best album yet – probably just
because it’s the latest one he’s
given us.
www.fierafierafiera.com
www.myspace.com/frannixon
Photo: Estudio Syx
www.juliodelarosa.com
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106
CLOSING CONCERT
Wednesday, August 31
Thursday, September 1
Coque Malla
Maga
On his latest album, Termonuclear,
Coque Malla has revealed his
tremendous talent for writing music.
“The songs on Termonuclear are
inspired by true experiences, but
they fortunately become fiction,
they turn into how you’d like things
to be or how you wish they could
have been.” And it is there, in the
writing, that the great composer
emerges, the talent of one who
knows how to handle sensitive,
personal material and turn it into
a universal creation, one we can all
identify with in equal measure. The
album was recorded in analogue
format, on “tape” like the great
classic albums, with a trio playing
live in the studio: Coque on
acoustic guitar, the former
“Ronaldo” Ricardo Moreno on
drums, and Nico Nieto, the album’s
co-producer (and Coque’s crucial
ally during the thermonuclear year),
on bass. Then came the recordings
for enhancing the tracks: delicate
strings to underscore certain
sections with their chamber-music
sound, and splendid tonalities
contributed by pop’s most timeless
(and now quite rare) wind
instruments.
Special concert/surprise celebration
of the band’s 10th anniversary.
Maga are back. The trio has closed
the book on one era (with three
albums, a couple of EPs and tracks
on various compilations) and begun a
new one at Mushroom Pillow with the
band’s own experience and that
shared with Germán Coppini on their
joint project, with Sr. Chinarro (the
rhythm section is the same featured
on Antonio Luque’s last two albums),
with Deluxe (Miguel participated in
Reconstrucción) and with Tote King.
Jordi Gil was responsible for the
production of A la hora del sol, an
addictive, timeless album marked by
the personality of a voice that is
unrivalled in Spanish-language pop.
The album was recorded at
Sputnik Studios in Seville with Jordi
Gil, who also produced El mundo
según and Ronroneando by Sr.
Chinarro. The band was accompanied
during the recording sessions by
Israel Diezma (lap steel guitar on
“Último mar”), Joaquín Calderón
(violin on “La Balsa” and lead guitar
on “Garagato”), Manolo Solo (backup
vocals and lyrics for “Sí, pero no lo
soy”), Javier Centeno (trumpet on
“Garagato”), Germán Coppini (lyrics
for “Garagato”) and César Díaz
(keyboard), who also joins the group
in their live performances.
http://www.coquemalla.es
Photo: María Vázquez
www.articapro.com/artistas/maga
Photo: Jopo/Emerre
This information has been
extracted by Green Ufos and La
Suite from specialized web sites.
AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 107
Nocturama, Lloyd Cole’s concert, 2010. Photo: Javier Agreda
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108
Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo
Avda. Descubrimientos entrance
Education
Workshop
D
Workshops
A
E
C
A
A
B
Instituto
Andaluz del
Patrimonio
Histórico
Library
Entrance
Ombú
F
A
Universidad
Internacional
de Andalucía
A
Avda. Américo Vespucio entrance
CAAC Exhibitions 2011
Song as a Force of Social Transformation
A. La Chanson. From July 21 through November 13
B. Matt Stokes. Nuestro tiempo (Our Time). From July 21 through November 6
C. Alonso Gil. Cantando mi mal espanto (Singing My Troubles Away). From July 21 through November 6
D. Ruth Ewan. Del pasado efímero (The Ephemeral Past). From June 30 through October 16
E. Annika Ström. Songs by Annika Ström. From May 26 through September 11
F. Nocturama. From June 30 through September 1
AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 109
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109
www.caac.es
Monasterio de la Cartuja de Santa María de las Cuevas
41092 Seville
Entrances:
Avda. Américo Vespucio, 2
Camino de los Descubrimientos (no number)
Bus routes: C-1, C-2
phone: (34) 955 03 70 70, fax: (34) 955 03 70 52
e-mail: [email protected]
OPENING HOURS
Tuesday-Saturday: 11 to 21 h
Sunday and public holidays: 11 to 15 h
FREE ADMISSION
Tuesday-Friday: from 19 to 21 h
Saturday: from 11 to 21 h
ENTRANCE PRICE
1.80 euros: Visit to the monument or to the temporary exhibitions
3.01 euros: Complete visit
