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Song as a Force of Social Transformation ACIssue 2 CAAC uyOtbr2011 July–October AAFF nº2 cubierta 150711:01 15/07/11 19:08 Página 4 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 1 11 to 21 Song as a Force of Social Transformation

Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo July-October 2011 Issue 2 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 4 Political 11 Pop AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 5

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An Introduction

Peio Aguirre The “Political Pop” section of my blog emerged The alternating vocals of Tennant and Oakey by chance.1 My first blurb about the Pet Shop are brilliantly accompanied by an authoritative Boys led to another and yet another, until I robotic backup voice. The chorus is perfect, and finally realized that writing about the music so is the song. Is Pet Shop Boys a militant band? I like was a real possibility. Music is unique in Undoubtedly. Pop music’s policy of evasion, the field of cultural production given its status pleasure and enjoyment has never been at odds as information, which has allowed it to become with social responsibility. Unlike other disco the object of financial speculation and bands, PSB has always known that its ultimately the paradigmatic expression of mass engagement is not so much rooted in its culture. However, the very definition of mass proclamations, but that its radicalism stems culture has changed dramatically and now from the band’s loyalty to electro-pop, a genre bears little resemblance to the description of capable of combining the most personal desires the culture industry outlined by Theodor W. with the most pressing problems. This critique Adorno and Max Horkheimer. What then might of the projections of a half-planned, half- have been defined as a homogenization of speculative future does not hide what should be consumption, due to an increasing amount of one of the missions of utopian thought: not to leisure time, now has its own specialized critics, imagine a perfect, idyllic future, the product of and of course we mustn’t overlook the multiple a recreational positivistic effort, but to think of ramifications of individual emancipation that the possibilities by exploring its dialectical (or mass culture has generated for half a century. negative) side – in other words, through a kind Whatever the proper definition of political pop of implosion of thought at its very root. Thus, might be, the real issue here is the need for a the engagement with utopia is as ordinary as an politics of pop – a directorate for the changing exercise routine: “But that future was exciting / forms of popular culture. At the heart of those Science fiction made fact / Now all we have to globalizing market forms, there has always look forward to / Is a sort of suicide pact / Was it been a transformative critical potential. The the dear old future / That created the problems ambivalence of pop music, like any other we face? / How do we deal with the fallout / Of market product, stems from the fact that its the age we used to call space?”2 fetishism simultaneously reinforces and We can also trace a historical arc through threatens the system. And if there is one this bonus track. It comes as no surprise that musical form that stands out as a shining there is a nexus between brutality, government example of peaceful coexistence with and housing policies and socialist labour politics in within the system, it is pop music. the English-speaking world, where poor urban Pet Shop Boys is a case of self- practices, the vicissitudes of class and consciousness that oscillates between mass subcultures are rewritten in a type of sociology culture and authorial singularity. But for now where boredom is merely the lull that precedes let us examine the social message they the forward thrust of change (as in PSB’s “Being enunciate. Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe launch Boring”). As if that weren’t enough, the conflict- a frontal assault on Yes with the bonus track free future envisioned by neo-liberal consensus “This Used to Be the Future”, where the duo in the early 1990s, when socialism collapsed, criticizes the social and urban utopias that has proven to be profoundly ideological. But were apparently constructed at some the ambiguity of the song “This Used to Be the unspecified point in the past. The track features Future” lies in the fact that you can dance to it the voice of Philip Oakey from The Human at a club, listen to it through your headphones League, a powerful beat that gives it an while practicing psychogeography, or analyze it addictive quality, and lyrics with a message. as a cultural critique; this multiplicity is an AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 6

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intrinsic quality of pop music. In the following determines the former (as any Marxist manual paragraphs I will outline some of the will tell us). But according to Attali, this characteristics of this music from the relationship can now be dialectically inverted, perspective of economics, ideology, style and suggesting the possibility that a superstructure form in order to highlight some of its inherent may actually anticipate historical developments policies. 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 Once they have been made aware period is several decades ahead of that society’s social forms. This would explain why the of the danger they pose to the political economy of music is premonitory. status quo, musicians should know Musicians are therefore heralds, messengers of that it is not the contents of their a future yet to come. And Attali says, “Its styles and economic organization are ahead of the songs that threaten to topple the rest of society because it explores, much faster established order but rather the than material reality can, the entire range of manner of distribution. 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 Pop Economies things, but the transcending of the everyday, Jacques Attali, an economist and former adviser the herald of the future. For this reason to the Mitterrand administration, is credited musicians, even when officially recognized, are with developing a political and economic theory dangerous, disturbing and subversive; for this of music. His work Noise: The Political Economy reason it is impossible to separate their history of Music is a theoretical reference of the first from that of repression and surveillance.”4 order whose primary claim to fame is that it Music is therefore inextricably linked to the proposes a new theory of noise (bruit). appearance of what Althusser called “the According to this theory, the utopian nature of ideological state apparatus”– in other words, music acts as a sensor that detects future forms ideology. Attali offers us a fertile new terrain to of society which have yet to emerge. In other explore the subversive possibilities of music words, the music of one era heralds the which, as intangible data that can be broken economic system of the next.3 This notion down into informational units, poses a threat undoubtedly complicates the already tangled to the dominant social and economic powers- web of links between the economic base (a that-be, for the issue at stake is an industry that society’s productive mode) and the moves billions of dollars each year. superstructure – in other words, the sphere We have only to consider the novelties that where cultural and ideological products are have emerged in the area of music consummated. It has traditionally been believed distribution – radio, piped music, the transition that the music of an era reflects the dynamics of from vinyl to digital, Napster and Spotify – to its contemporary social system, acting like a realize that the fight against illegal Internet mirror that reproduces or replicates those downloads is actually a desperate struggle for dynamics. According to this logic, the the system’s survival, a war waged in the name superstructure “expresses” the base; the latter of capitalism. Once they have been made aware AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 7

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of the danger they pose to the status quo, It is no coincidence that pop music musicians should know that it is not the contents of their songs that threaten to topple is the genre that best lends itself to the established order but rather the manner of an analysis of its own economic distribution. Bands like Radiohead with legions structure, with its “Top Ten” of loyal fans have taken action in this arena, although the alternative bands who upload formulas and other inventions that their songs on MySpace proclaim a different capitalism is capable of fuelling. but more contemporary anarchy than the calls Pop music is a form that has the for social chaos issued by the “children of McLaren”. For example, one would be hard- ability to criticize the ideology of the pressed to find a more explicit example of how hegemonic establishment while this ideology works than the inquisitorial also rediscovering tender shoots of persecution, conducted in the name of the musicians and artists themselves, of utopia in popular culture. hairdressers and shopkeepers who dare to play music in their places of business. Although the most outspoken criticism – not without a it predicts a sweet future of pleasant melodies certain whiff of appropriative ambition – of and is associated with the steady flow of a Attali’s theories has been voiced by post- certain everyday monotony. More than any Schoenberg advocates (the term noise other commercial music genre, it represents practically invites it), the truly important thing and meshes perfectly with the market; in fact, it is their extrapolation to whatever musical actually symbolizes the very idea of the market. regime one wishes to address. Pop is by definition commercial music, but it But music’s capacity to predict the future can be highly specific and tremendously can now be traced by travelling to the past: we sophisticated. So we must ask ourselves this: can listen to the Beatles and compare their How can pop music, as a market product, serve music with our present, something that would a utopian purpose? be impossible without some kind of mediation We should take a closer look at the idea that system capable of reconnecting the all musicians pose a potential threat to the intangibility of music with the material system, something that, in the realm of pop, substratum of our constructed environment. rarely takes the shape of a Messiah with the In its own modest way, this essay aims to talent of Paddy McAloon, the heart and soul of provide some of that mediation. It is no the British band Prefab Sprout. After making it coincidence that pop music is the genre that big in the 1980s with songs like “Cars and Girls” best lends itself to an analysis of its own or “The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll” – tracks that economic structure, with its “Top Ten” pertain to the realm of pop imagery in their formulas and other inventions that capitalism own right – Prefab Sprout released an LP in is capable of fuelling. Pop music is a form that 1989 under the eloquent title Protest Songs, a has the ability to criticize the ideology of the reaffirmation of their social engagement. For hegemonic establishment while also McAloon, the redeeming power of pop is akin to rediscovering tender shoots of utopia in that of religion, and its secular good news popular culture. The status of pop as the promises a communion between the tattered uncontested king of commercial music may subjectivity of the individual and the world point out some of the contradictions in that around him. However, Protest Songs (a slogan or same mass culture. Pop music does not shriek; statement) was a deliberate oxymoron of the AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 8

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We need new categories to define music journalists speculate about the vast amount of loot that Paddy might have in his our period within the larger context treasure chest, we must wonder about the kind of post-modernity. of futurity it holds. The Sprouts defy the stereotypes of the genre, such as the perennial politically engagé pop genre, finding its way to the top of the protest song of the troubadour/singer- charts without losing its political facet. Protest songwriter – something that immediately brings Songs is as much a pop album as it is a critical to mind Adorno’s defence of the autonomy of and rather ironic commentary on the art (or against the risk of a banal politicization of traditional protest song. But at this point no culture). But perhaps we should examine that one would dare to question Paddy, with his other defining trait of pop, its contradictory blind faith in pop music as a vehicle for nature as something that is both timeless and broadcasting profound messages – Paddy the time-specific. Indie (or the new underground) saviour, who once claimed that he was a better music gives us the best examples of a composer than John Lennon. That sophistipop postmodern culture that has made eternal re- which floated so smoothly on the airwaves has visitation its particular stronghold. This new become a legend of itself and, far from clinging underground infects pop and electronic music to the pinnacle of success, it has evolved into a in equal measure and can no longer be kind of music for fans, nostalgia junkies and understood from the logic of commercial music, other fans of the alternative. Not long ago, after nor from the secrecy of an exclusive community battling several serious health problems and that worships a new secrecy. Now that highbrow undergoing a secret confinement, we were culture has been abolished, and so-called mass reintroduced to an almost unrecognizable, culture is increasingly more sophisticated, we hermit-like Paddy, sporting a look which has find ourselves at a juncture that we could aptly also had its epigonic influence (and there is the describe as the perpetual present (or Dan fake documentary on Joaquin Phoenix, I’m Still Graham’s Present Continuous Past). What do we Here, to prove it). After driving the music find in this present? Historicism, reference, journalists mad – quite literally – in 2009, Prefab citations, tributes and revivals galore. The Sprout released Let’s Change the World with majority of consumer products intended for a Music, much to the delight of their fans. This wide audience is growing more sophisticated by new statement of intent contained “Let There Be the day; they are neither highbrow nor lowbrow. Music”, an ode to the creative energy of music And indie culture, far from catering to a with more than a few transcendental if not minority, is easily accessible. openly religious reminiscences. But the most We need new categories to define our period interesting thing is that the tracks on Let’s within the larger context of post-modernity. Change the World with Music were not new; they The inexhaustible and enduring nature of had all been composed in 1992 and immediately pop music has made it a pervasive element of rejected by Sony. After almost two decades our culture (and has led some to invent theories collecting dust in a trunk, the songs sound both that define our entire cultural system as the contemporary and timeless. One wonders if the “after-pop” coined by Eloy Fernández Porta).5 numerous allusions to God, for example in “God Now we must determine whether the 1980s can Watch over You”, might have made the be viewed as a kind of golden age or if it should producers leery. But one thing is clear: with his be considered the decade of pop modernism. new anti-pop star appearance, McAloon now What I am suggesting is the possibility that this looks more dangerous than ever, and while modernism might be on a par with the early AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 9

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20th-century renewal that swept through the ... but what is pop if not this? arts; we might think of it as a musical arsenal that could extend decades into the future, just as Repetition comes with its own built- “classical” modernism was followed by late in antidote, for the easy-listening modernism and ultimately led to the quality of the perfect pop song is postmodernism whose fundamental traits define our current global system. Post-punk, occasionally sabotaged from within New Wave, disco and other trends took root in – for example, when bands seek to an era that is still sending out shock waves today. reward fans according to the effort Although electronic music, trip-hop, drum ‘n’ bass, house and other celebratory liquid they put into the listening experience fantasies flourished in the 1990s, their rapid by composing songs that at first extinction in the following decades reminds us might sound strange or seem to that the agglutinating power of pop is limitless; and this without having to resort to the deviate from the pattern but, when regressions and repetitions which are at the played repeatedly, tend to grow on heart of the very definition of popular music or the listener. music for the masses. The legacy of the 1980s is the best example of that contradiction, an unmistakable periodizing capacity and a song intoned by Francis Fukuyama which played seemingly incompatible timelessness rolled such an important role in establishing neo- into one. conservative ideology. The perpetual present is There are two useful phenomena in this so closely associated with this “end of history” definition. The first has to do with form, and by and with the temporal continuity of pop that this I mean the perfect song. The quest for “the what has now become imperative is a sacrilege – perfect pop song” (to which the Sprouts namely, using pop as an anti-aphrodisiac for its contributed) was the primary concern of every own internal instincts. This would be the aspiring pop band. The ingredients of the perfect equivalent of glimpsing utopian impulses in the pop song are common knowledge: schmaltzy mass media and mainstream culture, something tempo, catchy sound, regular sequence, between quite unacceptable for Adorno, who held firmly three and four minutes long… The song as a to the idea that mass-marketed art could never closed monad, a time-space capsule and a be truly revolutionary. In the realm of pop, the repeating loop whose distribution relies on that dividing line between challenging the very repetition. In this respect, the “Top of the establishment and the more comfortable option Top” is one of the greatest discoveries of of going with the flow is so thin as to be almost consumer capitalism – the place, the precise imperceptible. The theory of the 20-Year Cycle frequency where the perfect pop song can be deals with the temporal categories of past, heard. The second phenomenon has to do with present and future, putting them together in the experience of temporality and the every possible combination like a barman trying emergence of trends. This is the theory of the 20- to come up with a new summer cocktail (past of Year Cycle, the idea that two decades must pass the present, future of the past, etc.). This same before the past can make a comeback as a recourse to the past-present-future sandwich is nostalgia-trend. The appeal of regression typical of pop, but we must remember that these associated with mass culture has managed the semantic games do not suggest a utopian experience of temporality since at least the post- philosophy per se. On this topic, the latest album war period and up to the “end of history” swan released by the Spanish band Astrud, Lo Nuevo, AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 10

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includes a track entitled “Lo popular” (The Pop Ideologies Popular) which says, “because the old is the new Of all the isms, miserablism is one of the richest / and the sophisticated, popular”. With titles like in nuance. Postmodernism, post-colonialism, these and other slogans, Astrud creates theory Marxism and now miserablism as well. from practice, consolidating the 20-Year Cycle as Obviously this word is not found in any one of the most universal and enduring laws. dictionary, so what does it mean? The patent Some may think this formulization = might be awarded once again to the Pet Shop formalism of the perfect song rather hackneyed, Boys, whose double album Alternative (1995), a repetition of repetition of repetition, but what which contains all their B-side tracks released is pop if not this? Repetition comes with its own up to that point, featured a song called built-in antidote, for the easy-listening quality “Miserablism”. The target was Morrissey, former of the perfect pop song is occasionally lead singer of The Smiths, a band who sabotaged from within – for example, when experienced their artistic heyday in the early bands seek to reward fans according to the effort 1990s. The track is a satire on what it means to they put into the listening experience by be a serious musician and how one must composing songs that at first might sound cultivate a certain pious look in order to project strange or seem to deviate from the pattern but, that appearance of seriousness. PSB ironically when played repeatedly, tend to grow on the comments on the posturing of those who listener. Many tracks and even entire albums embrace self-conscious pessimism as a way of were purposely designed this way, to act as life. We might call it the exploitation of one’s genuine boomerangs (think, for example, of own misery, something quite common in music. “Paranoid Android” and OK Computer by It is, however, possible to delve into Radiohead). The listener must “understand” the miserablism and come up with other origins. music before s/he can savour it, in a reversal of What the French called misérabilisme in the late the conventional easy-listening experience. 19th century was a term associated with Rewarding diligent listeners is the secret naturalism in literature. Naturalism followed the weapon of ideology in music. evolution of Realism (or the realist novel), and There is no need to bring up Adorno again while the latter was based on the reflection of a and his essay on the fetish-character in music certain class consciousness, that of the and the regression of listening – in other words, bourgeoisie, Naturalism revelled in the murky the idea that the repetition and manner of depths of the most disadvantaged social classes, consuming “light music” (jazz for him, pop for the misery and poverty of the underworld, and us) induces a state that causes the listener to found its milieu among the lumpenproletariat revert to a childlike way of listening.6 There is with its stereotyped characters (the an infinite recycling which takes place where neighbourhood criminal, the prostitute, and so the superimposed layers sound like so many on). This literature, this miserablism things at once that isolating each one would be (exemplified in Zola), denounced the social a daunting archaeological undertaking. Nor order by criticizing a capitalist production must we forget that pop’s natural ability to system which viewed the proletariat as a force produce icons goes hand in hand with their that threatened its very existence and subsequent demystification: indie bands reminding society of the potential generate their own pop culture, consume it, consequences of an uprising by that same recycle it and serve it as a reheated by-product proletariat. For the average reader of naturalist that reminds us of everything which feeds and literature, a middle-class citizen settled fuels their art. This kind of pop would not exist comfortably in his armchair, miserablism was a without its fetishes. warning of the horrible things that could AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 11

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happen if the established order was ever Just as Georg Lukács saw the great altered. We should not bend over backwards trying to draw parallels between the 19th-century realist novel as the miserablism of the Pet Shop Boys and its paradigmatic form which described naturalist counterpart; rather we should recall the bourgeoisie’s transition to a the long tradition of miserablism, not in music and literature, but in the field of contemporary new class consciousness, so pop art, where it seems to find its most fertile soil. can be used by us, the archaeologists But all this miserablism has an aesthetic of the future, as a form that models background which we should now examine, for its postmodern version could only find shelter the realist capitalism in which we in cyber-punk and its dreams of an are immersed. overpopulated metropolis à la Blade Runner where nocturnal rains, omnipresent mists and 1940s G-men trench coats take on new layers of However, the central theme of “It Is Love” is meaning. This aesthetic brings us to one of the not the idealization of love but power: “The men themes that has been largely ignored by pop who own the city make more sense than we do.” music and yet was one of the most persistent The music video sums up the elements of a motifs of the early 1980s: power. A good postmodern miserablist aesthetic; sunglasses, example which illustrates this Foucauldian U- nocturnal setting, complicit glances and an turn taken by pop is the post-punk band Gang architecture of personal relationships steeped in of Four. In 1983 they released Hard, a title which commerce and transactions involving goods, functions as a negation. Gang of Four is the bodies and identities typical of a new neo-liberal quintessential intellectual band, revered for awareness that begins to manifest itself in this having combined a rock sound marked by Andy look. “It Is Love” is the quintessence of the Gill’s staccato with lyrics that are obviously postmodern aesthetic, with its background influenced by the Frankfurt School. With Hard, vocals peppered with shouts, a black woman the band took a turn towards pop, towards a with an iconic hairdo singing “It’s all right!”, softer sound (hence the negation in the form of dancers dressed like hotel pages concluding the contradiction). The “hard vs. soft” dialectic is a music video... The salient feature of this constant in punk and post-punk; embracing the aesthetic is a geopolitical consciousness, a contradiction of Joy Division and New Order, or spatialization of interpersonal relationships and Gang of Four’s Entertainment! and Hard, is a of the dialectics between the essence and trial by fire for fans, but that tension can also be appearance of materialism which is also found seen as one of the cornerstones off which every in other songs on the album, such as “Woman rock and pop music theory rebounds. However, Town” and “A Man with a Good Car”. Hard is relevant for other reasons. The opening Gang of Four, who had given up writing track, “It Is Love”, is a programmatic song about songs about love, oscillate between a critique of one of the issues that the band had production relationships and another kind of deconstructed years before in the song criticism where (Foucauldian) power shifts from “Anthrax”– namely, love, or love as raw material micro to macro and back again. A change of style for the upbeat songs played on mainstream always entails an alteration of the message. This music radio: “I don’t think we’re saying there’s tension between the polished pop-funk style anything wrong with love / We just don’t think and the subtle radicalism of the social and that what goes on between two people should political messages embedded in the lyrics is also be shrouded in mystery.”7 found in other post-punk bands like Scritti AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 12

