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Press Information Kunsthaus Graz am [email protected] Rock – Paper – Scissors: Pop-Music as Subject of Visual Art Landesmuseum Joanneum www.kunsthausgraz.at 3 pages Lendkai 1, A–8020 Graz T +43-316/8017-9213, F -9212 Rock – Paper – Scissors Pop-Music as Subject of Visual Art Pop music counts as a low, popular form of art, while visual art ranks among the high arts. That relationship has changed profoundly in the last 50 years. Pop music is a hybrid originally spawned by the parallelism of sound and image found in TV programmes, fanzines and record covers. At its heart is a feeling of direct involvement with people rather than musical values. These can function as sex objects or the embodiment of new lifestyles. For art, this form of expression is as much a subject as a rival event. Rock – Paper – Scissors brings together artists whose methods and formulations use pop music’s body politics, knowledge industry and relationship with the world for their own purposes. The art ’n’ pop music affair all started with artists such as Andy Warhol, Ian Hamilton, Peter Blake, David Lamelas and Dan Graham in the 1960s. Since then, the number of pop music- themed works has risen exponentially. Major turning points in the evolution of art were often paralleled by turning points in the development of pop music. The new simplicity in the return to painting in the early 1980s, for example, had a counterpart in punk rock, while anti-subject techno culture was embraced by the anti-subject, collaborative, project-oriented art of the 1990s, with its feminism and neo-anti-institutional approaches. In short, artists with a special relationship with pop music, its subgenres and ancillary forms have long ceased to be exceptions. They are the rule. Exploration of the relationship between art and pop music today can no longer just illustrate this self-evident circumstance. There would likewise be little point in taking the common themes of art and pop music as a starting point. As a general rule, when themes dominate, the other dimensions of artistic projects are killed. Admittedly, the option does remain of focusing on particular aspects or historical periods and relevant overlaps between them, for example rock music, which is now completely historical. Yet if the aim is to avoid going so deep into the history as to lose sight of the present, there is one other possibility. We can rely on the artists themselves. Rock – Paper – Scissors. Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art brings together people whose works and techniques have long been defined by a close relationship with pop music. For them, pop music represents neither one subject among many nor a passing phase. Ultimately, the quality of this relationship in their works is also crucial for their ability to create connections with completely different periods and artistic approaches. - Art & Language is a group of first-generation conceptual artists who have collaborated with band The Red Krayola (or its sole enduring member, Mayo Thompson) since the mid-1970s. Beside various records and videos, the libretto of a hitherto unrealized opera was written this way. Thompson also worked extensively together with Albert Oehlen. - Artist Kim Gordon has been bass guitarist of the band Sonic Youth for almost 30 years. - Besides working as an artist, Jutta Koether has been writing about pop music for almost 30 years. She has played in several bands and projects, including Kim Gordon, Tom Verlaine (familiar from TV), Steven Parrino (joint Electrophilia project), Rita Ackerman (Diadal) and composer Stefan Tccherepnin. - Painter Albert Oehlen also runs a record label, producing many records and playing in his own bands. - Cory Arcangel comes from Internet pop culture, the successor to pop music. The links (and contrasts) between the two cultures have repeatedly featured in his work, which, unlike artists of the older generation in particular, also focuses closely on mainstream products (Springsteen, Van Halen). - In a series of motion-picture installations (Actualité, Western Recording, Sufferer), Mathias Poledna has used artistic means to present historic moments of pop music in a novel historical take quite unlike the usual treatment of pop history. - In all stages of his career as a visual artist, Mike Kelley has also undertaken and initiated pop music productions – both within and outside his own oeuvre; starting with the influential band Destroy All Monsters, followed by The Poetics, right through to joint projects with key protagonists of Japanese Noise (Violent Onsen Geisha) and lavish sound and music productions of his own for his recent exhibition projects such as Day is Done. - Besides other projects on the history and sociology of pop music taste and the contemporary culture associated with it, Lucy McKenzie has produced a complex body of work on 1970s London using artistic, academic and journalistic means and oriented to the two Brians (Ferry and Eno), who here represent prototypes of a certain stage of cultural production. - The subject of Sam Durant’s complex work is mainly the production and reception of Afro-American pop music and its aesthetic strategies in a racially imprinted culture, with a wide range of links to other subjects. Seite 2/3 Artists: Saâdane Afif, Cory Arcangel, Art & Language with The Red Krayola, Sam Durant, Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether, Renée Green, Stefan Hablützel, Mike Kelley, Klara Lidén, Lucy McKenzie, Dave Muller, Albert Oehlen, Katrin Plavcak, Mathias Poledna, Uwe Schinn, Nico Vascellari, et al. Opening: June 5, 2009, 7pm Performances: June 5, 2009, 7pm Cory Arcangel Kim Gordon & Jutta Koether Nico Vascellari Kunsthaus Graz, Space04 Concert: June 5, 2009, 9.30pm, admission 9pm The Red Krayola ppc, Graz Duration: June 6 – August 30, 2009 Kunsthaus Graz, Space01/02 Curator: Diedrich Diederichsen Information: +43 (0)316-8017-9200 Free Admission! Admission to upper exhibition level only from 18+. Please bring identification with you. Seite 3/3 .

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