12.02 euros: Annual pass
Disabled Access: Museum facilities are accessible and adapted to people with disabilities
LIBRARY, Videoteque, Photo Library and Archives
Monday: from 9 to 14 h
Tuesday-Friday: from 11 to 14 h / from 15 to 18 h
August closed
AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_180711:01 18/07/11 10:31 Página 110
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110
EXHIBITIONS
Annika Ström. Songs by Annika Ström
May 26 – September 11, 2011
Coordination
Yolanda Torrubia
Installation
BGL Ingeniería audiovisual
Signs
Fotocromía Lineal
Subtitles
Desenfoque
Assistance to wall paintings
María José Sánchez Barrera
Ruth Ewan. Del pasado efímero
(The Ephemeral Past)
June – October 16, 2011
Coordination
Yolanda Torrubia
Installation
Museographia
Shipping
HDArte
Woodwork
Carpintería Olivera
Instalaciones Martínez
Subtitles
Desenfoque
Graphic design for Did You Kiss the Foot that
Kicked You? project newspaper and Fang
Sang project poster
The 2 Group
Translation of Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked
You? newspaper and Fang Sang poster
África Vidal
Transcription of Fang Sang audio
Miguel Ángel Álvarez Highfield
Translations for Six Signs project
Okodia - Grupo Traductor
Signs and production of Six Signs project
Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual
Acknowledgements
Galería Ancient&Modern, Rob Tufnell
Gallery, and to all the people who
collaborated with the songs of A Jukebox of
People Trying to Change the World
Alonso Gil. Cantando mi mal espanto
(Singing My Troubles Away)
July 21 – November 6, 2011
Coordination
Raquel López
Installation
BNV
Audiovisual installation
Bienvenido Gil
Painting
Manuel Jesús Cruz
Woodwork
Carpintería Olivera
Signs
Fotocromía Lineal
Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual
Assistance to wall paintings
Pedro Delgado
Israel Díaz Iglesia
Acknowledgements
Colección Cajasol
Ricardo Garrido
Matt Stokes. Nuestro tiempo (Our Time)
July 21 – November 6, 2011
Coordination
Luisa Espino
Installation
Grupo 956
Shipping
HD arte
Kortmann Art Packers & Shippers (APS)
Acknowledgements
Frans Hals Museum | De Hallen Haarlem,
Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Workplace
Gallery, Susanna Koenig, Andrea Linnenkohl
La Chanson
July 21 – November 13, 2011
Coordination
Alberto Figueroa
Audiovisual installation
Salas
Painting
Manuel Jesús Cruz
Woodwork
BNV
Signs
Fotocromía Lineal
Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual
Acknowledgements
Galería Meyer Kainer, Video Data Bank,
María-Ángeles Alcántara-Sánchez, Jesús
Arpal, Martina Aschbacher, Lindsay Bosch,
Marta de Gonzalo, Sandro Grando, Amber
Hickey, Gil Leung, Sue MacDiarmid, Erin
Manns, Publio Pérez Prieto, Juan Pérez
Agirregoikoa, Glòria Pou, Paul Rooney,
Bert Ross, Mike Sperlinger, Mika Taanila
Audiovisual installation
Simeon Corless
Anna Nesbit
Acoustic installation
INASEL
Translation of The Gainsborough Packet poster
and of Real Arcadia subtitles
África Vidal
Signs
Fotocromía Lineal
Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual
Woodwork
Carpintería Olivera
Painting
Halcón
Curatorial Projects Management: Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes. Consultancy and General Coordination: Luisa López Moreno. Conservation Restoration: José Carlos Roldán, Lluvia Vega. Installation Coordination: Faustino Escobar. Assistance to installation: Jesús Muñoz. Graphic
Design: Luis Durán. Press: Marta Carrasco. Documentation: Eduardo Camacho. Education: Felipa Giráldez, Mar Martín, María Felisa
Sierra. Technical Assistance: Dámaso Cabrera. Administrative Officer: José Antonio Guzmán
The Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo would like to express its deepest gratitude to the artists participating in these exhibitions,
as well as to all those that have contributed to their production.
AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 111
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111
PUBLICATION
AUTHORS
Images:
Peio Aguirre
is an art critic and independent curator.
Of Matt Stokes’ works:
Courtesy of the artist, Lüttgenmeijer
(Berlin, Germany), Workplace Gallery
(Gateshead, UK) and ZieherSmith (New
York, USA)
Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
is Director of the Centro Andaluz de Arte
Contemporáneo, art critic and independent
curator.