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Politti, who sang, “I’m in love with a Jacques aesthetic has changed; narrative and invention Derrida”. Over the decades, pop contaminates are absent, and the display of technical skill and all musical styles, and the replacement of former virtuosity, though still important, is not drummer Hugo Burnham with a drum machine proportional to the creativity employed in the on Hard can be viewed as a technical and halcyon days. Yet the music video now presents ideological substitution. Both the left-wing a golden opportunity for alternative pop artists politicization of Gang of Four and Scritti Politti (such as Dorian or Sambassadeur), who see this and their transition from rock to pop can be medium as a way of creating a low-budget understood as symptoms of the coronation of a audiovisual production whose YouTubeization single form as the most appropriate for will reap not insignificant benefits on the expressing a period or era. Just as Georg Lukács international scene. saw the great 19th-century realist novel as the paradigmatic form which described the bourgeoisie’s transition to a new class Pop Styles consciousness, so pop can be used by us, the An album cover is an object that can convey archaeologists of the future, as a form that complex semiotic ideas. The cover of Get Ready models the realist capitalism in which we are by New Order is a work of apparent simplicity. immersed. The photographs were taken in Thamesmead, Most people are unaware of the ways in an area that was the object of speculation and which a critique of the dominant system can development plans in the 1960s and 70s and the materialize. On this point, my theory is that an backdrop for several scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s approach which sketches or defines a map of A Clockwork Orange. The cover photo (taken by capitalism as a whole – an approach that Jürgen Teller) shows a new Eve wearing a worn “expresses” or depicts that undepictable pair of denims stained with paint (similar to condition of capitalism – is in itself a form of Helmut Lang’s jeans from the late 1990s) and a criticism, and more potent than most. Musically dark, shabby T-shirt with small tears about the speaking, Gang of Four’s “It Is Love” meets the neck – casual street wear with a hint of grunge. requirements of a post-Marxist, postmodern The girl has access to technology. She looks at cultural critique. Indeed, Fredric Jameson has the camera while simultaneously recording with already pointed out that video, architecture and her handycam. The red strip on the bottom dance are the most privileged arts within the looks like it might read “REC”. This is a New spatialization of postmodern culture, and all of Order cover, and the covers of both this band these art forms are concentrated in the music and Joy Division are virtual temples to applied video.8 graphic design. Peter Saville borrowed ideas The music video undoubtedly combined from art (Russian Constructivism and Bauhaus) pop and postmodernism in a single form. The and other principles based on formal economics nostalgia mode and pastiche were two other to create his style. The Savillian red tape is like a items to add to Jameson’s list of tics that would minimal label linking the present and past of ultimately define the dominant traits of culture. NO & JD. A cut-out from Saville’s formal However, music videos entered a downward imagery and a symbol of what the definition of spiral in the 1990s and today, when YouTube has style can represent in fashion, design and music. effectively monopolized the extensive And what of fashion? What connections can we audiovisual archives of the past century, the make between style and pop? music video is a struggling art form. It is no A time of sensuality and warmth in apparel. coincidence that the most mainstream artists Mid-1980s. Outskirts of Milan. The second (Lady Gaga) still produce music videos, but the Italian revolution in the fashion world. As AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 13

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simple as combining a baggy linen jacket with a arrived at a time when Italy was recovering pair of jeans or baggy trousers cinched at the from the “Years of Lead”, a period marked by ankle. Collarless shirts, jersey-knit polo shirts terrorism and political and social turmoil. and naked torsos everywhere. A sign of The politicization of Italian society gave way in masculinity and of belonging to the oppressed the newborn decade to a growing indifference class. Slouched shoulders and hands in pockets. to politics and a shift towards consumerism A neo-Romantic touch. Casual elegance. A bit of that embraced the incipient signs of the prêt-à-porter and a lot of Armani. It is also a financial deregulation launched by Reagan time when street brawls and left-wing and Thatcher’s economic policies, which intellectualism shift towards a new style of dress. would later evolve into neo-liberalism. Without The feminization of men, the absence of the knowing it, the paninari were the heralds of power symbols represented by the traditional neo-liberalism, with their Timberland boots three-piece suit. The masculinization of women, and loafers, rolled-up jeans, checked shirts flat shoes, graceful double-breasted jackets, and puffy anoraks with no shortage of belts – wide trousers and a degree of androgyny. And preferably Moschino. The paninari found what cardigans and coats lined in Afghan sheepskin. they were looking for in Duran Duran, Depeche All of these elements were part of a new “Made Mode or PSB by completely eradicating every in Italy” focused on redefining genders through difference between, for example, these three fashion and style and on a genealogical bands and embracing their stereotype as divestment of avant-garde strategies. In this epicentres of 1980s pop music. The paninari context, outside the British hegemony of the subculture offers us a recycled version of what identification of styles associated with youth was formerly described as the capacity of mass subcultures, new cults and identities emerged culture to explain capitalism as a form. from attitudes in fashion. Style had to be surreptitious. Elegance, dandyism and the game of sexual ambiguity marked the point of no Pop Forms return. Pop culture exerted an influence on If Adorno had lived long enough to witness the fashion and style, and these in turn influenced birth of the punk phenomenon with his own music. In 1986, the Pet Shop Boys’ “Paninaro” eyes, he would not have held his tongue or picked up this scent, processed it and fed it back minced his words. He might have found in a freshly stylized version. Today “Paninaro” something positive to say about post-punk and has become a reminder of an ephemeral youth New Wave music, and we can imagine that he subculture. PSB captured the spirit behind the may have identified Vini Reilly as the principal styles of dress that characterized this era. The champion of these movements. The fetish- first appearance of Armani suits as uniforms on character of consumer music stems from its the Italian coast prove that style is a value which status as a product, and Adorno advocated unites different teen sub-groups. Style of dress regressive listening as the solution to that is a subversive weapon for undermining the fetishism. Reilly certainly deserves a place in this established orders and hierarchies. The anti-fetishism. The Durutti Column emerged in “paninaro” movement can be traced back to 1978 as a pioneering band managed by Tony Milan in the early 1980s. It was originally called Wilson (Factory Records), at the same time as paninari, for according to legend its birthplace Joy Division. However, it is difficult to classify was the Al Panino sandwich shop, where a The Durutti Column as a rock band. In fact, from group of young people began to feast on the outset Reilly deliberately dissociated himself hamburgers and imitate certain traits of the from everything that rock ‘n’ roll stood for, and American consumer culture. This hedonism instead chose to embrace everything that the AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 14

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New Wave represented. In the post-punk adaptation of the futuristic Fortunato Depero, or integration of jazz, folk, classical and avant- Power, Corruption and Lies, with Fantin-Latour’s garde music, there was also a place for rock. floral painting). This referential quality reveals Reilly’s guitar sound situated him in a no-man’s the historicity of the period’s pop and post-punk land where he still remains today. Vini Reilly is bands, who in their devotion to the pinnacles of not a familiar name to the general public, aesthetic modernism never cease to reproduce despite the fact that he is one of the world’s best and reinforce the meaning of postmodernism. composers and guitarists. He couldn’t care less Post-punk, as well as cyberpunk literature and that Morrissey left him out of the credits on Viva nostalgia films, fits in perfectly with Jameson’s Hate, the latter’s first solo album for which Reilly cultural diagnosis of post-modernity. did more than a few arrangements. As early as The Durutti Column’s historicist ties are not 1981, during an interview in Belgium, Reilly found in its direct reference to the Spanish spoke about Stockhausen and about music anarchist Buenaventura Durruti, who organized made for the mind. Eschewing all the usual rock the legendary “Durruti Column” to combat the paraphernalia, Reilly still practizes the old Fascist uprising during the Spanish Civil War, but formula of proving what he can do before an rather in the Situationist comic Le retour de la audience with a guitar and an amplifier. Colonne Durutti, a four-page publication created Perhaps this would be a good place to insert by André Bertrand in 1966 at the University of a meta-commentary on the reason for Adorno’s Strasbourg. When the band released its debut possible affiliation with post-punk. I think he album in 1980, they borrowed the title of would find it interesting because of this style’s Bertrand’s comic: The Return of the Durutti deconstructive yet perfectly audible nature: Column. When they were just starting out, they fragments of jazz, krautrock, electronic and had already come back. This trait is very post- classical music combined with rock in a style punk, by which I mean the über-awareness of the that embraces the modern avant-garde practice historicity of musical movements and the of breaking with all that has gone before (the manipulation of clichés associated with trends as 1980s as modernity once again). Listening to a basis for the subsequent deconstructive The Durutti Column is like plunging into a operation. Having said this, now we might even process of formal self-questioning and emerging examine post-punk’s instinctual tendency to unscathed with your own style; it is more adapt names taken from the revolutionary left reminiscent of the live performance ritual of an wing, and to deliberately or unknowingly alter orchestra or soloist playing classical music than their spelling in the process. For example, the it is of the exacerbated communion between a name “Durruti” ended up gaining a “t” and band and a typical punk/rock concert audience. losing an “r” in The Durutti Column, and Scritti Knowing what Adorno would have thought is Politti was a deliberate adaptation of the “Scritti only possible in the realm of science fiction, but Politici” (political writings) of Italian Marxist the important thing for us now is to observe the Antonio Gramsci, which was changed to make referential dynamics of shifting ideologies. the name sound more pop if not openly rock ‘n’ Post-punk, with its focus on the past that has roll (in the “tutti frutti” tradition). little to do with the “no future” of punk, is an I imagine that these appropriative licences intrinsically periodizing category: late 1970s, are exempted from inscription in the companies early 1980s, perhaps between 1978 and 1985? register under the name of pop. But in order to Once again, Saville’s design seems to hold the understand the true affiliations derived from key to the interpretation of style; old emblems post-punk and Situationism, we must look at and labels combined with cold, elegant serif another fundamental band that stands out typefaces (see New Order, Movement, an obvious conceptually as a dialectical exercise which AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 15

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combines theory and practice in a caustic, ... This referential quality reveals totalizing way: Stereolab. They undoubtedly the historicity of the period’s pop represent a stage of production where history is given a solid form. Although Tim Gane and and post-punk bands, who in their Laetitia Sadier gracefully deflect the journalists’ devotion to the pinnacles of questions about their influences, the answer is patent in their music: Situationism, Marxism, aesthetic modernism never cease communism, etc. Stereolab does not represent to reproduce and reinforce the the political; they are political, by which I mean meaning of postmodernism. Post- that their music is a form of politics. Their sound drinks from the bottomless well of history. The punk, as well as cyberpunk band’s referentiality is not citational, nor is it a literature and nostalgia films, fits in commentary on the infinite musical styles at the perfectly with Jameson’s cultural disposal of eclecticism (in a similar way to the films of Jean-Luc Godard, who is not citational diagnosis of post-modernity. 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 1. Criticism and Meta-Commentary: http://peioaguirre.blogspot.com collaborations, parallel and unfinished projects – in short, a unique production style. Godard once 2. Pet Shop Boys. “This Used to Be the Future”. Yes, Pet said that around 1965 there were 100,000 people Shop Boys etc., Parlophone. in Paris who could view his films. After 1968, his 3. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music. entire global audience did not amount to that Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. figure. And what can we say of Stereolab? In the 4. Ibid., p. 11. 1990s this band could have gone in a more 5. Eloy Fernández Porta, Afterpop. La literatura de la commercial direction, but instead they chose to implosión mediática. Córdoba: Berenice, 2007; Barcelona: stick to their characteristic mode of production. Anagrama, 2010. Meanwhile, their lyrics speak of the class struggle 6. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and of emancipation. But this is the content, not and the Regression of Listening”, in Andrew Arato and the form. When Laetitia formed Monade in 1996, Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School their first album was entitled Socialisme ou Reader, Vol. 1. New York: Continuum International Barbarie. Statement of intent? And what of Tim Publishing Group, 1978. Gane, that alchemist of ideology? The lyrics of 7. Gang of Four. “Anthrax”. Entertainment!, EMI / Warner “Ping Pong” are explicit enough: “It’s alright ’cos Bros. the historical pattern has shown / how the 8. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic economical cycle tends to revolve / in a round of of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. decades three stages stand out in a loop / a 9. Stereolab. “Ping Pong”. Mars Audiac Quintet, slump and war then peel back to square one and Duophonic. 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? AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 16 Album 11 Covers, Sleeves, Labels, Boxes, AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 17

11 to 21 17 m Packages and Cases ... Pedro G. Romero 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 Covers: Strategies Against much as making this polemic productive. , Architecture “They’re the vestiges of a certain ‘Romantic’ sensibility”, Ivo Supicic2 and José Antonio In a recent debate a series of arguments came up Rodríguez Alcantud3 point out, “to which such that are relevant to the academic consideration approaches or explanations of some of the of music as an abstract language. For example aspects of music are repugnant. There is a the work of Situaciones was raised, the genuine fear that the artistic event, the musical Argentinean group that posed methodological event and its intrinsic value, might be devalued, , questions about militant research along similar a fear that the autonomy of creation of the lines to those that Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre musician might be restricted, and even that an Henry put on the table when it came to analysis of this kind might reduce music to institutionalizing concrete music. In both events or values of another kind. The opposition instances it was a question of collecting sounds to sociopolitical reductionism has a strong and afterwards understanding how they were Romantic component, a movement in the emitted, of organizing them, with equal hierarchy of values of which ‘spirituality’ attention being paid to semantic questions and occupies the highest place. And whosoever says grammatical, phonetic and syntactic ones. “A spirituality means inspiration and genius, in an voice which was saying nothing, but shaped the anomic relationship that escapes conventional discourse without being in the least bit social structures. The creator, due to his own rhetorical”, or “the sounds of a street market genius and his means of expression, would that hide the words we wish to hear in the remain outside of social structures.” foreground, underlining them”: with these The curious thing is that the Romantic tracks they made Mal de altura,1 the book and argument that provided the basis for the the video in which the Argentineans approached spiritual nature of musical sounds had also the creating of new ways of understanding contributed to the fact that in music there figure political constructs in Bolivia. Those of us who natural landscapes of the “view of snowy peaks keep to these opinions are described as nothing in a storm” type or “huge waves violently

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lashing the coast”. Music, which appeared to be singers or rock musicians say, in reference to embodied as a mere aesthetic arrangement of their declamations and lyrics, that they, of the natural phenomenon, did not seek to course, are not being political when they domesticate the world, to make it legible in the perform, that everything is owed to the public or same way science did, but to embody the very to art. This view usually depends on the level of violence of the natural order in an aesthetic audience and the status of the actual musician language. who speaks, firstly, to his faithful followers (the It is these “figurations” that lead many public) and, finally, directly with God (art). writers to situate the end of pure music with William Washabaugh4 can help us pinpoint Romanticism or with the appearance of figures the urgency of the political when speaking of like Wagner or Verdi. However much one might popular music: seek to take sound constructions from reality – “A great many musical moments spanning from the cannon in military music to tracks on the time from Richard Wagner to Bob Dylan magnetic tape – the process of musical remind us that music mediates politics and that concretion has, in parallel to technological popular music, in particular, has regularly been evolution, acted not so much as a “figural” or used to spin political wheels. However, debate “representative” element but rather as a persists about how, when, and toward what end devastating tool of what those sounds were any music style is tied in with a political agenda. trying to simulate, a veritable demolition of the The answers to these questions may come easily soundtrack of the real. where lyrics are obviously intended to incite For that very reason, only on the basis of the political movements, e.g. songs for labour rallies incorporation of “other” real sounds in the or national anthems. But after one sets aside sound spectrum of concrete music does this these easy cases, the arguments about the political possibility begin to appear for music. politics of popular music rapidly become dense The intention of the IRCAM laboratories was, and protracted. My support, in these arguments, rather, to do with demonstrating the abstract inclines toward those who contend that the essence of any reality, capable of being captured visible politics of popular music is minimally in sound form. No type of semantic analogy may effective, and that the real potency of the music be established so profoundly that the listener lies below the waterline, where power is managed could read the musical experience the way he through covert strategies and hidden tactics.” was executing it while listening. The workings of The repertoire of gestures that go to form this the concrete – the identification of sounds, understanding of music, the performative order geographical or material allusions, musical that transpierces our living space, from the quotes, etc. – were instead to serve as points of concert hall to music in the lift, from the polished support for destroying any figuration the listener tone of the guitar to the experience of the iPod, is might come up with. Concrete music is aniconic, the true political material with which music is however much it might open the door to sounds made. It is essential to understand the experience being written, not only inscribed, in the real. of the musical, be it in so-called serious music – The crucial phenomenon for this conversion how do we understand the continuity of the Luigi of music into something social is, of course, the Nono of Intolleranza 1960 and Hay que caminar industrialization of popular music. It is here that soñando, otherwise? – or in so-called popular the phenomenon is produced of the social music – if not how do we understand the masses that incorporate, with the help of great continuity in flamenco between the mythology of technological diversity, music in the business of persecution and the protest lyrics and the way life itself; here music becomes necessarily they fit into the most established notions of political. How many times have we heard pop Spanishness? – since only the labels, the data, the AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 19

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track listings and the visual signs change, A great many musical moments forming a single reference map. spanning the time from Richard In 1982 the German rock group Einstürzende Neubauten included the track Wagner to Bob Dylan remind us “Gestohlenes Band (ORF)” on its Strategies that music mediates politics and Against Architecture.5 This is a recording taken from Austrian television, incorporated in the that popular music, in particular, musical repertoire in a way similar to how has regularly been used to spin laboratories of concrete music operated. A voice political wheels. 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 In that anchoring the refrain forms a precise involved in politics. machine for making politics. Here, we might We are speaking of politics in the sense in reproduce a paragraph that is fundamental to which music constructs standards of life in our concerns; it comes from A Thousand the community, in the same way that, Plateaus,6 the book in which Deleuze and etymologically, politics makes us construct the Guattari – let’s grasp to the full the referents the city. In that same sense we are going to explore two philosophers apply to music and painting – the functioning of the artefacts that are album consider the refrain: covers, in relation to music, in relation to “Our problem is more modest: comparing the sound. Record shops, discotheques, music powers or coefficients of deterritorialization of magazines, concert posters, flyers, gadgets, sonorous and visual components. It seems that video clips, staging and so on – all these are when sound deterritorializes, it becomes more album covers, the doors that, like track listings, and more refined; it becomes specialized and shape what is going to be heard. How do the autonomous. Colour clings more, not necessarily lyrics begin to articulate the voice? How does to the object, but to territoriality. When it the image go on to regulate the sound? We are deterritorializes, it tend to dissolve, to let itself be seeing, looking at, the covers we have before us, steered by other components. This is evident in as yet without listening to the songs or sounds, phenomena of synaesthesia, which are not without turning the record player on, far from reducible to a single colour-sound the dangers of the music. correspondence; sounds have a piloting role and Gilles Deleuze warned about the “fascist” induce colours that are superposed upon the danger involved in all music experience, the colours we see, lending them a properly sonorous fascination that music produces in us, the rhythm and movement. Sound owes this power annulment of the critical sense to which sensual not to signifying or ‘communicational’ values experience subjects us. This appraisal goes (which would privilege light over sound), but to beyond the mass phenomenon of rock culture a phylogenetic line, a machinic phylum that or the new kinds of electronic music. It has to operates in sound and makes it a cutting edge of do with the dangers of making language with deterritorialization. But this does not happen time, keeping time. In collaboration with Félix without great ambiguity: sound invades us, Guattari he explored the figure of the refrain, or impels us, drags us, transpierces us. It takes leave ritournelle, “Deterritorialized sound, the refrain of the earth, as much in order to drop us into a is rhythm and melody territorialized”. The black hole as to open us up to a cosmos. It refrain embodies the music in our lives, our makes us want to die. Since its force of cities; it is what turns time into space. There is deterritorialization is the strongest, it also effects no community with refrain. the most massive of reterritorializations, the AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 20

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We like the covers of albums as much or recreate a phylum, and they must do so on the basis of bodies of light and colour they as the facile, catchy songs that we can themselves produce, whereas musicians have repeat and whistle in order to make a at their disposal a kind of germinal continuity, disappointment in love or the loss of even if it is latent or indirect, on the basis of which they produce sound bodies. Two a friend bearable. Of course, they different movements of creation: one goes from have an obviously didactic function soma to germen, and the other from germen to in relation to the sound of the record; soma. The painter’s refrain is like the flipside of the musician’s, a negative of music.” they transmit information, related We can find these same theoretical ideas, to us; they make the oppositions in other sets of ideas. For example, affirmation of a seemingly elusive they are in Derrida when he makes a difference between “gaze” and “voice”, situating the musical whole concrete. They appear former in objects and the latter in the subject. to us in a sort of institutional critique In that sense, “writing” appears as a condition of the fascinating power of music, of of the voice that culturally marks the gaze, inscribing it; namely, inscribing it in the sound. They territorialize music, framework of subjective vision. Similarly, the articulate it politically. 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 most numbing, the most redundant. Ecstasy dragging we ought to pay attention. and hypnosis. Colours do not move a people. Slavoj Žižek has clearly explained the Flags can do nothing without trumpets. Lasers differences between Lacan and Derrida with are modulated on sound. The refrain is regard to “gaze” and “voice”. All that is sonorous par excellence, but it can as easily “interiorized” in Derridean writing is develop its force into a sickly sweet ditty as into “exteriorized” in the Lacanian system. We can the purest motif, or Vinteuil’s little phrase. And simplify things by saying that the trajectories of sometimes the two combine: Beethoven used as the “subject” are a nucleus and orbit for the a ‘signature tune’. The potential fascism of atomic placement of the “voice” and the “gaze”. music. Overall, we may say that music is What we want to focus on is this dragging. plugged into a machinic phylum infinitely more When an electron bangs against the nucleus, a powerful than that of painting: a line of dragging and subsequent explosion is selective pressure. That is why the musician has produced. If in Lacan it is the object that gazes a different relation to the people, machines, and at us, its displacement necessarily has musical, the established powers than does the painter. In environmental consequences. The world we particular, the established powers feel a keen see also gazes at us and would overwhelm us need to control the distribution of black holes were it sustained by our own gaze and thus and lines of deterritorialization in this phylum subject to our bit of reality. As an example of of sounds, in order to ward off or appropriate this exterior, displaced gaze Žižek7 gives la voix the effects of musical machinism. Painters, at acousmatique, which functions as the least as commonly portrayed, may be much background music of two films: Brazil, by Terry more open socially, much more political, and Gilliam, and Lili Marleen, by Rainer Werner less controlled from without and within. That is Fassbinder. In both, the background song because each time they paint, they must create invades reality in an overwhelming, totalitarian AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 21

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way before becoming the unique element that Covers: Albert Ayler makes that same reality bearable. The same thing occurs in Fallen, a film in which a pop Beginning in the 1920s and 30s, the industry was song by the Rolling Stones possesses the crowd, called on to invent different ways of presenting at once one and multiple, in body and voice. discs made of shellac. They were entering the As in the famous continuity of the old Spanish regime of advertising, of course, but it was also a movie, María de la O, in which the whole matter of identifying different forms of life in the community, in the diversity of its leisure and records. Record labels, the circle of paper that professional pursuits, sings the same song. As centred the information on the record, marked in the refrain, we once again have a description this affiliation in graphic terms. Records of of music’s need to drag itself down to earth, to popular music immediately began to make these make itself real in our hands, far from the fears inscriptions more attractive, to differentiate of the cacophony the world produces. themselves from those other kinds of music Let us observe for a moment the Goya pertaining to the Western classical tradition, capricho that bears the inscription “The Sleep which seemed to get along self-referentially, of Reason Produces Monsters”. The given their exclusive musical status. Italian opera arrangement of the monsters in the visual and German lieder, above all the ones put out in nightmare is musical; they are the sounds of the United States, began doing things differently. reason to which the artist, who was going deaf, Band music, flamenco and jazz, in that order, gives an order. The same has been said of the also began to invent their own graphic labels. On musical representations of Bosch. Likewise, the generic covers for records of popular music psychedelic painting. put out by Columbia in the 1930s, they were Let us not detain ourselves further. What indiscriminately illustrated with images of interests us most about album covers, about flamenco and jazz. It was a question of selling, the illustrations which feature on their sleeves, obviously, and so the evolving record industry that accompany our listening to them, that call issued serious music without covers and popular for our hearing them, that is to say, the function music covered in little drawings. The difference 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.

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The object of the singular record communion. He never believed that there were differences between his jazz and the rock that appears by way of avant-garde artistes. excited the black community. He put the Listening is singularized. The cover difference down to the image, the advertising, the thus turns into information. fetishization of the record as an interchangeable cultural factor in the identity of different black societies. It was obvious that thanks to record was so definite that it persists today: for the company packaging the commercialization of former, generic company designs are employed, music led to ever more merchandise, taking its while the latter personalizes each release, each lead from the image on the album cover, so that design, to the point that in the release of any disc his intention was also to make his musical mark it’s the graphic support that costs the money. It’s on that terrain, which he considered a form of the image that makes the difference. continuity in terms of the political demands of Alex Steinweiss8 was perhaps a pioneer: not the Afro-American community. only did he make the cardboard objects that When one alludes to this commercialization would become album covers – he also of the pop, but not popular, music of the youth contributed to giving an identity to the contents music industry, or to the fetishization and and the outside of the disc. The collections of spectacularization of music, one might overlook popular music that were to be promoted a certain opposition between two terms that in a followed his guidelines and codified their marks sense compensate for and complement one of identity. A collection of discs functioned like another. We could say that the fetish is the stone the music; it weakened our relationship to reality of the real that we hold in our hands in order not by inviting us to take pleasure in the sound to let ourselves be dragged along by the alone. The object of the singular record appears spectacular alienation that musical fascination by way of avant-garde artistes. Listening is can exercise upon us, to the point of making singularized. The cover thus turns into reality unbearable. It is true that fetish and information, clues, data in terms of concrete spectacle are connected, that they form a experience. religious whole, a totality that would surely The Afro-American jazz musician Albert confirm, today, Walter Benjamin’s dictum that Ayler,9 falling within the free jazz tendency, was has capitalism as the new religion of the 20th worried at the end of the 1960s by the excessive century. intellectualization of black jazz and insisted on One of the renovations of that religious faith the covers of his records being like those of rock has encountered in the disc, in the world of the music. He observed how the political image that surrounds music, a way of identification of Afro-American music and perpetuating, paradoxically, so-called youth culture was passing from jazz to rock and roll, iconoclasm. In fact, on account of this the although he considered that his music dictionary has had to change the definition of functioned in the same way as Jimmy Hendrix’s iconoclasm, and not only is the aggression or Sly & The Family Stone’s. Little by little, he against an image given this name but also the moved his concerts in the direction of the obscene and provocative presence of an image. political effectiveness of the music, through In other words, due to both disappearance and being something that gives true meaning to a appearance, the image of the disc is iconoclastic, community. He changed the saxophone for the either in the formal clarity of the Wergo label, the electric guitar and ended up working with publisher of John Cage and György Ligeti, or in marginal Afro-American communities in which Andy Warhol’s advertising campaigns for the the music became a genuine object of Rolling Stones. The periodic renewal that AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 23

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One of the renovations of that Well, against this surge in buying and selling, as a consummate contradiction, there appears religious faith has encountered in the brake of the fetish-object, singled out, the disc, in the world of the image constructed so as to narcissistically repeat itself. that surrounds music, a way of Even the greatest market inflationists have recourse to its specificity in order to fight music perpetuating, paradoxically, so- piracy in the illegal market! The self-referential called youth iconoclasm. In fact, on condition of the fetish leads pathologically to an account of this the dictionary has anomaly in the ordered world of the commodity. Walter Benjamin differentiated between the had to change the definition of collector of fetishes and the collector of iconoclasm, and not only is the commodities. In the first, as if it were an aggression against an image given inclination of the personality, the collector’s drive was thrown into confusion, randomly this name but also the obscene and remodelling questions of value and price, provocative presence of an image. buying and selling. The sentimental education of the adolescent artist is realized today, and following Benjamin, in these two models of fashion and the market undertake of this character and fate. The second are given over to iconoclasm, the extraordinary mobility these an alienated consumption whose only solace is commodities have, their unquestionable in repeating the act of consumption itself. alienating power – none of this gets in the way of Aimed at them are the new MP3 downloading considering album covers as a true comfort in models, the iPod, productive repetition. The the face of the overwhelming fascism of music first, alienated in character, resist in the and its potent technology in the construction iconoclastic brand name, in the differentiation and organization of ways of life of all kinds. of products. The market has separated them The massive consumption of music products into spectators and artists. 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 Sleeves: Tamarán no other inducement to repetition in the consumption of music. It was unnecessary to In 1974 a Milan publisher launched Tamarán,10 introduce subliminal messages. The actual by Canary Islands musician Juan Hidalgo. This is sequence of the images of a collection implied a sort of minimal conceptual music that draws this monetary repetition. It’s like in Spain with inspiration from Cage, but on the sleeve there’s music in English: nobody understands the lyrics, the illustration of three bodybuilders in the but the “hit” is repeated just the same, the middle of exhibiting their biceps and triceps, musicians repeat the tune whatever the silhouetted against the outline of Gran Canaria storyline. It’s the same, too, with art images: island, the mythological Tamarán, pioneer of nobody understands what they mean, but the sexual tourism, the cult of the body and beach artists repeat gestures and styles so that things boys. A close listening to the trickle of harmonics “look familiar”. A consumer product with a the piece has recourse to over its forty minutes standard of consumption within, a bit like the forgoes poetry of any kind. Let us allow Juan caption “Coca-Cola gets you hooked”, but Hidalgo11 himself to comment on his work: theorized in the 1940s in the hypotheses of “Let’s talk now about Tamarán, Gotas de Adorno. esperma para 12 pianos de cola. [Tamarán, AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 24

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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 Juan Hidalgo, Tamarán, 1974 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 us read the subtitle in Italian: “Gocce di sperma and place, at an appropriate distance, the twelve per dodici pianoforti”. The humorous grand pianos. Located at the centre of it, the displacements are obvious: the pianoforte of the public will be surrounded by the pianos, which bodybuilders, the sperm of the white key, the will be set out in a circle like the numbers enjoyment of the harmonics. Could we have engraved on a clock face. If the space possesses arrived at this “pleasure” without the explicit the optimum acoustic conditions, it will not be references that appear on the cover? necessary to use any amplification. If not, the Dominique Fernandez12 proposes the death amplification of each piano with absolute of music with the disappearance of Bellini and independence of the others will be essential. If Rossini, just before the appearance of Wagner amplification is necessary, each of the sources of and Verdi, just before the irruption of the refrain sound will be positioned between the piano and the political. As Deleuze has pointed out,13 a which amplifies and the public. In this way one tragic disappearance is involved: has the rain of harmonics produced by the “Bellini will die in circumstances that remain twelve pianos bombard the listener, thus unclear, maybe from an illness unknown in his creating a sound pattern of maximum time, maybe from some more sombre story, and effectiveness.” Rossini is about suddenly stopping. That In actual fact, we have the description of an musician of genius who, at the height of his orgy before us: as in the final circus of a success, decides to stop: now he will devote pornographic film, all the partenaires come on himself to cooking. He’d always had two loves, the body of the main protagonist, situated music and cooking; he was a great cook, and he strategically at the centre of the circle. The drops went mad. Fernandez comes out with a of sperm, as the subtitle points out, refer to the statement of this type: music stops with Bellini harmonics that literally bathe the expectant and Rossini. I don’t mean to say he’s right public. As in the final scene in Behind the Green because I don’t think he is. That said, what is it Door, a classic of porn cinema by the Mitchell that makes such a statement possible? He can brothers, the rain of sperm is in slow motion. Let only mean to say one thing: something that AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 25

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pertains essentially to music will no longer exist without suffering) can be established at low after Rossini and Bellini, the two last musicians. cost? And if the eventuality of such an economy What, even indirectly, does the disappearance of is rejected, wouldn’t it be possible to put forward Rossini and Bellini entail? What is the new music the hypothesis that mutilation, that particular around 1830? It is the advent of Verdi and of mutilation, the physiological castration as Wagner. This means that Wagner and Verdi have enacted, was instead a symptom or symbol that made music impossible. Fernandez goes as far causes the wound, the genuine cause managing as to say they are fascists – it’s not the first time to recreate or announce itself in another this is said of Wagner. What is it that, being symptom, in another symbol, each time a essential to music, inseparable from music, they modality of artistic creation reappears?” have suppressed, according to Fernandez? (...) What these readings make clear transcends Fernandez states that, as he sees it, music has the biopolitical violence exercised in the realm always been riven by a content that was a very of art. The technologies that construct us have intimate part of it: the upsurge or the outstripping their model in musical violence and the of the difference of the sexes. And so, since in mutilations continue without the need for quiffs spite of not being an analyst he does not forget and makeup, tattoos or piercings. Mutilation is his analytic training, he says that music is connected with the economy of the fetish in always and essentially a restoration of the such a way that the object which points to that androgynous.” fetish category can only be considered a riven “Evviva il coltello, il benedetto coltello” – the one. The ability to politically territorialize that Neapolitans protested against the Napoleonic the fetish has is comparable to the one described laws that forbade the practice of the knife in by Deleuze and Guattari in the refrain: “The barbers’ shop, namely the castration of boys refrain emerges in the black hole, the child intended to produce sublime singers, the intones his tra-la-la in the dark because he’s castrati. This is the reason why Rossini, afraid”. composer of The Barber of Seville, abandons Dominique Fernandez ends up blaming the music. This is what he confessed to Wagner in end of music on capitalism: the division of their famous meeting in Paris. The labour, the predominant role of man in the disappearance of the castrati renders the economy, his role in the factory replacing his continuity of music, of bel canto, impossible. role in war, the Taylorist assembly line, and so Víctor Gómez Pin14 has posed some apposite on. And yet he praises The Beatles and David questions about these events: Bowie. While he cannot stand the English “What need is there to fill stages by recourse counter-tenor, he praises the ambiguous falsetto to mutilation, if today, the brutal extirpation of English pop singers. After the Second World being banished, it is possible to experience in War capitalism enters into another configuration: lyrical theatre the persistence of voices that the division of labour is dynamited by the provoke identical emotion? The economy of this demands of the feminists, the predominant role argument is that perfect beauty can exist of consumption again situates women at the without more than the ‘spiritual’ pole of the centre of the economy, the assembly line gives human condition being in play. But one might way to post-Fordist models. ask: what sustains such a benefit? If the shock is One of the collaborations between Andy salva veritate comparable, why does the matrix Warhol and The Rolling Stones, perhaps the have to be asymmetrical? Is it really possible to boldest, occurs in 1971 with Sticky Fingers, imagine that the work of art (a recreation of the which presents a zipper ready to zipped down in wound that, at the heart of animality, sets man the fly of a tight pair of jeans. Obviously, it wasn’t apart, namely the impossibility of making links a sticky finger that was hopefully to be removed AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 26

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from this crotch. In Spain and many other ways of seeing the world, since there is no countries the sleeve was censored. As a totality or project which sustains them. In 1977 substitute we were presented with a more or less the censors stopped the cover of Veneno’s record Warholian tin of food, half-open, from which from coming out. A block of hashish was there emerged some treacly mutilated fingers, presented in the middle of its tin-foil wrapping; what the aficionado used to know as “dicks in burnt into the block was the word Veneno vinegar”. The repressed always returns. (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 Veneno, Veneno, 1977 and Raimundo Amador, afterwards Pata Negra, and Kiko Veneno. They went into the studio full of Bob Dylan, psychedelia and flamenco, and Labels: Veneno ended up making a flamenco-style punk record – the punk of the subalterns was never Music’s capacity for figuration has to do with wholly electric – in concert with the spirit of the appearances. The relationship of an album cover age. I have to say that my first live concert in to its content is a guide, an invocation of what 1979, in the Aracena bullring, was of the as yet ought to appear. The graphic design that unnamed Pata Negra, and that their version of dominates in popular music has to do with these “La muchachita”, the second track on the indications, the why and the wherefore of all record, was memorable. Those two gypsies with imagination. In that sense the fragmentary, the flamenco guitars invoked the stroll of the miniature, micro-historical quality of the sleeve “teenage girl with cheeks as fresh as cookies” prevents us from constructing an idea of totality, with the filthy intensity and adolescent an absolute world, with it. Here are the impudence of a girl from Ipanema. While they programmatic groups, fan clubs, urban tribes, were performing the song, they made continual creators of style, lines in tailoring, the aesthetic pleas to the audience, calling for the “teenage – in short, everything collides with the disc. girl” to appear, and that, singing the song in Misunderstandings are the creators of album unison, we’d get to see her physically. They covers and they construct duly anti-totalitarian couldn’t accuse us of being paedophiles because AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 27

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we were equally as young. The sexual turmoil ideal. Even the action in itself delivers us from and the intensity of the music clearly marked the these things. From Merimée it has this logic even beginning of an emotional education. Afterwards, in passion, from him it has the direct line, I got the record, that cover, and the song, “La ‘inexorable’ necessity, but what it has above all muchachita”, followed by the impossible subtitle else is that which belongs to sub-tropical zones – “Canción nacionalista zamorana”, which led me that dryness of atmosphere, that limpidezza of to the seminal book by Agustín García Calvo that the air. Here in every respect the climate is inspired the instrumental and had the stroll of altered. Here another kind of sensuality, another the fresh teenager come to an end on the kind of sensitiveness and another kind of cobblestones of the May ’68 revolt in Paris. cheerfulness make their appeal. This music is gay, Another misunderstanding, of course, and but not in a French or German way. Its gaiety is although the track brought the two themes African; fate hangs over it, its happiness is short, together, they had nothing to do with each other, sudden, without reprieve. I envy Bizet for having at least up until that time; afterwards they did, had the courage of this sensitiveness, which the record had a life of its own. hitherto in the cultured music of Europe has That imprint was a biographical milestone found no means of expression – of this southern, comparable, probably, to Nietzsche’s tawny, sunburnt sensitiveness… What a joy the impressions upon hearing Bizet’s Carmen, the golden afternoon of its happiness is to us! When passage of the habanera that had transferred we look out, with this music in our minds, we Iradier’s El arreglito to the language of high wonder whether we have ever seen the sea so opera, an erratic fragment with which to ‘calm’. And how soothing is this Moorish demolish the totalitarian edifice being dancing! How, for once, even our insatiability gets constructed by Wagner, much admired by the sated by its lascivious melancholy! And finally German philosopher until a short while ago. love, love translated back into ‘Nature’! Not the Ángel González García reminds us of the love of a ‘cultured girl!’ – no Senta-sentimentality. sentence Nietzsche pronounced against the But love as fate, as a fatality, cynical, innocent, overture of Mozart’s Don Giovanni: “Here begins cruel – and precisely in this way ‘Nature’! The love the twilight of opera”. This is odd, since it was on whose means is war, whose very essence is the that note of musical violence that Georges ‘mortal hatred’ between the sexes! (…) Such a Bataille and his accomplices on Acéphale kicked conception of love (the only one worthy of a off their plans to demolish that same fascism philosopher) is rare: it distinguishes one work of “with the strains that opened Don Juan sounding art from among a thousand others. For, as a rule, on the gramophone in the kitchen, while Masson artists are no better than the rest of the world, was cooking mongetas in blood on the stove”. they are even worse – they ‘misunderstand’ love. However, it was with Carmen that Nietzsche Even Wagner misunderstood it. They imagine honed his diatribes against Wagner, against the that they are selfless in it because they appear to totalitarian model of the world as machine that, be seeking the advantage of another creature as put forward by Susan Buck-Morss – we’ll often to their own disadvantage. But in return expand on this later – was in consonance with they want to ‘possess’ the other creature. Even the conception of society as an enormous God is no exception to this rule.” factory, the fascism of the total work of art. Let us momentarily identify – for it exactly The second fragment of The Case of Wagner15 represented this – the suggestions of popular says this, and it is worth quoting at length: music with lo español (Spanishness), what is “Bizet’s work also saves; Wagner is not the later called lo flamenco. Because that is the only ‘Saviour’. With it one bids farewell to the emergence Nietzsche is capable of announcing damp north and to all the fog of the Wagnerian through Spanish music, the emergence of the AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 28