Matthew Collin
is a journalist and writer currently based in
Georgia. He has worked as a foreign
correspondent, broadcast journalist,
magazine editor and features writer for
publications such as the Big Issue, The
Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Moscow Times,
Face and Mojo. His previous books include
This is Serbia Calling, The Time of the
Rebels and Altered State: The Story of
Ecstasy Culture and Acid House.
Chris Fite-Wassilak
is a writer and curator based in London.
www.growgnome.com
Pedro G. Romero
is an artist.
Jonathan Griffin
is a British writer and editor living in Los
Angeles. He contributes to Frieze, Art
Review, Mousse, Flash Art and other
publications.
Will Hodgkinson
is the author of Guitar Man, Song Man and
The Ballad of Britain, and writes on music
and culture for The Guardian, The Times,
Mojo and Vogue.
Raj Kuter
is a graphic artist, writer and editor of the
literary magazine Vacaciones en Polonia.
The views and opinions expressed in
this publication are those of the
individual authors and should not be
attributed to 11 to 21.
Views at CAAC on p. 93:
Guillermo Mendo
Inside cover page, from left to right,
up and down:
Basia Bulat / Rainbow Arabia / Depedro /
Binary Audio Misfits / Lacrosse (photo:
Sebastian Tim) / Pelle Carlberg /
Hidrogenesse (photo: Darío Peña) / Micah
P. Hinson & The Pioneer Saboteurs /
Lonely Drifter Karen (photo: Sandrine
Derselle) / The School
Inside back page, from left to right,
up and down:
Alondra Bentley (photo: Blanca Galindo) /
Triángulo de Amor Bizarro (photo:
Thomas Carret) / Klaus & Kinski /
Arizona Baby (photo: Ricardo F. Otazo) /
Christina Rosenvinge / Fiera / Francisco
Nixon (photo: Estudio Syx) / Julio de la
Rosa / Coque Malla (photo: María
Vázquez) / Maga (photo: Jopo/Emerre)
Published by
JUNTA DE ANDALUCÍA
Consejería de Cultura
Publisher
Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
Deputy Editor
Luisa López Moreno
Editorial Coordinator
Luisa Espino
Editorial Assistants
Alberto Figueroa, Raquel López,
Yolanda Torrubia
Copy-editor
Fernando Quincoces
Texts translation
Paul Hammond: Spanish to English:
Pedro G. Romero.
Deirdre B. Jerry: Spanish to English:
Peio Aguirre, Raj Kuter, Juan Antonio
Álvarez Reyes, Nocturama 2011.
Design and Layout
Florencia Grassi, www.elvivero.es
Printing
erasOnze Artes Gráficas
Photomechanics
Margen
Acknowledgements:
To María José Rodríguez Bisquert and all
the artists and authors of the texts and
images.
Binding
José Luis Sanz
© This Edition:
JUNTA DE ANDALUCÍA.
Consejería de Cultura
© Texts: The Authors
© Photographs: The Artists and their
Agents
DL: M-26788-2011
ISSN: 2173-8203
Printed on Igloo Offset 90 g/m2,
100% post-consumer recycled paper,
distributed by Torraspapel Distribución
AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 112
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July-October 2011
112
JUNTA DE ANDALUCÍA
Consejero de Cultura
Paulino Plata
Viceconsejera de Cultura
Dolores Carmen Fernández Carmona
Secretario General de Políticas Culturales
Bartolomé Ruiz González
CENTRO ANDALUZ DE ARTE
CONTEMPORÁNEO
Director
Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes
Direction Secretary
Ana M. Contreras
Head of Administration
Luis Arranz Hernán
Chief Curator
Luisa López Moreno
Exhibitions
Faustino Escobar
Luisa Espino
Alberto Figueroa
Raquel López
Yolanda Torrubia
Press
Marta Carrasco
Graphic Design
Luis Durán
Education
Felipa Giráldez
Mar Martín
María Felisa Sierra
Collection
Isabel Pichardo
María Paz García Vellido
Library and Documentation
Eduardo Camacho
Elodia Huelva
María Isabel Montero
Inés Romero
Conservation
Dámaso Cabrera
Isabel Vargas
Restauration
José Carlos Roldán
Lluvia Vega
AAFF nº2 cubierta 150711:01 15/07/11 19:08 Página 4
AAFF nº2 cubierta 150711:01 15/07/11 19:08 Página 3
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11 to 21
Song as a Force of Social Transformation
CAAC
Issue 2 July–October 2011