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The group of French artists, 4taxis, obvious. Clement Rosset,16 perhaps the present- were in Seville at the end of the 1980s. day philosopher who best understands Nietzsche, summarizes things: Their guide to getting to know the city “That the intensity of joy is directly was that same record by Veneno. proportional to the cruelty of knowledge is, Among other qualities, they admired without doubt, a general sort of truth. All the same, to underline here that in Spain this truth its ability to portray a subaltern encounters a privileged field of expression, world – gypsies and hippies, drug especially in cante flamenco, and is so precisely addicts and drop-outs, prostitutes and because it is always accompanied by the lustre given to it a contrario by the cruel sentiment of delinquents – without collapsing into the derisory typical of all existence, that which miserablism. There is always a sense shelters it from all complacency or compromise… Exalting the joy of living, it does of dignity. not forget that this will never be more than a miraculous resistance to death.” subaltern. And from here, from Nietzsche, there But Nietzsche doesn’t stop there. After seeing is ignited the pathway of lo español, the journey La Gran Vía, the zarzuela by Federico Chueca, a of the moderns along the anti-modern southern masterwork that announces the entire musical route. That represents lo español; that is the politics of the 20th century, he says: function of lo flamenco in the modern “An important extension of the concept – the imagination. And we don’t know the extent to Spanish operetta La Gran Vía, which I’ve heard which this passion gets people’s backs up. The twice, a Madrilenean event of prime importance. extent to which these aficionados of lo flamenco Something that simply cannot be imported; one also meant a crisis, a calling into question, an would have to be a rogue and the very Devil, a interference. Erik Satie was well aware of this, fellow who was instinctive and solemn at the tired as he was of the “fashion for Spain”, a same time… A trio of three solemn, old and “pestilence” among French composers of his immense villains is the strongest thing I’ve seen time, to whom he dedicated the short piece and heard… even in music: genius cannot be Espagnagna. Its score is accompanied by these formulated. Let us take as an example Rossini, parodic lines: “A kind of waltz / Beneath the whose work – eight of his operas – I know quite pomegranate trees / As in Seville / The beautiful well and let us choose our favourite, La Carmen and the hairdresser / Porte Maillot / Cenerentola, for comparison: well, when This good Rodríguez / Isn’t he the mayor? / confronted with the Spanish works it’s a Place Clichy / Rue de Madrid / The women cigar thousand times more innocent. Only a complete makers / At your service.” scoundrel could conceive the actual plot itself; Humour for humour’s sake, but at the cusp the way in which the villains appear like the frivolous play on words, the joke, the tongue lightning on stage seems like a conjuring trick.” twister, onomatopoeia, parody, the sainete, In Chueca’s work the German philosopher nonsense, the gag. Nietzsche says it himself: recognized the antithesis of the musical drama “You must not take what I say about Bizet that he had been seeking since his traumatic seriously. As sure as I exist, Bizet – I say it time break with Wagner. He managed to appreciate and again – does not interest me, but he acts the anti-operatic rhythm and the malice of strongly as an ironical antithesis to Wagner.” numbers like the Jota de los ratas, which This is the modern imposture. Joy! Joy! A levity undermines the most deep-rooted aesthetic and that kills. Gags, boring jokes that are blindingly social mantras by recourse to an extremely AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 29

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penetrating theatricality and musical irony, as Lisbon. There, a political will exists to bear the critics have recognized. And all that business witness to the reality of dispossession. Also the about “It’s when authority / pursues us / that as practice of making a film with the inhabitants, calm as you like / we swindle more” might be including those whose behaviour in front of the sung as a hymn. We shall not meet the exalting camera is unpredictable. There are two main of delinquency as a logical resistance to aesthetic positions: one is to blur the distinction capitalism again until Bertolt Brecht and Kurt between fiction and documentary; the other is Weill’s Threepenny Opera. to film, not the misery of the people, but the Pive Amador, who went around at the time palpable richness of their decor in the light and with the group who made up Veneno, remarked the richness of their experience of life, in order that, “It was an unrepeatable time, with Franco to restore it.” dead, we political fugitives and criminals were living as comrades, the Veneno song grows out of that, there was no greater political freedom than Boxes: Commercial Album the freedom of that moment, freedom doesn’t only have to do with the police, Los delincuentes A map of the colonial world in the mid-19th speaks about that moment”. The COPEL, century will provide us with the economic clues antipsychiatry and libertarianism – everything as to how the different styles of popular music resounds in that song, in fact; these are the have been formed in the 20th century. It is easy words the Spanish Transition should have had. to understand the musical basis of reggae, even “Afterwards”, continues Pive, “came the of flamenco, in this way. If we trace this map Constitution and that, at the time, was back to the dawn of modernity we can also something else, better perhaps, but redundancy understand the dawn of so-called serious music isn’t always a good thing.” in the West, which was clearly popular, local and The group of French artists, 4taxis, were in national music as well. What interests us right Seville at the end of the 1980s. Their guide to now is to underline the renovation of the 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 The Residents, Commercial Album, 1980 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 30

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economic map that is produced on the basis of abundance – “It is not need but its opposite, recorded music, that is to say of the discs abundance, that poses the basic problems for conveniently slotted into their sleeves. It is a fact living matter and for man”, wrote Bataille – are, that autochthonous musics reinforced their paradoxically, the tools of survival and resistance identity by releasing their music creations of subaltern economies – peripheral, poor and themselves in the ample commercial fabric of disregarded by various powers – in the face of the the record industry. The “versions” typical of general colonization by capitalism which we now Mexican or Indian music were reinforced by the call globalization. This opposition has its entire characteristic treatment given to the covers of logic in the “general economy” of which Bataille such albums. The reinforcement of musical spoke, providing a different concept of identity, the underlining of signs like those of subjectivity, human rationality and its primitivism or exoticism, was mainly done communitarian ties. The need to acquire and through the presentation of the records, while accumulate is not what uniquely or principally the music content often escaped the straitjacket moves human beings, but the desire to give and to of the images and functioned as a ragbag in squander. As Antonio Campillo20 has pointed out, which the modern coexisted with the traditional, “In opposition to interested egoistic calculation, autochthonous quaintness with international generous and disinterested squandering”. fashion. Hence, the construction of an invented This cultural logic directly inspired some of the identity has, in the album cover, the finest and more radical applications of the artistic avant-garde most efficient tool for the subcultures of urban to the world of music and sound. The Cabaret peripheries throughout the world. The Voltaire that the Dadaists mounted in Zurich in the collections of Latin American album covers that 1910s parodied, in the most original sense of the the Colombian artist Raimon Chávez presents or word, these primitivist practices. They practiced the collections of flamenco album covers what Eric Hobsbawm21 has called an “invented presented in the exhibition Vivir en Sevilla at the tradition”, in the same way that jazz musicians or Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in flamenco performers invented their own tradition. Seville are prime examples. Hugo Ball,22 who never got to experience the These are often marginal productions, commercial blossoming of album covers, referred peripheral situations of industrial production to the paintings, objects and photographs of the that have their raison d’être in subaltern, illegal Zurich period as “boxes” containing the sound, fury economies. This economy of expenditure and and noise of those years of wartime oppressiveness. extravagance is intrinsically linked to the It is obvious that in the era of consumer construction of record imagery in pop music capitalism we might, parodying the classic Max throughout the world. The attention Georges Weber title, say something like we have entered a Bataille18 paid to flamenco and jazz was Catholic phase of capitalism itself, in which ritual, endorsed by a whole series of subaltern graphic fetish and spending acquire another kind of elements that had still to blossom into the usefulness for the general religion of the economy. images on album covers. The notation made by In that sense, the publicizing and wastage of Bataille19 stresses how these signs of poverty are images of massive commercialization seem to get presented with all the pretension of the luxury together in pursuit of the circulation of object. The baroque rhetoric, the kitsch, the commodities. Never has so much been bought abuses of ornamentation, and so on, help draw and sold. As we said before: today the record attention to that need for loss, for economic industry spends much of its production money in waste for musics like the blues, son, reggae, the interests of the image of the artiste, to the bossa, flamenco, tango and many more besides. point that when we buy a record – from the records The economy of the spending and wastage of of Morton Feldman to the latest CDs of Falete – we AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 31

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What interests us right now is to their Commercial Album,24 a collection of forty underline the renovation of the songs of a minute each that function as sinister advertising jingles, their personal vision of what economic map that is produced on the commercial music ought to be, to wit: “To our basis of recorded music, that is to say of music we’ve been able to apply the concepts we the discs conveniently slotted into their apply to our visual imagery, and when the music circulates without images these tunes can sleeves. It is a fact that autochthonous function as the covers of our future albums”. musics reinforced their identity by releasing their music creations Sleeves: Goma themselves in the ample commercial fabric of the record industry. 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 pay more for the graphic elements of industrial to start a music label that would address, in a production than for the actual music content. grown-up sort of way, the new musical impetus This rule is also applied to the general they detected in the moribund Spain of General representation of any music production; even on Franco. In April 1975 they talked to the novice the street, in the illegal market, the graphic copy producer from Seville, Gonzalo García Pelayo, of the disc is more expensive for the pirate than who had created successful radio and TV its musical support. programmes for the “new youth”, as it was In San Francisco in the 1970s there appeared called, to whom Gonzalo explained his an obscure music group called The Residents, in methodology:“I don’t know if I can make a good principle a “marginal” group, which dynamited record, but if you let me make ten I can all the rules of the business with a new and guarantee one will be a hit”. Thus was born 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 Goma, 14 abril, 1975 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 32

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Movieplay’s Gong label,25 with the intention of records had to be cheap, the playing time was making room for underground and experimental not only to be a matter of minutes, the music, Andalusian rock and the wilder kind of cardboard cover, the photography, the weight of flamenco, new singer-songwriters and the object, all this had to count for something, progressive music, Cuban nueva trova and had to do with those the music was meant to Sevillanas. “Quantity for quality” was the motto feature. Later on, Gong came to an end and it and out of this there came records by Goma, ended when that way of understanding music Triana, Lole y Manuel, Dieguito de Morón, José el fell apart; not the records, though, the way of Negro, Joselero, Pau Riba, Vainica Doble, Amancio understanding music.” Prada, Luis Eduardo Aute, María Jiménez, Benito The album cover project comes face to face, Moreno, Carlos Cano, Azahar, Elisa Serna, then, with an artistic dimension which, more Carrete, Granada, Gente del Pueblo, Gualberto, than aestheticizing the lives of various Agujetas, Hilario Camacho, Inti-Illimani, generations, has, of course, helped make them Labordeta, El Lele, Luis Pastor, Manuel Gerena, more artistic. The utopia of technical Pablo Guerrero, Eduardo Polonio, Olga Manzano reproduction, an object printable thousands of y Manuel Picón, Pablo Milanés, Silvio Rodríguez, times, which circulates in all shapes and sizes, Quilapayún, La Susi, Victor Jara, etcetera. an object without qualities but with great A basic consideration for Gong were the symbolic meaning – all this served to fulfil the covers of their albums; in fact Gong is the first objectives of the most radical economies of art. Spanish label that stipulates that their sleeves Moreover, the narrative possibilities, the had to be as important as the music. Máximo capacity for figuration and abstraction that were Moreno was the art director of the collection and established in relation to the music, endowed he directly produced masterpieces like Lole y the object with possibilities that complied with Manuel’s first record, with those two impressive information and expression as maxims of a photographic registers, or the first two records certain way art works. In relation to the music, by Triana, El patio and Hijos del Agobio, with the record thus fulfilled a number of minimum designs that are a combination of psychedelia requisites of plasticity, at the frontier of the and social critique. There are other figurable, of the art object, of the book, of vital collaborators: the Rafa Díaz cover for A la vida, experience. It almost, we might say, functioned al dolor by Gualberto is masterly, as is the one like the transformational masks of the Northwest for Vericuetos with paintings by Jessica Jones. American Indians, as described by Claude Lévi- Also Iván Zulueta’s for the Vainica Doble Strauss. Designed and elaborated as mediation, masterpiece Contracorriente or for Licors by Pau the object of use has the capacity to become Riba with a design by Ana Carmona. Even so, autonomous and in that particular journey to be what is most interesting is the project, the transformed with its own laws, being returned to assumption of the visual contribution of the us with conditions that now forever condition covers in relation to the product, to the music, to listening to the music, the visual experience of the figuration of the world projected therein. A the surroundings and the project of a form of whole economy of art applied to record design, life. Finally, how many works of art aspire to just with a basic idea of narration, the need to tell a such a moment of autonomous profanation? story with each of them, and, moreover, the Let us look at a concrete example. García material armature of the covers, their physical Pelayo had an all-embracing obsession with quality as objects. This poetics of “cardboard transforming political hymns into intense love recycling” was defined by Gonzalo as a matter of songs. This was no coincidence. In his film Vivir duration: “We were at the crucial move from the en Sevilla one of the characters says it clearly: culture of the single to that of the LP and the “He listened to those songs of combat and AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 33

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struggle with a lover’s desperation, songs of A basic consideration for Gong were forever falling in and out of love”, while the young man listened time and again to the record the covers of their albums; in fact of “Hasta siempre comandante” dedicated to Gong is the first Spanish label that Ché Guevara by Carlos Puebla y Los stipulates that their sleeves had to Tradicionales. He performed the experiment on various occasions – I’m thinking of “Como tú” be as important as the music. 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 steps when we walk down the street or that often Cuba and its revolution, sung by María Jiménez. manage to upset, without us knowing why, a She was a jovial flamenco-style nightclub singer, chain of thought, of intimate reverie.” whose nickname La pipa, given to her by Thus Peter Szendy begins his masterly journalist Emilio Romero in praise of her sexual treatise Tubes, La Philosophie dans le juke-box,26 power, had to be both promoted and parried. an attempt at thinking, in tune with Walter The cover of her first record had to combine Benjamin, about the things that make up the those two worlds with little more than a world and mark our everyday life. Of course, photograph. The record was to be full of versions read in accordance with these notes, record of Latin American themes, a common practice in covers turn into the mediating factor devised by flamenco bulerías and rumbas at the time, but in those big hits in order to be in the world. When this instance another type of projection was Szendy brings us nearer to the relationship of involved. The Máximo Moreno photograph these ditties to money, to their capacity for presented the cuplé singer as a sort of mediation, what else can we hold on to? committed singer-songwriter, and the whole Following, in a literal way, the reading Szendy force of the photograph bursts forth in that makes of Marx’s famous text “The Fetishism of impossibility. But there is no meaning – that is to Commodities and the Secret Thereof”,27 it is say, if you don’t listen to the rumbita there is obvious to think, instead of songs on record, of nothing, a forgotten dusty record, with album covers. “A commodity appears, at first something of the nondescript object about it. sight”, writes Marx, “a very trivial thing, and But that was the intention: to lead to melancholy easily understood.” It is a thing that is used to and not to deception. It wasn’t even necessary to satisfy certain needs, and as such seems to have consider the subject matter; the important thing nothing “mysterious” about it. But endowed, is that when recalling the theme, when walking among other things, with this “use value”, the along the street humming it you would think of commodity as such behaves in a special way: as María Jiménez: “I give you a song and I say my Marx argues, taking a table as an example, as a country”, and there appears the infinite promise commodity, “this indulges in whims that are of pleasure, that dubious thing we sometimes even more extravagant than if it had proceeded call happiness. to dance”. Because like all commodities, the “All of you have, like me, been visited, I’m table-commodity is not only something useful: it sure, been obsessed to the point of nausea, consists of, sums up or embodies, “a definite possessed to the point of exhaustion by one of social relation between men”; that is, a type of those ‘catchy’ melodies, one of those songs heard relationship among those who produce it with by chance, that is to say of necessity, on the radio, their work. The commodity, for example, is the in cafes, in the supermarket. One of those ‘big product or expression of a certain labour time hits’ that henceforth never leave us, that are on and of a certain organization of that labour. our lips when we awake, that lend rhythm to our However, this social relation, deposited, so to AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 34

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speak, in the commodity, is forgotten: for men it still not made a distinction between his activity is “the fantastic form of a relation between as an artist and a designer. Linked politically to things”. And the power products have to “appear Seville, at the time his works were habitual in the as independent beings” is the power Marx calls cultural life of the city: his poster for Alfonso “the fetishism which attaches itself to the Jiménez’s Quejío, put on by La Cuadra, or the products of labour”: “(…) the relations book La vida en el Barrio for the Pro-Sevilla connecting the labour of one individual with group, are a couple of exemplary instances. The that of the rest appear, not as direct social group gathered around Seville’s M-11 art centre, relations between individuals at work, but as with Quico Rivas and Diego Carrasco among what they really are, material relations between their number, served as a link for the work in persons and social relations between things”. In hand. Rehearsals took place in the gallery and the the exchange market the commodity lives, in record had that artistic ambition from the first. effect, from its exchange value, which seems “to Goma was the name of the group, with musicians truly belong to it”, as a property that it would who came from the mythical Smash or from an possess naturally, thanks to a forgetting of the even stranger group, Chicle, pipas y caramelos. relations of production that have caused it to be Their music took off from experimental jazz- born. It appears to have an autonomous rock, and lo andaluz, the typically Andalusian, movement and a rationale when it circulates was vaguely invoked. 14 abril was the title of the from exchange to exchange. Like a real fetish, record, a subversive date in 1975 since it invoked the commodity seems henceforth to be the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931. endowed with a psyche, that “soul of the The lyrics got past the censor by recourse to commodity” Marx ironically alludes to. And, in tongue twisters and absurd meanings: “A new order to demonstrate its illusory quality, Marx April, without salt, hindering and without heat, makes this soul speak: “Could commodities possession and shrewd, like the look of a themselves speak, they would say: our use value balloon”. What did not pass was the purple of may be a thing that interests men. It is no part of the Republican flag which was meant to feature us as objects. What, however, does belong to us on the cover. The whole design revolved around as objects, is our value. Our natural intercourse the icon of the dollar, the Masonic pyramid, the as commodities proves it. In the eyes of each eye of God and its repetition ad infinitum. The other we are nothing but exchange values.” Just illustration of money, like the illustration of the as in these famous pages of Marx’s, album record and like the illustration of the sleeve, covers also lend their voice to musical were all meant to revolve hypnotically, like a commodities in general, in order to make them gyroscope. The graphic elements were assembled speak and sing about their nature as fetishes: by Miguel Gómez, who resolved things with the what we might call the musical self and the censors. These visual fragments were used lyrical self of the song would be, then, the voice afterwards by Pive Amador, the group’s manager of the actual commodity that is talking about at the time, on dozens of posters that announced itself. Because in effect it is the phantasmagoria other luckier groups and musicians like Pata which appears as an album cover: the song as a Negra, Imán, Kiko Veneno and Silvio. “We used musical commodity understands or recognizes to call it a sleeve back then. The record didn’t itself; it enters into a relation with another song, work, but its sleeve did, becoming an identifying which is nothing short of a new version of itself, mark of both the label and a way of with which it enters into an exchange. understanding the music.” The first Gong record had to fulfil the Among others, Corominas28 identifies the condition of “being money”. The job was following definitions for his etymology of carátula entrusted to Alberto Corazón who, happily, had (cover): “mask”, “the histrionic profession”. From AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 35

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the ancient carátula, “witchcraft”, and this from Borges himself confused the work of the two the Latin character, in the sense of a “magic writers – noted down the occasional interesting sign”. It arrived at its modern meaning by idea in that respect. Corpus Barga recounts it: proceeding from the paint-daubed face of “Ricardo Baroja, Valle Inclán and the young wizards and magicians; and at the American painters close to them were arguing about the meaning of a “book cover” through comparison values of great painters and masterpieces. with the mask covering the face. Silverio Lanza began outlining his proposition by attributing it to a young stockbroker and student of homeopathy, of anarchist medicine. Covers: The White Album If a painting by Velázquez, El Greco, Tintoretto, Titian, Raphael or Leonardo, whoever it is, I’m It is obvious that the maximum refutation of the citing the names you cite, the one each of you Walter Benjamin essay “The Work of Art in the chooses, finds a viewer, the one that each of you Age of Mechanical Reproduction”29 is found in has chosen, the maximum rapport will occur, the work of Andy Warhol. Let us remind one and the same, the first and most complete, ourselves of the ending of the essay: “This is the but if a bad print finds a viewer, who goes with situation of politics which Fascism is rendering it to the same extent as the one before in terms aesthetic. Communism responds by politicizing of the masterpiece, the same view will also art.” Well, capitalism has embodied this prevail. 100,000 billion divided by 100,000 dichotomy between art and aesthetics in order billion is the same as one divided by one – it’s to create its politics. Hence, the converting of always one. The stockbroker with aesthetic as aura into “credit” has enabled the serial well as stock market values was right. He was pictures of Warhol to apply for the “art right, the rightness of geometric progression, standard” with the same intensity with which which in aesthetic proportions is the unit, our Visas or Mastercards function in terms of democratic and individualist. The young the gold standard. The linguistic effectiveness of libertarian was right.”30 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 The Beatles, The Beatles, 1968 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 36

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The periodic critical waves that shake séances. In our own time that table is the dj’s and the connotation in the form of the dance the relations of representation in the would include the social mass as a whole. field of art, from punk to institutional Silverio Lanza saw it clearly – it is a pity that critique, help to create a stenography only a few of his Economic Tales have come down to us – and not without a certain humour, that ends up strengthening the and with a certain sarcasm, even: “The value of corridors of power they are fighting. 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 simplicity with which Lanza resolves the “The ‘becoming-image’ of capital is nothing troublesome issue of technical reproduction and more than the commodity’s last metamorphosis, the work of art, the famous aura that Benjamin in which exchange value has completely saw being lost, can only proceed from a real eclipsed use value and can now achieve the understanding of the economic laws of status of absolute and irresponsible sovereignty capitalism that define the identity of art. A clarity over life in its entirety, after having falsified the akin to that of Karl Marx’s text on “The Fetishism entire social production. (…) The first duty the of Commodities and the Secret Thereof”31 that we Situationists assigned themselves was to wake cited above. The Jewish angels that frightened up from this nightmare.” Benjamin had served, years before, to make Conscious of the role their productions play Marx’s vision more acute: “A ‘commodity’ in the design of the current system, visual appears, at first sight, a very trivial thing, and constructions only need to act accordingly. They easily understood. Its analysis shows that it is, can feel themselves to be privileged because in reality, a very queer thing, abounding in from the outset their activity was a parallel metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties. model to the strategies of capital and would turn So far as it is a value in use, there is nothing into the best placebo for the latter. It seems quite mysterious about it, whether we consider it from difficult for visual productions to be able to the point of view that by its properties it is renounce the founding characteristics of their capable of satisfying human wants, or from the own activity, but if the predominance of point that those properties are the ‘product’ of exchange value leaves us in a dead end, it is in human labour. It is as clear as noon-day, that the recovery of use value that a critical relation man, by his industry, changes the forms of the with the real may be rediscovered. In that sense materials furnished by Nature, in such a way as album covers provide the work of art with an to make them useful to him. The form of wood, exceptional vehicle for releasing the tensions for instance, is altered, by making a table out of between fetish and commodity, luxury object it. Yet, for all that, the table continues to be that and democratic merchandise, that spreads ways common, every-day thing, wood. But, so soon as of handling and understanding life, codes of it steps forth ‘as a commodity’, it is changed into identity, in short political narrations, throughout something transcendent. It not only stands with the community. its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other If factors of abundance, spending and commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves wastage have served to turn the cover into a out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, that are privileged tool for the democratic circulation of even more extravagant than if it had proceeded the work of art, what is the use value of that to dance.” which seeks to establish itself beyond all use? If, It is obvious that Marx describes a table like as Bataille wished, the value of art is related to those that began dancing around in spiritualist the concept of abundance, engenders AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 37

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abundance in some way, the potlatch would therefore contemporary with the operas of have to be carried out with greater Wagner, describes the factory as a total assiduousness. We ought to give in to environment: “Every organ of sense is injured in destruction more bravely. One is prepared to get an equal degree by artificial elevation of the just as emotional about the baroque imagery in temperature, by the dust-laden atmosphere, by a procession as about churches in flames. This the deafening noise, not to mention danger to life would be one of the constants in the renewal of and limb among the thickly crowded machinery, the modern. The records of the Sex Pistols which, with the regularity of the seasons, issues coexist with the reappearance of Gregorian its list of the killed and wounded in the industrial chant. Does it not seem excessive that while this battle.” Wagner’s “total work of art”, intimately doubt persists, while this debate about the use related to the disenchantment of the world, is an values of art is maintained, there exists such a attempt to produce an instrumentally totalizing degree of unanimity in attributing a rising metaphysic by using every available technical exchange value to them? means. This is true for dramatic representation In the meantime let us stick to the evaluation and for musical style. In Bayreuth the orchestra, of the stock exchange. It is all very well to turn the means of production of the musical effects, is shit into gold, but it is not something exclusive hidden from the public by constructing the to artists or musicians. They are the best orchestra pit below the eyeline of the audience. instructors, of course, but right now this is the Supposedly interested in “integrating the basis of the world economy. The artistic individual arts”, continues the reading by Buck- principle transposed to the social dynamic has Morss of Adorno’s Wagner, “the execution of provided a few solutions, but it is also Wagner’s operas finally attains a division of responsible for the current status quo. The labour without precedent in the history of periodic critical waves that shake the relations of music”. representation in the field of art, from punk to Accordingly, in Critique of the German institutional critique, help to create a Intelligentsia,34 Hugo Ball again contrasts a life stenography that ends up strengthening the that persists in the grandeur of the German corridors of power they are fighting. The closed music of Wagner to a life that is endured with a circularity and self-satisfaction that occurs in the programme like the ones handed out in the many worlds of the field of the visual arts and Cabaret Voltaire. Corresponding to the Buck- music, prevents the transference of the Morss image, the part confronts the whole: the undoubted political achievements attained – in fragmentary as a weapon of reconstruction of a autonomy, representation, and so forth – to the total economy of presenting the world. Ball’s rest of society. The marginal ways of life that are proposal works in a simple way, in absolute constructed around reggae or electronic dance opposition to Wagnerian “totalitarianism”. As music, experimentation in the languages of concrete music, and their instrumentalization in everyday usage, are just a few examples of the If factors of abundance, spending loss of political energy in a society that tries to and wastage have served to turn keep the diverse spheres of production separate. As Susan Buck-Morss has pointed out,33 the the cover into a privileged tool for factory was the contrast to the opera house in the democratic circulation of the the world of work, a sort of counter- work of art, what is the use value of phantasmagoria based on the principle of fragmentation, not on the illusion of totality. that which seeks to establish itself Marx’s Capital, written in the 1860s and beyond all use? AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 38

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The cover of the record did not causes. All that was involved, of course, but also contributing rigorous language, critical function, now, in relation to the interweaving, a questioning of work itself, a music, but in relation to the other political event. Were it not so, what meaning record sleeves that came out during would it have to put a collection of album covers together at precisely the moment these that year and in relation to the supports, the covers of LPs, cassettes and CDs, general iconography prevailing in are beginning to disappear? What example of a pop culture. tool would they now be, when with these supports a thing of the past, the task shifts to other shared forms of relating and against the absolute model of society that seeks communicating? Faced with the museum that to cleanly represent the social whole as a mirror, contains collections of junk of all kinds, it is hard it is proposed to work in different kinds of noise, not to repeat Mairena’s dictum, “We praise what in the tensions of the violin bow, in in-between we lose”. spaces, in the dirtiness of the world. And in In 1968 Richard Hamilton designed the music, against the location in which an absolute sleeve of the double LP The Beatles, known as scene is built in order to represent the world, The White Album36 on account of its plain white there is pitted the warmth of a simple album image. He was contacted through gallery owner cover, the vinyl broken, without even giving us Robert Fraser – the same person who appears in the chance to listen to it. police custody with Mick Jagger in another When Paolo Virno35 puts forward the social famous work by Hamilton – who had previously virtuosity of pianist Glenn Gould as a model, convinced Peter Blake and Jann Haworth to put which virtue have we to consider? The peerless together the famous cover of Sgt. Pepper’s. genius, capable of constructing absolute worlds Hamilton had it easy, since he already knew the on the basis of his interpretation of, for example, commercial workings and iconic expansion Bach’s Goldberg Variations, or the same genius involved in the Lonely Hearts Club Band record. of social destruction who in Thomas Bernhard’s In this instance it wasn’t a question of operating The Loser leads his closest colleague to suicide with the music – such as the contamination and the other friend to the lowest form of between psychedelia, carnival and image writing? Or is it a question, instead, of that other denoted in Blake’s work – since the operational Glenn Gould, who managed to value the framework had already been transcended. The awkward nature of his dexterity, the damage his cover of the record did not function, now, in fingers caused to the democracy of technique, relation to the music, but in relation to the other and who abandoned the space of representation record sleeves that came out during that year of the concert hall in order to transmit his music, and in relation to the general iconography technology and craftsmanship being prevailing in pop culture. Thus, this image indiscernible, through recordings alone? without an image – the first design proposed the In actual fact, it wasn’t just a matter of mark left by a coffee cup, later on by the stains of making use of the symbolic potential of the apple pulp – the white record identified by just record, of taking the relationship between its serial number, would again drag the ethereal democratic circulation and a marvellous fetish music – a set of songs without any relationship for increasing audiences as exemplary, or even to each other, since the group had ceased to of abusing, as has been abused, the political exist – towards the concrete, taking it in the potential of such a popular element and of direction of the iconic artefact that had ceased to introducing slogans and propaganda for good be. Hamilton didn’t even listen to the record AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 39

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before proposing his cover. Its visual impact 17. Jacques Rancière, Le Spectateur émancipé. Paris: La even contributed to the legend of Charles Fabrique, 2008. Manson and his demented crimes. As it is, The 18. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, White Album is the album of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La- 1927-1939. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Da”, but also of “Helter Skelter”, “Back in the 19. Denis Hollier (ed.), The College of Sociology 1937-39. U.S.S.R.”, “Revolution 1” and “Revolution 9”. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

This text is an enlarged version of the one published in 20. Antonio Campillo, Contra la economía. Granada: Diedrich Diederichsen, Jean-Ives Bosseur, Mark Jamieson Comares, 2001. and Pedro G. Romero, Vinil. So i col.leccionisme. Barcelona: 21. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (eds.), The MACBA / Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2006. Invention of Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University 1. Colectivo Situaciones, Mal de Altura. Buenos Aires: Tinta Press, 1983. Limón/UNIA, 2005. 22. Hugo Ball, Flight Out of Time: A Dada Diary. New York: Viking Press, 1974. 2. Ivo Supicic, “Sociología musical e historia social de la música”, Papers, no. 29, Barcelona, 1988. 23. Adolfo Marín, La nueva música. Barcelona: Teorema, 1984. 3. José Antonio González Alcantud, El rapto del arte. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2002. 24. The Residents-Pore Know Graficcs&Rex Ray, Commercial Album. San Francisco: The Cryptic 4. William Washabaugh, Flamenco: Passion, Politics and Corporation, 1980. Popular Culture. Oxford: Berg, 1996. 25. Félix J. Santana, Un paso atrás por la serie Gong de 5. Einstürzende Neubauten, Strategies Against Architecture. Movieplay. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2001. Herne: Mute Records, 1983. 26. Peter Szendy, Tubes. La Philosophie dans le juke-box. 6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 27. Karl Marx, Capital. Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol.35. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996. 7. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 28. Joan Corominas, Breve diccionario etimológico de la 1991. lengua castellana. Madrid: Gredos, 1961. 8. Jorge García, Jazz gráfico. Valencia: IVAM, 1999. 29. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1969. 9. Albert Ayler and others, and Michael Snow, 1016 New York Eye and Ear Control. New York: ESP-Disk, 1966. 30. Corpus Barga, Los pasos contados. Barcelona: Bruguera, 1986. 10. Juan Hidalgo and Antonio de Gregorio, Tamarán. Milan: Cramps Records, 1974. 31. Karl Marx, Capital. Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol.35. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1996. 11. Juan Hidalgo, De Juan Hidalgo, 1957-1997. Gran Canaria: CAAM, 1997. 32. Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 12. Dominique Fernandez, La Rose des Tudor. Paris: 2000. Julliard, 1976. 33. Susan Buck-Morss, Walter Benjamin, escritor 13. Gilles Deleuze, Derrames, entre el capitalismo y la revolucionario. Buenos Aires: Inter.zona, 2005. esquizofrenia. Buenos Aires: Cactus, 2005. 34. Hugo Ball, Critique of the German Intelligentsia. New 14. Víctor Gómez Pin, La escuela más sobria de vida. York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Madrid: Espasa, 2002. 35. Paolo Virno, Virtuosismo y revolución. Madrid: 15. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner. Edinburgh & Traficantes de sueños, 2003. London: T.N. Foulis, 1911. 36. The Beatles-Richard Hamilton, The White Album. 16. Clément Rosset, Le Principe de cruauté. Paris: Éditions London: Apple Records, 1968. de Minuit, 1988. AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 40 Annika Ström 11 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 41

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Jonathan Griffin Guitar slung low, legs spread wide apart, neck Sometimes she sings songs. The songs are craning up towards the microphone, the young not dissimilar to many pop songs, in that they man screws his features into an expression that are mostly delivered in the first person and are looks like something between grief and sexual addressed to an unspecified “you”. Whatever ecstasy. He sings: their lyrical content – “It’s my fault”, “I get so sad”, or “I didn’t do anything wrong”, for “I - will be - the one - to turn you on! instance – we cannot help, because of their form On the bed and because of what we know about songs that I - will be - the one - start with “I” and end in “you”, interpreting tonight.” them as being about relationships. In other ways they are nothing like pop Between the assembled bar crowd and the songs. Ström does not perform these songs with shallow, six-inch high stage, in front of clusters a band, but accompanies her own voice with the of people clutching bottles of beer and raising preset chords and rhythms of a small electronic their voices to the ears of their friends, in front keyboard. She rarely occupies a stage, preferring of other people who stare expressionlessly at the instead to stand on the same floor as her singer, surrounded by movement and noise, audience, and she usually finds herself singing stands the singer’s mother, holding a video in art galleries. Sometimes people don’t even camera which she points at her son for the notice her at first; at one particularly busy whole duration of his performance. private view, Ström recalls, only the security No one seems to find this strange, or guard heard her while everybody else continued embarrassing, or worthy of comment. 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 This was a small concert that I saw just two musician. Her musicianship is aggressively weeks ago, but I’ve wondered many times amateur, not in a punk way but more akin to the before: what is it about the special zone of intimate tradition of folk songs. But it is also performance that allows us to observe such shaped by the formal conventions of Conceptual extraordinary heights of emotion and art, which, by and large, is less concerned with vulnerability in strangers – or even, sometimes, technical virtuosity than resourceful in our loved ones – without flinching or turning autodidacticism. away in shame and embarrassment? Normal Another strand of Ström’s artistic output, her rules of privacy and discretion no longer seem to text works, fit more squarely into the aesthetic apply. The peculiarly distancing effect of a stage, category of Conceptual art. They consist of and of the dissipation into a crowded room of phrases, normally no more than a few words, words that, anywhere else, would be troubling or transcribed in a neat, sans-serif font onto sheets provocative, is a mysterious and wonderful of paper or, occasionally, onto a wall. She rarely phenomenon. It has become so normalized in uses punctuation or capital letters except for the our culture, however, that most people no longer word “I”. Although their words are different to even notice it. In its contemporary form, it is a Ström’s songs, they often have the feeling of structure that rises from the popular music of song titles or lyrics. Please help me. All your the past half-century, but it also has foundations dreams have come true. I love to live but not with in theatre, in Spoken Word Poetry, Live Comedy me. What these phrases share with pop songs in and Conceptual art. Annika Ström makes art that general is their combination of emotional exploits our familiarity with its conventions in directness and impersonal ambiguity. For order to thrive on its strangeness. instance, when the text says “I”, does that mean

Annika Ström,Ten New Love Songs, 1999 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 42

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Annika? If so, when she sings “you”, does she some of her work and Swedish textiles, and on mean us? We hope not, but the possibility for the back of which was written the script of a such intimate personal address is troubling and heated conversation between a couple. At an elevates the work beyond the cerebral chilliness unannounced moment in the exhibition, an of the art that it formally resembles. actor began to speak into his phone, becoming Ström’s text works are also comparable to the more obviously distraught as the conversation idiom of the pop song (though perhaps not went on. He was performing the script written Ström’s own songs) because of the distance that behind the stage, but he did not ever venture their formal constraints – their font, their size, onto the stage itself. The man appeared not to their concision – place between them and us, the acknowledge the boundaries of his performance audience. The hot words are insulated by their at all; despite the quietness of the gallery visitors cool presentation, not unlike the cordon around him, he loudly continued his sanitaire where the stage meets the auditorium conversation as if completely oblivious to his in a performance venue. However, in her texts surroundings. this membrane is only partially effective. In The effect for the confused members of the certain pieces, Ström uses humour to punch audience was profoundly embarrassing. At first, little holes in it, as with a modest-sized text that it was embarrassing because the man (who they announces itself to be a “major work”, or the one assumed to be a regular gallery visitor) had that says Excuse me but I need to lie down here become a performer unintentionally; a private and think about my next piece of art. In this case exchange was being enacted in public, and the and in many others, she uses the text to talk man was so engrossed in his personal situation about itself, and to undermine the surety of its that he ceased to be aware of his context. The own pronouncements. failure to see oneself objectively (like when you A performance or an artwork grows have food on your chin or your trouser flies are extremely powerful when it acknowledges the undone) is embarrassing for those around you, limits of its own frame. If it allows its subject to precisely because it is not for you. As the talk about itself objectively – from outside the performance continued, and people realized frame, as it were – it effectively appears to that the man was in fact an actor (perhaps when remove that frame altogether. For instance, they remembered the script on the back of the when Kanye West raps “I’m on TV talkin’ like it’s stage), it remained uncomfortable because the just you and me” he implies that now it is just us normal conventions of performance were not and him. Sometimes this objectivity can become being followed. Gradually, an unspoken the subject of the work itself: Ström has made a consensus formed that it was appropriate to be video of people talking about other videos by her silent and still, and to listen to the conversation, that they have either been in or cut out of, and a but the man still refused to acknowledge his sound piece in which she describes other proper role as a performer. When he finally hung exhibitions she has made. Where, really, is the up the phone, the crowd clapped to re-establish artist in all this? their distance from the proceedings, and to put In a recent work, Ström disappears from space between themselves and him. view, and dissolves the distancing structure of Ström has said that all her art, whatever its the stage – real or metaphorical – altogether. The nature, is embarrassing in one way or another. Upset Man was a performance devised for her She doesn’t say for whom, but it is clear that the exhibition From the Community Hall, in Temple embarrassment of the performer and of the Bar Gallery in Dublin, 2010. For the exhibition, audience is closely intertwined. Ten Embarrassed Ström had built a stage, or rather a life-sized Men was the title of a work Ström made for the sculpture of a stage, on which she had displayed 2010 Frieze Art Fair, in London. It seems strange AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 43

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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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 44

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Annika Ström, I Am in Love, 2004 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 46

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to call it a performance, although that is what it this deeply personal and traumatic scenario was, for the men were actors and they were without the man’s consent. And that is both playing to an audience, even through (especially captivating and shaming for them. Something through) pretending not to. A group of ten similar happens with Ten Embarrassed Men, identically, blandly dressed men shuffled in a except that in this case the actors seem actively tight group through the bustling crowds of the to want to evade the attention of those people art fair. Some stared at the floor; others hid their around them. That in itself makes them an faces behind their hands; all generally avoided object of curiosity, especially in an art fair. eye contact with passers-by who looked intently When Ström records herself singing for the at everything, many of whom were also hoping soundtracks to her videos, as with Ten New Love to be looked at themselves. Songs (1999), she sounds as if she’s singing to An art fair is not a place for the scopophobic. herself. It’s not the first time that a performer Things fight for visual attention on all sides – not has pretended not to be performing at all, as just pictures and objects but faces and bodies. we’ve just seen. But it does confuse any Equivalents between finance, power and (the associations we might make between the singer predominantly male) pleasure in looking are and the extrovert impulse. The problem with easy to draw. That heterosexual male collectors extroverts, generally speaking, is that they are enjoy having images of female bodies on their insincere; they will say or do something just to walls is no secret, and art fairs are always get a reaction, rather than because they mean it. packed with work explicitly catering for male In order for a singer such as Ström to convey the taste. A comparable dynamic also plays out in sincerity of her words, she must deliver them in a traditional modes of performance – theatre and way that is emphatically introverted. Is then this cinema, but music too – in fact whenever an quietness, this modest way of sharing, also an audience is permitted to watch other people on act? The answer must be that yes, in a way it is. stage from the security of a darkened But it makes no sense to describe Ström as auditorium. Sigmund Freud, in his essay insincere, any more than we would call a Method “Instincts and their Vicissitudes” (1915), asserted actor a faker. (In fact she herself jokingly admits that voyeurism is unhealthy because the that she takes the stereotype of the tormented scopophilic does not admit the object of his artist suffering in her studio to ridiculous desire into his sexual satisfaction; he is insulated lengths.) The opposite is true: Ström is concerned against intimacy, and takes only the image of the with finding ways to make her sincerity other person (through looking) against her will. conveyable to a deeply cynical audience. Perhaps Voyeurism does not map quite so neatly onto it is most valuable to think of Ström’s art as being the kinds of performance I’m discussing, about sincerity. Pushing this thought further, it however. After all, performers, whether singers, seems that throughout her work, one is, in every actors, comedians or athletes, not only submit to instance, made aware of the vehicle for such the gaze of the audience but actively thrive upon sincerity: language. It is the problems of it. Typically, their exhibitionism nullifies the communication, and of the inadequacies of unpleasanter associations of their being language in conveying personal experience, watched. Ström’s work, however, tends to distort which Ström’s work brings into the light. and invert these dynamics in order to disrupt the It is never wise to dwell too much on comfort of the conventional viewing space. In biography, but it is worth noting that Ström is a The Upset Man, for instance, the actor is seeking Swedish artist who has lived outside the country the attention of the audience before they even of her birth for the last twenty years. This realize they are an audience; instead, they displacement places her at a remove from both believe (at least at first) that they are observing her native tongue and her adopted, second AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 47

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language (English – which, like many people phrase that is apparently not so commonly used around the world, she first encountered through in Sweden. In other cases, the untranslatability the lyrics of pop songs). Sometimes, her texts of words is down to cultural or social factors. handle language awkwardly, and sometimes Ström notes that, while the English words “I love Ström’s foreignness becomes a strategy of you” are bandied about so often that now they confusion, whether deliberately or inadvertently. are almost meaningless, in Sweden, to say “jag (She has noted that when she showed people her älskar dig” is almost forbiddingly heavy (the text piece This work refers to Joseph Kosutt, she phrase is still relatively unscathed by popular sensed them wondering whether she knew she’d culture, and so is hesitatingly used even in the spelt his name wrong.) most intimate circumstances). Central to her experience as a non-native When I first saw Ström’s pink and orange text speaker, however, is her vivid awareness of those piece Wait, I need to think about these words, I things that cannot be said. Often this is for took it for a clever, ironic comment about voids, linguistic reasons; All my dreams have come true about the facileness of most artistic products (2004) is a video of her parents struggling with and the pressures of creativity. Now I realize that the translation of the work’s title into English, a it is absolutely sincere.

Annika Ström, Dirk the Stand In, 1997 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 48 Ruth Ewan 11 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 49

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Chris Fite-Wassilak I met Fang when I was looking for buskers. I went to “Wurlitzer really smashes them!” the an event at the Southbank where I spotted him and advertisement exclaims exuberantly, while a went up to him as I thought he looked quite man hefts a sledgehammer over his head down interesting. He took part in Did You Kiss the Foot that on the splintered shards of what used to be a Kicked You?, and during that I got to know him a bit. jukebox. In an action and a forthright promise For his audition he came in and sang Black Sabbath’s almost unthinkable today, the company “Paranoid”, it was amazing. He thinks the Fang Sang gleefully make this guarantee, to “enable project turned him into a local celebrity, but he was Wurlitzer Music Merchant everywhere to make already a celebrity, he’d done that for himself. He’d taken this name Fang, actually changing his name to more money”. In 1938, the emphasis was the Fang by deed poll, it says it on his bank cards and future, on inventions, innovations and stuff. He’s created this amazing identity for himself, improvements imminently arriving; part of wearing a set of false teeth in his ear, and incredibly their self-perception of integrity was to simply rude things on his t-shirt. He was a front man in a destroy any jukebox models that had been band for ages and used to wear ladies underwear on superseded. They openly promote their violent stage. He says the gods named him Fang before time destruction of the past; today, it seems taunting existed. I don’t know when he changed his name, he’d and ludicrous to willingly erase these cultural never give you a straight answer on something like artefacts. Their clerical decision tells the story that, he doesn’t tell people how old he is or what his they want to present: that every Wurlitzer you real name is. encounter will be a new one, the latest model to the highest standards. They happily disclose We did an open mic night after the Fang Sang project; the mechanisms through which they enforce some students from the Byam Shaw School of Art the narrative. But behind that is the sound of sang, and Fang sang the tune of k.d. lang’s “Constant thousands of destroyed jukeboxes. Craving” mixed with the lyrics of “Anarchy in the U.K.”, so it was “Craving Anarchy”, and it just did “Conscious tinkering and remaking is only something really weird, it was so much better than any a small part of the shaping of the past. When of these mash-up remixes, it was really beautiful. We we look closely at the construction of past time, were packing up when one of the young librarians we find the process has very little to do with the said, “I’d like to sing a song.” He sang “Ain’t No past at all and everything to do with the Sunshine”, it was really surprising in such an unlikely present. Institutions create shadowed places in situation. Some of Fang’s old bandmates came as which nothing can be seen and no questions well, he hadn’t seen them in 20 years, they performed asked. They make other areas show finely together.1 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 re-

Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, 2007. animated and re-placed in the present, often as Photo: Thierry Bal a series of actions, events and performances, AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 50

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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.

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One of the buskers was called Anna-Maria Tkacz, Working in ambiguous opposition to the broad an IT programmer who had been a junior historical sweep of Ewan’s work is the accordion champion as a kid. When she won, she punctuation of irrevocably intimate moments. was like, “Well, what do I do now?” She put her Her carefully researched and constructed accordion away in the attic. When she saw the actions and installations stop at some point, to advert asking for buskers, she said she’d always give way to melodies that stir up rousing wanted to busk but she’d never had the emotions, or coincidences of accidental confidence. So she decided to do it, and she got discovery. The utopian, socialist dream might her accordion out. She hadn’t touched it for 15-20 years. She told me a bit about the history be at the heart of many of the figures and of it; it has such an odd place, a completely historical moments she explores, but in being anachronistic thing. It’s mentioned in literature replaced in the present their political force is left placed in the wrong time period; it wasn’t actually open and ambiguous. If she creates structures patented until late 19th century, but it appears within which to re-release these moments from in things like “Pirates of the Caribbean”, which the past, they are only activated and made living is supposed to be set in the 18th century. My by moments of personal insight by those who mum told me, after I’d completed the busking participate and experience the projects. It is project, that she’d found out that her uncles, who these personal moments of insight, connection, were Italian immigrants to Scotland, busked on and reverberation that lie within each of her the streets of Glasgow with accordions. That’s how works, numerous but often hidden and they made their money. unrecorded. It is a few of these moments I have collected and tried to let them be heard here. Loads of the buskers who took part in Did You “Thus the presences and absences embedded Kiss the Foot that Kicked You? still sing the in sources (artefacts and bodies that turn an “Ballad of Accounting” song. One of them said, “I only know three songs, this is number four!” event into fact) or archives (facts collected, Rachel from Artangel, who commissioned and thematized, and processed as documents and managed the project, was at a squat party in monuments) are neither neutral nor natural. Camden a few months ago, an open mic event, They are created. As such, they are not mere and someone had said, “I was involved in this presences or absences, but mentions or silences project a few years ago...”, gave this little of various kinds and degrees. By silence, I mean introduction and then played the song, so it’s an active and transitive process: one “silences” still germinating. Some natural collaborations a fact or an individual as a silencer silences a came up as well on the rehearsal days. There’s gun. One engages in the practice of silencing. no busker’s organization where people can come Mentions and silences are thus the active together, loads of buskers are quiet loner types dialectical counterparts of which history is the anyway. Even on the underground network, the synthesis.”3 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. AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 52

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It is at the back of the Jukebox of People Trying to I’ve known Fred for six years, he was only four when I Change the World, or maybe at the very front, met him. Fred and I spoke about the content of the that we find the song of “The Cutty Wren”. song “The Cutty Wren”, and did some research into Though its origins are unknown for certain, it is the Peasant’s Revolt. It was oddly appropriate, the song dated back the furthest in the Jukebox’s because Richard II, the King at that point, was catalogue. The story, which has innumerable fourteen years old and that’s one of the reasons the revolt happened. His tax men were trying to take variations on its lyrics, tells of two men on their control of things from this kid. Fred went off and did way to hunt for the diminutive wren, also known his own research, and got on with it. The day before as the “king of birds”. It has become known as the royal wedding in April, his primary school was the first protest song, sung in association with having a “royal” party, and he said to his mother, “I the peasant’s revolt of June 1381. But like the don’t want to go to it, because I’m anti-monarchist”. song, the origins of this claim are elusive, So he made a placard, and wore his ripped jeans as themselves mythologized. In a pamphlet an act of rebellion. I spoke with him about the wren, published in 1944, A.L. Lloyd, a writer and singer what the symbol of the wren is, and how there’s some central to the folk revival of the 1950s, gave a disagreement about what it means. He said he brief history of folk protest music. “The Cutty thought it represented the King. 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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 53

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Ruth Ewan, A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World, 2003 (ongoing project) AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:18 Página 54

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I bought the first jukebox from a pub in Sunderland. In Escape the Overcode, Brian Holmes states All the ones I’ve got from pubs really stink, of smoke. that, “when a territory of possibility emerges it You open them up and this smell just hits you. The changes the social map, like a landslide, a flood, jukebox in Seville, it’s the same, or a very similar or a volcano do in nature. The easiest way for model, to the one that’s in the Rover’s Return pub in society to protect its existing form is simple the television soap-opera, Coronation Street. It’s a denial, pretending the change never happened: very British jukebox; when people from other and that actually works in the landscape of countries see it, they say it looks like a cigarette mentalities. An affective territory disappears if it machine. The thing with CD jukeboxes is that they actually don’t hold that much material, so I constantly isn’t elaborated, constructed, modulated, have to edit. I could convert it to mp3, a digital differentiated, prolonged by new breakthroughs 5 jukebox, but then it’s changing the form. I quite like and conjunctions.” Within Ewan’s layered it being sort of in between technologies, it’s such an releases, resoundings, and reverberations, what uncomfortable proposition, the CD. It’s like the digital comes forward is the attempt to give sound to and analogue joining up together. Sound Leisure from these silences, to play them out loud so that Leeds make the oddest models, they’ve not gone for these elaborations, differentiations, and that Americana diner bubble jukebox, they just do breakthroughs might occur. Her work asks what quite wild designs in their own way, or at least they we make of the potential when we quietly catch did for a period in the 1980s-1990s. They’re still a few lyrics, humming words that carry producing, but they do these digital jukeboxes that something for us privately; can this moment are centrally controlled and you can’t just add your also have a wider meaning? Ewan reposes the own homebrew. That’s what someone called my CDs, paradox of how a song can potentially mean “homebrew” CDs. something both historically and personally, on how it can resonate on both levels at the same At the New Museum the staff – particularly the security and cleaning staff – really enjoyed listening time. It is at this juncture Ewan makes the space to it and all had their own favourite tracks. It was for a series of individual moments that gather to their piece of work, and when the museum opened the possibility of an active, aggregate cultural really early in the morning the cleaners were cleaning meaning in the present. the shop space and they’d turn it on to listen to it in the background. The New Museum kept it on after the 1. All quotes in bold come from an interview between Younger Than Jesus exhibition for another 6 months the artist and the author conducted on 2 May 2011. or so for the staff, because people at the front desk, 2. Mary Douglas, How Institutions Think. Syracuse, NY: and the security guys were like, “Yeah, Tool’s on Syracuse University Press, 1986, pp. 69-70. there!” There was a whole section of songs about 3. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, quoted in Charlotte Line, “Work”, so I hoped they’d be listening to union songs Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. but they were probably just listening to Beyoncé. 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. AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 55

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Ruth Ewan, Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked You?, 2007 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 56 Alonso Gil 11 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 57

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Libertarian Artist

Raj Kuter I have no desire to usurp a title that is not my Hamburg and Munich; from there he moved on own, that of the art critic, even if this role can to Venice and then, accompanied by Esther essentially be boiled down to “an honest Reguira, jumped across the pond to New York, exercise of the profession of seeing”, as Quico where the two lived from 1994 to 1998. Rivas said in one of his deprecations back in the “At the time, Robin Kahn and Kirby Gookin 1980s. I am here to speak of Loncho – or the were working on the Disappearing Act project, artist Alonso Gil, if you prefer – and of his work, thus called because all the works were ephemeral, and what I have seen in it from the perspective they could be eaten and drunk." Loncho recalls. of affinity. We have shared various artistic and “They also invited me to disappear, so they libertarian adventures, no doubt all the more produced my alarm clock concert which I had thrilling since Quico was there to complicate originally presented in Ceuta in ‘97 as part of the them: from the Salón del Carbón to Copilandia Almadraba project. In New York I did it at the and Archivo Q., the free practice of art and the Bound&Unbound Gallery (...) I used two free circulation of ideas have been their primary hundred speaking clocks that announced the common denominators. At the same time, I will time out loud... every hour, all in a display case also unravel the skein of a relationship that has a and with visiting hours, so people could go hear bearing on my chosen subject: that of art and the concert whenever it was convenient for flamenco as manifestations of an openly them: Symphony of the American Dream.” libertarian expressivity. Later, in Mexico (between 1999 and 2001), As in art, what is sung in flamenco music is Loncho experimented with magic mushrooms a reconstruction of life – an unorganized life, because he was interested in their ability to with no agenda or message, that leaves traces heighten perception and expand the senses. and intuitions in its wake. Art has more to do He related his experiences in a text entitled Los with a process than with the usual objects we Santitos y el ocio personalizado (The Little Saints find hanging on walls or lying in dust-free and Personalized Recreation), which opened display cases. For anarchy, too, the creative with the following words: process, the quest, has always been more “Journeys have always opened doors to new important than the end result,1 the finished work ways of seeing the world. (...) When you take a which, because it is finished, denies all the drug-induced trip, such as I took with magic richness of its potential, all that it could have mushrooms, the journey becomes an expedition been and no longer is. With regard to flamenco, and takes you to another place where perceptions everyone knows that no two songs are alike and differ from those found in the sphere of the that a flamenco singer never sings the same experience of reality. / The best part is that those copla in an identical manner. Flamenco song perceptions heighten the senses, and we begin to defies systematization and notation; traditional understand reality with other parameters. (…) sheet music is technically incapable of capturing Because of this ability to create new and its nuances. Ever versatile, it is not repetitive and different images of the world… I decided to refuses to settle for mimesis, although for some investigate with hallucinogens…” time now the term improvisation has been His pupils grew more sensitive on these trips, missing from its vocabulary. with the probing capacity of one who intuits that However, we can speak of experimentation reality has many facets. “The possible is part of and search. Loncho began his quest back in the the real”, as Rafael Barrett, that lost boy of the 1980s, setting out on journeys of initiation to Generation of 1898 who became an anarchist in explore the Old Continent with his inseparable the Americas and embraced the struggle of the companions, the artists Federico Guzmán and disinherited to reclaim their freedom, once said. Victoria Gil. His first German foray took him to And he added, “Sooner or later, time will bring

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us the possible, and perhaps the impossible.” and anarchism – which are found combined in “Art and anarchy all day long” is the formula Alonso Gil’s working method: “The alchemist, proposed by Loncho, which can be summed up like the artist, is the archetype of the rebel not in: daily contact with the artistic act, non- only because he seeks the youth of the gods and competitive games, presiding over or enriching their power to create, but because he has every event in life. understood that youth is a creator, and hence that Art operates in a similar way, through revolution and youth are two aspects of the same searching, combining and crystallizing, as a matter. Just as the mind is the most evolved form process that unveils hidden realities. And the of matter, so revolution is the most evolved form artist is one who reveals the different possibilities. of youth. Revolution is man’s youth...” Rimbaud granted poets the capacity to translate I believe that Loncho, the libertarian artist, mystery into will (after freeing themselves of knows that youth is not necessarily diminished reason), but it was Isidore Ducasse, Count of by the degradation of matter. Since boyhood he Lautréamont – of whom Loncho painted a has worked to pass that revolutionary, critical, magnificent portrait which he showcased in the playful, effective and gratuitous creative activity exhibition 6 asaltos 6 (6 Rounds 6) at the Suffix on to others. And he sings as he works, as my Gallery in Triana, Seville, in 2008, converted into readers will soon discover. 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 The Singing Artist for everyone. The widespread rumour of flamenco is nothing less than the shared life of humanity, Some artists, though not musicians themselves, and the sole task of the singer (or the artist) is to research and work with sound as just one more pass it on to those who have not already heard. component of their work, attempting to place it Loncho says, “I, like many of you, am an in a new aesthetic dimension. Some of Alonso artist who works 24 hours a day; I work even Gil’s projects fit this description, although I when I sleep”. Art is not a 9-to-5 job where one would not say that he is a “sound artist” in the can clock in and out. The artist’s workday never usual sense of the term. He is also interested in ends. And although anyone who creates by the latest artistic trends that seek to create inventing is theoretically an artist, art requires a multisensory effects. However, from my constant sensibility and observation, a profound perspective I would venture to say that he is appreciation of things with finely-tuned more an artist who can be heard – in other perceptive skills – concentration in dispersion, words, a singing artist. centrifugation. Allow me to explain. My first impression of In a text about Alonso Gil written on the Loncho’s painting was that it sings – and how. occasion of his impressive 2006 exhibition/ I am not saying that Loncho has ever deliberately installation La celda grande (The Big Cell) at the attempted to “toot his own horn”. Often MEIAC in Badajoz, rich in libertarian irradiations, combined with photo printing techniques, his Quico Rivas accurately described Loncho as “a painting, with its amalgamated waves of flowing worker who paints (...) with the attitude of an hues (garden greens, bellicose pinks, alchemist: the artifex who, in the esoteric aquamarines, turquoises and sky blues) or tradition, is both demiurge (creator) and explosive, dazzling, unheard-of colours (new technites (manual labourer)”. And Quico called pigments and phosphorescent tones), sing with upon Arturo Schwarz, friend and cataloguer of remarkable joy while also encouraging us to view Marcel Duchamp, to remind us of the four the world critically. Happily, the artist has long convergent paths – Surrealism, tantra, alchemy since ceased to be that dark figure tormented by AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 59

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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 Alonso Gil, Silvio, 2008 and analogies. If music is, as Langer asserted, is “a tonal analogy of emotive life”,2 then the same is true of painting. In all of this there is a large element of fun, However, we belong to a generation (or which is nothing to sniff at; if we didn’t have fun, whatever you want to call it) that grew up to the what would become of us in this life? As Nietzsche rhythm of pop, punk and techno music, and warned us, in our world the “spirit of gravity” has many of us formed bands of an inventive and progressively displaced the “gay science” – in experimental (but not commercial) nature, other words, fun science. Laughter as a critical blending vibrations with theatrics, imbued with form of direct action, as Quico Rivas proposed, rock animalism and happening-esque gesturality is found in many of Loncho Gil’s works. In a in equal measure as an antidote against the over- performative line we have the example of specialization of a society that categorizes, Chigate, a masked band of musicians and deejays delimits task and channels preoccupations (and which, according to Loncho, was primarily an whose prototype is the expert in his most amusement: we turned the machines up as high aberrant disciplinary specialization). Many have as they would go, we recorded the interminable dismissed this activity as a mere hobby or even sessions, and then we performed for a live an extravagance, arguing that the artist could audience. The whole idea was to make noise and only really shine or be a true artist in one facet of use the environment. his life. It seems to me that the artist has many A very different kind of distortion takes us to facets, and although he may invest more time in the urban intervention that Loncho and Francis one – or even two or three – they are all Gomila presented at Madrid Abierto in 2007 complementary. This comes as no surprise to under the title Guantanamera. The work has Loncho, who is skilled at using what we might resurfaced in his show at the Carthusian basically call tools. Monastery in Seville this year, which offers a AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 60

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Alonso Gil and Francis Gomila, Guantanamera, 2007

selection of past creations and new productions. transformations and distortions. The artist uses With an evident social and political a variety of media (paint, video, etc.) and mixes preoccupation, the artist reflects here on the use them up, experimenting with the formal of music as an instrument of torture. The title possibilities to achieve a broader expressivity. refers to the maximum-security prison at Imbued with an irremediable social Guantanamo, a place not of this world that engagement, Alonso Gil understands that these operates outside the framework of international media are weapons. Painting like a man entering law. His next intervention in the public space, the ring, with boxing gloves or the handled the more kitsch and convention-defying palette knife of the working-class artist, the Tunning cofrade (2008), was a mobile project artifex... Loncho engages in many different that involved driving around the city of Seville in games of equivalency with an attitude that is a tuned car – a car modified to the user’s liking halfway between ludic and Luddite. Swinging and equipped with a powerful sound system back and forth between formal research, the which he used to blast recordings by the modes and manners of unveiling, and its different bands of the religious Holy Week function as a “social sensor”, art acts as an brotherhoods that had been remixed and spun antidote against the common place; it has a together with flamenco, electronic music, punk, liberating power of inertia. So does flamenco, in rock and techno. the sense that it overflows with a contagious Montage is undoubtedly the great invention creative rhythm that is caught by all who see or of the 20th century, used in every field from film hear it. Music in its tribal sense, an expression of and photography to visual and sound art. Much collective merrymaking. And what is a party of the best contemporary art is based on without music? I’d really like to know. AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 61

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Flamenco and the Visual Arts exotic appeal and ability to spark curiosity, and despite their authenticity they are an endangered Throughout the two centuries of its existence, species because there is no room for them in the flamenco’s relationship with the visual arts has spectacle of the cultural industry. I am referring been less intense and productive than most to the outskirts, the marginalized, far removed people think. Painting, engraving, poster art and from fashion circles and the international art photography saw flamenco primarily as a theme world. Other set-ups. If flamenco is a vital that they could use to their own ends, recreating exhalation before the blinding spotlights of the characters, scenes and stages. Street musicians stage, then Loncho is determined to explore its and travelling flamenco artists were the ordinary, everyday space, particularly the part protagonists of the drawings that Doré produced we call making a living – earning one’s bread- on his trip to Spain in 1862. There are many and-butter is such a tiresome, tricky thing. other examples of this folksy illustration, which Seville has seen its share of these ways of life, or began when flamenco song moved from the of joyful survival in an increasingly hostile and neighbourhood greengrocers’ to the taverns, and precarious world, of this back-alley scheming. from there to the cabarets, eventually spreading On its way through the Puerta de la Carne, a across the peninsula and throughout the world. traditional gathering place for rogues, rascals From the moment Alonso Gil first settled in and beggars since the days of Cervantes, now Seville, his eye was drawn to the figure of the gentrified thanks to urban renewal plans tainted flamenco hustler or street performer, and this by the inevitable suspicion of speculation and curiosity was re-modernized in a dual sense. overrun by the hordes of tourist terrorism, the Born in the province of Badajoz, one of the “Orchestra of Miracles” and its daily shining natural boundaries of flamenco territory, moments provide ample proof of this. Loncho’s interest in capturing the intangible In this vein, An Error Occurred (2001) offers aspect of this atmosphere was more of an innate us a video recording of the performances of characteristic than something acquired over several street musicians who present their time. This was not the Romantic quest for “expertise” to anyone who wants to listen exoticism – conveniently staged with background (though most would rather shut them up). It is and props – that so appealed to European generally assumed that music “aims for the travellers. On the contrary, Loncho was ear” – well, this kind aims for the pocket. “The determined to invert the traditional perspective. Orchestra of Miracles,” writes Quico Rivas, “is In Flasheados (Cree en las ruinas; pronto serán made of up of those musicians whom we often ruinas pintorescas) (Flashed [Believe in the give a few pence, not so that they will play but so Ruins; Soon They Will Be Picturesque Ruins]), a that they will go away, not so that they will sing video shot in 2003 in Seville, stigmatized and but so that they will be quiet, for the specular stereotyped as the prototypical tourist town, he vision they offer us is often quite unbearable.” revealed the contrast between this “collective” “The gypsies have always gotten I-don’t- of foreigners – the tourists – and other kinds of know-how-much from I-don’t-know-what, this foreign presences in our cities, such as from that”, say Jorge Cano and Carlos Simón, the immigrants, refugees or exiles. heartland friends who broadcast La Voz de tus While the quintessential predator that is the Muertos each week, a very jondo flamenco radio tourist entertains himself by consuming a show. Flamenco song must be inspired; the standardized cultural difference, Loncho turns important thing is for the song to come out as it his attention to both the foreigners and to the is. When flamenco is sung to please an audience, displaced natives, those who have been it becomes entertainment. When it is sung to overlooked or forgotten. These have lost their lighten the workload, balancing out a physical AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 62

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activity with an emotional one, it is a situational Los abandonados (The Abandoned Ones) hope art form, the product of life experience rather to come into focus once more. This photographic than of performance. Ruskin defined art as the series created by Alonso Gil for PHotoEspaña’09 expression of man’s joy in his work, and this is was a product of the time he spent with the precisely what La felicidad en el trabajo (Joy in Sahrawi people at the refugee camps of the Work, 2008) is all about. As its title indicates, this Algerian Hamada in Tindouf, after participating documentary-style video installation addresses in the Artifariti International Art Encounters in the idea of finding joy in work through flamenco the Free Zone of the Western Sahara. To produce song. This work, produced in Andalusia and these almost ghostly photographs, Gil wreaked Extremadura, shows (on eight monitors with havoc on the chemical developing process, simultaneous images but independent tinkering with the liquids and making sure to do soundtracks) people in various professions who a sloppy job on the fixation, in order to achieve sing as they go about their work. The song grows fading and disappearing effects in the images. In a fainter as the muscles concentrate on the task at paradoxical and metaphorical way, this technique hand. The song’s rhythm matches that of the highlighted the disappearance of conflicts that manual labour; the power conveyed by the make the power-that-be uncomfortable in the former drives the latter. mass media. It is to this spontaneously emerging rhythmic Upon his return, Federico Guzmán, Loncho’s beat of language and labour, where creation is travelling companion on the sandy paths of the 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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 63

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Sahara together with his sister and fellow artist Loncho has just opened a new studio on a Victoria Gil (who, by the way, is now presenting back street in the old Jewish quarter, very near the her portraits of Sahrawi friends sketched against Puerta de la Carne where he lives and works. a bright yellow background), said, “The trip [to After a long period spent shifting, coming, going the Sahrawi camps] was like moving towards a and sharing on necessary nomadic wanderings mirage that showed us a warped reflection of our that took him to the desert, it seems that the time society of ostentation, waste and ignorance. We has come to combine what he brought back from passed through it and found among the Sahrawi his latest travels and experiences, rediscovering people a joy, generosity and endurance in the his facet as an alchemist. Now we must look face of adversity that we have long since forward to discovering his developing process. 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 1. Quico Rivas, “Alonso Gil: El alquimista en su celda”. Sahara is the road to our own freedom.” Grazalema, Seville, Paris, December 2006 / January 2007. Flamenco, with its rich legacy, also speaks to 2. S. K. Langer, Feeling and Form. New York: Scribner & us of the need to assert that those dead are not Sons, 1953. really dead, that they populate and inhabit, and 3. Francisco Lira, “La felicidad en el trabajo. El cante y los that without them we would be a wasteland of oficios: Quien canta su mal espanta. Sobre algunos tientos plastic and shopping-centre glitz. visuales de Loncho Gil”. Seville, La Carbonería, August 2008.

Alonso Gil, La felicidad en el trabajo (Joy in Work), 2008 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 64 Matt Stokes 11 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 65

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No Way Back

Matthew Collin Nervous, pure nervous. A twilit Victorian street Industrial towns in decline became techno in the Lace Market district of Nottingham, at meccas, like Blackburn, the focus of the illegal that time still dour and ill-used, a few years party scene in the North West due to its away from gentrification. Fear and anticipation. abundance of disused factories in which a sound One of us is holding a couple of bottles of cheap system and lights could be quickly and cheaply supermarket champagne, the other, a small bag installed. Locks cracked, power on, people in; of white pills. A siren wails in the distance: we and then in the morning a quick escape into the hold still for a second or two, then hurry across breaking daylight as if nothing had ever the road to the photographic studio in a disused happened. The illegality was part of the thrill, textile factory where we’re about to hold our and it felt like some kind of victory when the first illegal party. The summer of 1990, only a flash of blue lights didn’t bring the music to an few days after parliament adopted new untimely end. legislation to clamp down on outlaw raves. Media reports in the late 1980s likened the Good timing... M25 motorway which encircles London, to a Inside, a sweet surge of electronic noise as kind of carousel of oblivion, a merry-go-round the needle falls on the first record – “LFO” by from which ravers would spin off, hurtling down LFO – and when the bassline drops hard, country lanes, towards parties deep in the Home shuddering through the white room, a feeling of Counties, only discovering the secret location at relief and rising joy: it’s going to be alright. This the last minute through frantic calls to the is how it started, how it would always start. organizers from roadside telephone boxes (at The photo studio was a rather conventional that time, mobile phones were relatively new, venue by the standards of the time. After the expensive and rare). It was hard to match the Ecstasy-fuelled dance scene began to sweep experience of rolling to the peak of some rural through Britain in 1988 – “acid house”, we called hill, to see lasers strafing the darkened skyline it then, before it became known as the “rave and hear the soft thunder of sub-bass rhythms; a scene” and then simply “dance culture” – people fairground big wheel spinning its glow through began to search for ever more outlandish places the darkness, behind it the black tower of in which to hold illegal parties where they would speakers already pulsing with sound… and the not be bound by the strictures of Britain’s World promise of a long night’s journey into dawn… War One-era licensing laws, which at that time But while the huge, spectacular events, with dictated that most nightclubs must close by their “top DJs”, “blinding lasers” and “turbo 2am. So they occupied derelict warehouses, sound systems” (as the technicolor flyers used to farmers’ fields, aircraft hangars, film studios – say) were staged close to Britain’s biggest cities, anywhere to establish a temporary autonomous people were doing things for themselves on a zone where time would be suspended in a much more personal and altruistic level all blissful frenzy of noise, light and writhing around Britain, putting on small parties which bodies. In the case of the outlaw ravers were often free, or subsidized by drug sales. Like documented in Matt Stokes’ Real Arcadia, a cave the Cave Raves, they didn’t achieve national in the Lake District was transformed into a notoriety, although they became a vital focus for nocturnal Wonderland, something that one of emerging alternative cultures in their areas. They them called “a nightclub in a mountain”, but were products of sheer enthusiasm, attempts to which was so much more than that to many of democratize metropolitan bohemia by taking those whose lives it touched. electronic music and psychedelic drug culture Rave culture moved into spaces abandoned into the heartland of the “beer monster” and the during the recession of the 1980s, when Britain’s ritzy discotheque. Or so many thought at the manufacturing industries were devastated. time.

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Yet more parties took place in far less Rave culture was rooted in new technologies – glamorous surroundings: the back rooms of musical and chemical – but it also sampled and pubs or high street nightclubs whose tacky décor remixed ideas, as well as sounds, from a variety and dodgy names still reflected their origins in of pop-cult sources: the Saturday Night Fever pre-Ecstasy, six-pints-and-a-Bacardi-and-coke traditions of gay disco and the Amphetamine- nightlife. When the Cave Crew weren’t raving in fuelled northern soul scene, the do-it-yourself the quarry, they frequented the rather more ethics of punk, and vague hippy philosophies traditional surroundings of places like the Stag’s handed down from 1960s psychedelia (although Head pub in Bowness-on-Windermere. This was cut loose from the protest politics of that era). hardly unusual. People would drive for miles However, it could not help but reflect the time of around the Midlands and the North West to pack its birth, at the high watermark of Thatcherite into a glitzy discotheque called Shelleys in free-market materialism: this was an Stoke-on-Trent; a venue called The Osbourne in entrepreneurial culture which was energized Manchester which looked like a working men’s by the small-time business activities of party club and became a notorious techno sweatbox promoters, record producers and drug dealers. known as The Thunderdome; even the first acid And yet while the rave scene enthusiastically house club in Britain, The Project, was held at embraced Margaret Thatcher’s urge to an unremarkable suburban “nitespot” in an entrepreneurialism, it implicitly rejected her assertion unfashionable district of south London. In that there was “no such thing as society”. It was driven between the rave spectaculars, the party had to by a deep and powerful desire not only for go on. Intoxicated by the moment, nobody transcendence, but also for community: to be part of wanted the music to stop – it felt somehow as something greater, a feeling amplified by the empathy- necessary as a heartbeat, and just about enhancing effects of Ecstasy. There was also a anywhere would do. There seemed to be, as widespread desire for it to “mean something”, Hunter S. Thompson once said about 1960s although nobody could really give a convincing California, madness at any hour, in any explanation of exactly what it meant, and the search for direction. meaning was in some cases little more than a human It was a time of profound optimism, and need to rationalize what seemed to be such a profound derangement. The names of some of momentous experience. Hence some of the myths that the raves tell the story: Sunrise, Live the Dream, grew up around Ecstasy, like the suggestion that it Fantazia, The Trip, Apocalypse Now. Normal ended the football violence of the 1980s when loved-up rules seemed to be suspended – an impression hooligans from opposing teams began to hug each heightened by drugs, youthful innocence and other at raves instead of slashing each other with razor- the sense of belonging to some kind of secret blades, or the belief that it promoted multi-cultural society. Stokes’ interviews for Real Arcadia tolerance. capture comments which could have been made Effectively, in the absence of any ideological by so many others over the decade: “You know gurus, people brought their own beliefs to the like when you were a kid and you go up to party, and saw the rave scene in terms of those someone in the playground and you’d say beliefs. So it became home to some dedicated ‘alright mate, what’s your name, what do you do, anarchists who believed it was part of a rebel where do you come from...’ And that’s what it crusade against the capitalist system, and to a was like. There were no inhibitions whatsoever... few intrepid young Conservatives who saw it as everyone was on the same level, and everyone an expression of radical libertarianism – as well was really happy...” It was a feeling that many as to many more who would speak vaguely about thought would last forever – although of course “sharing” and “togetherness” and “love”, about it could not and did not. celebrating as one, beyond the British divides of AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 67

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Matt Stokes, Real Arcadia, 2003 (ongoing). Exhibition view

class, race and regional origins. However, and the calls for “something to be done”, perhaps for the majority of those involved, there followed by police action and government was no attempt at analysis or any need for it: legislation. But it turned out that much of the this was simply the most exciting thing that had agitated media coverage simply acted as an happened to them in their young lives. advertisement. All-night dancing, hypnotic The spectacular rise of this new youth rhythms, mind-warping chemicals: many found culture was hard to ignore, and inevitably the such sweet but forbidden fruits tempting backlash started almost as quickly as the scene indeed. itself, with the first shock-horror newspaper The police were initially caught unprepared headlines and reports of police raids appearing by the strange stirrings in the countryside, but towards the end of 1988, only a year after the eventually they set up specially-equipped units first acid house parties were held. After that, the to combat what they prosaically referred to as outrage flowed in consecutive waves, following “pay parties”. The experience of the Cave Crew the traditional sequence of moral panics about in the Lake District was not unusual: concerned renegade cults corrupting the minds of Britain’s reports in local newspapers and on regional youth. First the scandalized press despatches television about the threat to young people’s AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 68

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safety, then the erection of police roadblocks – after taking Ecstasy, mainly people in their teens “We are not killjoys, we are trying to preserve or early twenties who thought they were about life”, the words of the local police chief, were to have the time of their lives but ended up in typical of the time – and finally the suggestion the ground. Many ravers were reluctant to that the caves should be dynamited to put a stop blame their beloved, life-affirming “happy to the madness. By 1997, parliament had passed pills”, pointing out that most of those who died three separate pieces of legislation aimed at had expired through heatstroke after not curbing the wilder excesses of the rave scene. drinking enough water. But the fact remained When combined with the introduction of more that if they hadn’t gone out and taken Ecstasy, liberal licensing laws, they contributed to both they would probably still be alive. Year by year, a the ultimate commercialization of the scene as little more innocence was lost. The story of the well as the radicalization of a small but Cave Raves, again, serves as a kind of parable dedicated outlaw fringe who even now continue for these times: some of the people connected to travel the roads staging illegal parties – with the Lake District party crew have since although none of the new laws would halt the served prison time. One is dead. irrepressible growth of Britain’s drug culture. The dance scene reached its peak as a mass And it was inevitable that any culture based movement sometime in the mid-1990s. But on illegal drug use would have even more apart from fuelling a mass drug culture in serious repercussions – legal, medical and Britain which continued to grow even psychological. Many people ended up with afterwards, its legacy remains hazy and difficult criminal records; everyone knew someone who to assess, particularly for those who were had been arrested after being caught with a bag involved. There is the music, of course, captured of pills, and those who thought they were simply in hundreds of wonderful recordings and helping friends to have a good night out soon thousands more dreadful ones. There are the realized that the law regarded them as drug careers in pop culture and media which grew dealers like any others. The fact that Ecstasy was out of the scene. There was the development of illegal also attracted those who could organize computer-aided do-it-yourself creativity and large-scale imports of the drug: serious spontaneous, ad hoc networking which fed into criminals, men with weapons and few scruples, the obsessions of the internet age, while the and – as in the case of the Cave Raves – low-life technology used by outlaw raves was deployed thugs wielding baseball bats who wanted to with more serious intent by the environmental make a little easy cash by using their muscle to road-protest movement of the 1990s. “tax” illicit parties. Yet few wanted to talk about And yet even now, two decades after the first the criminal empires which were being built acid house record sounded its urgent call to upon their pleasures. action, the lingering question –“so what did it The drug itself had its own complications all mean?” – still evades an answer. “They were too; although Ecstasy wasn’t addictive, for some special times, really special times”, one of the people it represented an introduction to the Cave Crew says – but was that all that they were? wider world of recreational chemistry. Some Many people went through life-changing ravers who chased the buzz a little too hard experiences – they are the ones who still glow developed psychological problems – “lost it”, to with nostalgia while talking about how they use the slang of the time – and a few, endlessly discovered new ways of seeing the world, found seeking the next rush, became addicted to Heroin. routes out of dead-end jobs, forged new But then there was worse: some time around friendships and relationships. But others will the start of the 1990s, it became clear that small speak of mental illness, prison and death, and but significant numbers of people were dying it’s no surprise that some of the people who AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 69

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Matt Stokes, Real Arcadia (Archive), 2003 (ongoing)

Stokes tried to contact for Real Arcadia simply Perhaps it was no more than a moment of pure didn’t want to talk about those times again: for communal abandon, lost in the music with no whatever reason, they didn’t want to remember. way back, transported into raptures beyond And then there are those who say it was nothing rational thought. Perhaps that, in itself, was more than youthful hedonism, a necessarily more than we ever could have hoped for. limited period of liberty before entering the adult world of responsibilities and obligations. © Matthew Collin 2007. Originally published in Matt But perhaps what it really “meant” can never Stokes: Lost in the Rhythm. Edinburgh: Collective be captured in words – and to do so would only Gallery and Sunderland: Art Editions North, 2007. devalue the intensity of that indefinable feeling. Reprinted with permission of the author. AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 70

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Matt Stokes, The Gainsborough Packet, 2009 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 71

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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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 72

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their words, but not because they have any 20th century, when academics and classically particular authenticity. One could guess that a trained musicians like Francis Child, Cecil great modern-day pop song like Rehab by Amy Sharp and Vaughan Williams sought to save the Winehouse will be a traditional ballad of the songs of pre-industrial, rural Britain from 22nd century because it gives a representation extinction by notating them, using their of our contemporary reality. These are the songs melodies for classical compositions and that, according to the great English composer encouraging their use in schools. Cecil Sharp in Ralph Vaughan Williams, “lived in the minds of particular wound his way through pubs, unlettered country men, who unknown to the vicarages and farms in Somerset in search of squire and the parson were singing their own songs passed down through oral history that songs”. captured the land and its people. The second Holy Grail is the traditional Sharp had passed 40 before he discovered singer. This is the man or woman, ideally there even was such a thing as folk music. On elderly, low born and living in the countryside, 22 August 1903, he was visiting the vicarage of with a repertoire of ballads they learned at their his friend Charles Marson in the village of parents’ knee. They might be farm-workers or Hambridge in Somerset. Marson’s gardener, a gypsies and few will make any money out of labourer’s son from the neighbouring village of singing, which is a natural outlet for daily Westport called John England, was singing a expression. The argument is that someone like song called The Seeds of Love. England probably the late Shropshire stone-waller Fred Jordan is learned the song, which has pretty words about a traditional singer, while Maddy Prior of gathering up the seeds of love in the springtime medieval folk-rock minstrels Steeleye Span is as small birds sweetly sing, when he was not – even if they sing the same songs – because labouring in Dorset as a young man, and didn’t the first is the real thing and the second is an think too hard on it. To Sharp it was a entertainer. revelation. Over the next two years he collected This is a fantasy, albeit an attractive one. 1,500 songs in Somerset alone, which he then Fred Jordan was a great entertainer, hence his published in the five-volume edition Somerset appeal. The Scottish traveller Jeannie Robertson Folk Songs. In 1911 he founded The English was one of the great ballad singers, frequently Folk Dance Society, which remains in operation recorded by the BBC after the folklorist Hamish in Camden, North London to this day, Henderson discovered her in Aberdeen in the continuing Sharp’s goal of preserving the sword late 50s, but her singing style got ever more dances, morris dances, folk tunes and ancient theatrical as her fame grew. There’s an amazing pagan traditions of England that had, until depth of feeling to the way the mid-60s singer Sharp and fellow Victorian collectors came Anne Briggs approaches old tunes like along, often existed only in the shared memory Blackwaterside and She Moves Through the Fair, of the people that performed them. and the fact that she was a revival singer who Sharp came with an agenda, though. He did didn’t grow up with these songs but discovered want to preserve the folk music of rural Britain, them in her late teens in no way lessens the but only in a version that could be taught in power of her voice. There is no such thing as schools without fear of reprisals from outraged authenticity, and the folk world is full of rules parents or churchmen – and a song like The about what you can and cannot do, in an Seeds of Love is quite obviously about sex. attempt to preserve something that never “When every English child is, as a matter of existed in the first place. course, made acquainted with the folk songs of The idea of folk music as a genre or culture his country then, from whatever class, the really started in the mid to late 19th and early musician of the future may spring in the AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 73

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national musical idiom”, he writes in English spirit can take any form and withstand the Folk Songs, but he could hardly offer a vicissitudes of time while remaining essentially traditional Somerset ballad like The Keeper, the same. It’s actually impossible to define which celebrates rape, to the music teachers of since it really comes down to a personal primary schools the country over in the hope of reaction you might have. When I hear the getting their young wards to perform it at the Yorkshire singer Mike Waterson singing the end of term pageant. So he sanitized the words, supernatural love story Tamlyn in his really turning what was once organic into something weird and frankly totally out of tune nasal way, refined and fashioned, and sharpened up the for example, it never fails to make me shiver. melodies which, having previously only existed There are other versions of that same song that in the oral tradition, changed according to the make me long for the excitement of filling out person singing them. But by notating English my tax return, but to say that one is more folk songs and writing piano parts he created a authentic than the other because of my own body of national music for schoolchildren to personal reaction to it is meaningless. learn, thereby strengthening the artistry and Shirley Collins’s 1970 rendition of the tragic identity of England itself. He was also adapting loneliness song Are You Going To Leave Me has the songs to reflect his own contemporary a heartbreaking power – and the fact that reality, which the malleability of folk song Collins had just been left by her husband at the allows for. time of recording has something to do with Cecil Sharp and his ilk believed that they that. Applying rules to something as anarchic had found the authentic voice of Britain. Half a and haphazard as folk music is pointless. It’s century later a new generation upheld only that feeling we are left with. traditional music as the authentic voice of the One of the most important aspects of the working people. While the American folklorist old ballads of Britain is that they are there to Alan Lomax travelled throughout Britain serve you. Nobody owns them, and although making field recordings of traditional singers, plenty of people have tried, nobody has the hard-line communists such as the journalist right to tell anyone else how to approach them. and broadcaster A.L. Lloyd and the actor, One argument in the folk world is that to sing playwright and singer Ewan MacColl began to these songs in ways that veer away from what lay down rules on how folk music had to be has gone before is to show disrespect to the approached. Together they formed Centre 42, a traditional singers whose notated or recorded touring arts festival that aimed to ensure folk versions introduced them to the world at large music was performed throughout the working in the first place. This is totally spurious. Alan class towns of Britain. MacColl and his wife Lomax’s field recordings from the 50s and 60s, Peggy Seeger started The Singer’s Club in which are now often used as the guidelines on London, where performers were only meant to how to approach the old ballads, were the result sing songs from the place they came from; a of chance encounters, usually in pubs, and the joke, considering MacColl was from Salford but songs came out the way they did because the sang in a Scottish accent in honour of his people singing them were frequently drunk out ancestral roots. of their minds. If you look through the It seems that folk music, like religion, is traditional material Vaughan Williams collected, forever about rules, but the great appeal is that you will find ten different versions of the same it has something that cannot be tamed. The best song. Nobody knows which the original one is. ballads and the best singers contain a spirit that There is no such thing as a definitive version. can be compared to the Holy Ghost: impossible Over the spring and summer of 2008 to get a hold of and only there if you feel it. That I undertook a mission to travel through Britain AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 75

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and make field recordings myself, in an attempt singing songs that stretch deep into the past and to discover if there was such a thing as folk that, with their universal themes of love, music in the age of mass communication. And betrayal, hardship and mystery, belong to the what I found was that as long as you ignore the present – and to all of us. old ideas of authenticity, folk music has never To some extent, folk music does belong to a been healthier. Everywhere I went I found subculture. It remains outside of the mainstream diversity and a musical connection to the land and has its own community, although perhaps and its past, but an expression of a present not the one of popular cliché (bearded men reality too. smelling faintly of wee). And its great strength is One encounter sticks in the memory in the fact that it can’t be captured. It’s rather like a particular. In the heart of Bradford’s Muslim butterfly. It is only beautiful, it only has value, neighbourhood I met a shy, quietly spoken 21- when it is flying free. Pin it down and you render year-old woman called Stephanie Hladowski. it lifeless. The daughter of Polish immigrants, Stephanie discovered that she loved singing after landing the role of Dorothy in a school production of Originally published in Matt Stokes: The Gainsborough The Wizard of Oz. A few years later she heard Packet &c. London: Zabludowicz Collection, 2009. the folk-rock group Pentangle’s version of Willie Reprinted with permission of the author. 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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 76

11 to 21 11 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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 77

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Towards the Transformation of Ways of Life

Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes Why, one might ask, was this group exhibition example) and socioeconomic (the birth and given the title La Chanson? The show, which expansion of what for years was the most features a variety of visual and sound powerful cultural industry in the world, installations, takes its name from the French responsible for the rise and subsequent music movement of the 1950s and 60s propagation of intangible capitalism). spearheaded by Édith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Boris Consequently, as a collective exhibition La Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco, Georges Chanson attempts to reveal how the personal Brassens and Léo Ferré, among others. It was and the political can be combined in a single not chosen in an attempt to draw parallels musical format – the melodic song – reused as a between past and present, but rather to medium by countless contemporary artists who highlight something essential to most of the see it as a way to challenge pop culture using a protagonists of the chanson movement: the cultural format that is deeply ingrained in our juxtaposition of opposing elements which they everyday lives and has effected numerous used quite naturally in their songs. For example: changes in both the private and public realms. the use of irony combined with melodrama; a Not only does the chanson proclaim, like the wholehearted dedication to romantic themes feminist movement, that the personal without ever forgetting their political (including love) is political, but it also tells us counterparts; simplicity and directness in that life brings these apparently antithetical conjunction with theatricality and metaphor; themes together in a perfectly natural way. The and an intense interest in personal emotions song, the chanson, the melodious tune, pop accompanied by an equally intense concern for music, or what you will, has comprised the social issues. These conflicting elements, soundtrack of our lives for years, but it has also combined with apparent ease by the chanson aided and abetted profound changes in our movement, are the focal point of this collective mentality and way of life on countless occasions. exhibition. Like its companion shows in the Even now, in the midst of a sector-wide crisis session dedicated to song as a force of social and the loss of its hegemony as the leading transformation, this exhibition attempts to cultural industry, pop music continues to analyze the often catalytic role that pop music appeal to contemporary artists as a powerful has played in recent decades, triggering major tool of communication, propaganda and changes at both the individual and collective transformation. This group exhibition features levels. several such artists, creators who in recent years While the influence of rock music on have addressed the theme of the song from contemporary art has already been evaluated in different perspectives and using different several exhibitions – most notably Sympathy for aesthetic and conceptual approaches. the Devil, a title borrowed from Godard’s film The work entitled Concierto para puño about the Rolling Stones, at the Chicago MCA alzado (Concert for a Raised Fist, 2007) by Juan in 2007 – this show aims to reassess the crucial Pérez Agirregoikoa is about a choir, a rather influence of pop music movements, and of song monotonic ensemble of deep male voices. in particular, on the changes that took place in Seeking inspiration in the musical traditions of the second half of the 20th century. These his native Basque Country, the artist worked changes were cultural, affecting individual and with an ochote (vocal octet) which performed a group customs, ways of expressing sexuality, of number of popular Spanish and Basque tunes dressing, of relating to others, and of thinking whose lyrics had been altered. The artist and sharing certain moments, as well as socio- changed the words in order to alter the meaning political (inspiring or associated with certain of the songs: the audiences recognized the labour movements and collective protests, for melody but not the lyrics. The strangeness of the AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 78

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experience was accentuated by the fact that the way of seeing and experiencing the world. new lyrics were actually quotes from the works Jérôme Bel also appropriates all kinds of songs – of French materialist philosophers like Jacques tunes that we have heard throughout our lives, Lacan. This new protest song about revolution willingly or unwillingly, accepting them or and authority bears a certain similarity to John hating them as a gift or a curse from the music Baldessari’s 1972 recording entitled Baldessari industry. Bel’s background is in contemporary Sings LeWitt. In this performance recorded on dance, and his approach to pop music focuses video, Baldessari made a modification that on how this music is perceived and received by produces a sense of defamiliarization when it its audiences. The Show Must Go On is one of is watched again. In his day, Baldessari also his best-known works and has been performed changed the words to well-known American around the world. In this exhibition, visitors songs – including the national anthem – and will be able to view certain moments of the replaced them with a series of pronouncements performance, which in its entirety includes a DJ on art made by conceptual artist Sol LeWitt. In spinning famous songs (from Queen to David this specific recording, the new lyrics were sung Bowie), a group of actors/dancers on stage, and by John Baldessari himself, with the stated the audience who identifies with them and intention of making LeWitt’s maxims easier to becomes emotionally involved, as we all have understand; however, despite its apparent some kind of reaction to music that we’ve heard seriousness, the piece has an undercurrent of a thousand times before. Meanwhile, Mika irony and mockery that is also present in the Taanila investigates the world of piped music – work by Juan Pérez Agirregoikoa. Another specifically focusing on an American company contemporary artist with ties to Baldessari’s called Muzak which specializes in this field – historic creation is Annika Ström – whose work and how it has been used to achieve certain is featured in an individual exhibition at the goals, primarily of an economic nature, and CAAC – and her concomitance with the especially to boost productivity on the job or conceptual. However, Ström’s manner of relating stimulate consumerism. In other words, what the song to conceptualism is probably the Taanila analyzes is the use of something we opposite of Baldessari’s approach. The decision have grown so accustomed to that we barely to extract repetitive maxims and interpret them notice it but which is deliberately designed to melodically stems from sentimental rather than modify our behaviour. Taanila’s projects have philosophical reasons; indeed, it is only when to do with the retro-future: something that was they are removed from that context that they designed for the world of tomorrow but is now acquire a philosophical or conceptual value. the archaeological ruin of what could have Pop music is a constant part of our life, even been and only was in part, or at least not in before we are born. This is what British artist the way that its designers had planned. Gordon, Douglas Gordon seems to say in his 1994 Bel and Taanila all plunge into the murky depths installation Something between My Mouth and of the music industry, attempting to shed light Your Ear, which invites us to interact with a on how music influences and changes us in a selection of songs that his mother probably rather subliminal way. listened to while pregnant with him in the year Songs can also be reinterpreted and take on 1966. Although Douglas Gordon is primarily new meaning depending on who sings them known for his film-related works and and how, as well as on where the voice is coming cinematographic installations, this piece from from or the area to which it has spread. This is his early years reveals pop music as just one of the case of Susan Philipsz and Johanna Billing, the many influences – together with inherited who both prefer to resurrect songs written by and social traits – that determined his particular others. Every space has connotations derived AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 79

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from its past – or the memory of an event Discoteca Flaming Star homes in on issues associated with it – and present, as well as from related to music and songs in particular, as well other less obvious sources. Susan Philipsz has as to the concept of reinterpretation. put this fact to good use, exploring the darkest Consequently, the term “hardcore karaoke” corners of memory, of our own memory, of the which some have used to describe their style is history of a place and of that which persists in not only fitting but also an eloquent the form of melancholy, nostalgia or longing, summarization of how they craft and later that which is present by virtue of its absence. distribute their creations. In any event, film, It is there where the political references in some sound and performance all converge in their of her works become visible: through the poetics installations, which serve as memory banks of of the place, the sound intervention, the song process-based and collaborative projects. They chosen and performed, the intention, or all brought this project to life at the Stock these things at once. In contrast, Johanna Billing Exchange in Valparaíso, Chile, combining the prefers not to use her own voice; instead, she energy of the location itself with the convulsions asks others to sing pre-existing songs in many of the local and global financial markets. The of her works. In this case, the song is from 1968 project has been condensed in a workshop and and its significance varies depending on the a performance piece involving various elements physical location of the artist, the performers which ultimately channel the abstraction of the and the listeners. In any event, the song speaks set design into bodies and finance. Finally, the of a time of transition and change, whether two members of Jeleton (Gelen Alcántara and political or personal. The experiment we see Jesús Arpal) tackled the task of teaching here took place in Zagreb in the aftermath of the themselves to play an instrument (drums and Balkan conflict, at an old cultural centre from guitar, respectively) as a performance project for the communist era. Melancholy and a residency in Paris. The result was, among defamiliarization are two powerful tools for other things, a video which shows them exploring signifiers of transformation. attempting to play French music as part of that In a different way, we might say that karaoke learning process. Inspired by Dan Graham’s is the common thread linking the works famous Rock My Religion, they also produced a presented by Phil Collins, Discoteca Flaming publication which attempted to combine pop Star and Jeleton in La Chanson. The first is a music and conceptual art, thus joining the path karaoke experience in the literal sense blazed by John Baldessari and followed by Juan organized by Phil Collins, who decided to invite Pérez Agirregoikoa in the exhibition La Chanson, fans of the legendary British band The Smiths to and also taken by Annika Ström in her solo perform a song from the album The World Won’t show. Thus, in this case karaoke is a means Listen before the camera on a set decorated in rather than an end. the style of the 80s, when Morrissey’s group was A quality that most of the artists featured in in its heyday. A call for volunteers was issued in La Chanson undoubtedly share is their amateur three rather complicated cities (Bogota, approach to pop music, an approach that has Istanbul and Jakarta), allowing participants to its consequences even when they take a step become their idol for a brief moment while towards composition. This may well be the case simultaneously revealing the global expansion of Paul Rooney and the duo comprising Marta of the British music industry and how a group de Gonzalo and Publio Pérez Prieto. Both that was considered a cult band in its day can produce projects/songs in which the writing expand its sphere of influence and fame thanks and audiovisual presentation of the lyrics are to the ubiquitous nature of music and the fundamental, as is their shared concern about phenomenon of globalization. Meanwhile, labour situations in the era of late capitalism. AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 80

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Paul Rooney presents a creation that defines his Alonso Gil is represented in La Chanson by a relationship with song, always tinged with a hint work from the CAAC Collection, in line with our of melancholy (as is the work of Susan Philipsz efforts to create dialogues between our own and Johanna Billing) but also with the hope pieces and guest works and to contextualize the implicit in the dreams and aspirations of those works in the museum’s collection. In this case, who perform essential yet undervalued jobs in Gil’s decision to record what goes on in the the service industry. The repetitive, monotonous streets, the things that happen around us every 8 nature of their tasks contrasts with the workers’ day, was not motivated by a desire to portray desires, which are illustrated based on their survival or create a Decalogue of various musical descriptions. In this respect, a museum whose aptitudes in which a virtue is made of necessity; programme explores the transforming power of rather, the choice to record reveals a yearning for song cannot avoid this theme, for some of the the endurance of life experiences, and therefore members of its staff may identify with what an affirmation of life itself and of the capacity for Rooney describes. Marta de Gonzalo and Publio survival. Pérez Prieto also focus on a very specific group As a result, La Chanson oscillates between of people, a collective that often seems invisible the personal and the social, exploring recording, 9 yet without whom the experience of visiting and amateur composition, karaoke and the viewing a museum (or of using and inhabiting possibilities of performance, and the any other public or private space) would be very melancholy and strange, but also the different and even distressing. But this reference underhanded efforts of the music industry to to the ranks of cleaning professionals, to whom maintain the status quo and the conceptual the song is partially dedicated, segues into a alteration that some artists have chosen to make. more general commentary on the asepsis that The difference between La Chanson and the two permeates every aspect of life in contemporary previous exhibition sessions at the CAAC societies; our zealous endeavours to hide the (featured in issues 0 and 1 of this magazine), pollution and filth that is a by-product of the where the group shows attempted to reinforce social organization typical of late capitalism the significance and coherence of the other solo reflect a desire to keep up appearances and exhibitions, is that in this case it is the individual eradicate any trace of what lies beneath. shows (Annika Ström, Ruth Ewan, Matt Stokes The last two works included in La Chanson and Alonso Gil) that set the tone – halfway have to do with recording, at least in part. The between political and sentimental – of the entire piece by Mathias Poledna quite obviously programme. La Chanson, the group exhibition of revolves around this theme, for he focuses on a this session, merely provides the background specific space, a legendary California recording vocals for the soloists, thus broadening the tonal studio from the 1960s that is still virtually intact. range and creating a richer polyphony. 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, AAFF_de11a21_color_150711:01 15/07/11 18:46 Página 81

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90-91 92-93 94-95 96

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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 99 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 100

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OPENING CONCERT JULY

Thursday, June 30 Wednesday, July 6 Thursday, July 7

Basia Bulat Rainbow Arabia Depedro As the daughter of a piano teacher, The husband-and-wife team Jairo Zavala, former lead singer of Basia grew up surrounded by formed by Danny and Tiffany La Vacazul, presents his second musical instruments (she plays the Preston created Rainbow Arabia, solo album under the Depedro guitar, the sitar, the flute, the inspired by the sounds of the alias. The tracks on Nubes de piano, the ukulele, the saxophone, Middle East. After their debut EP, Papel were written between shows the banjo…) in a home where only The Basta, was received with great while touring with Calexico, a band the oldies were played (Motown, critical acclaim in 2008, and after in which he has played guitar for The Beach Boys, The Beatles, touring with Gang Gang Dance, the last four years, and while Sam Cooke, etc.). From the time they released the 7” Omar K and travelling around the world to she was a small girl, her brother the EP Kabukimono, in which promote his debut album. Nubes Bobby accompanied her on the African and Caribbean rhythms de Papel features two tracks drums just as he does today. In were added to their sound palette. recorded with Joey Burns, John 2007 this youthful Canadian singer Now they’ve come to Seville to Convertino and Jacob Valenzuela and songwriter released her debut offer us their first LP, Boys and from Calexico, and Vetusta Morla. album on the Rough Trade label, Diamonds, a dazzling blend of dub When listening to Depedro, we can Oh My Darling, a collection of punk and world pop, Afro- hear echoes of John Barry’s beautiful, fantastically arranged Caribbean beats and synth-pop, soundtracks, frontier tunes, African tracks performed by a prodigious hip-hop and electronic music. guitars, a pinch of Brazilian music, voice. This perfectly assembled puzzle is a dollop of The Beatles from the Now she has presented her sure to delight fans of MIA, “Let It Be” era, Vainica Doble and second LP, Heart of My Own, where Santigold or even Vampire M. Ward. we discover an even more self- Weekend. www.depedro.net confident Bulat, with a voice that www.rainbowarabia.com 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.). www.basiabulat.com AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 101

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Wednesday, July 13 Thursday, July 14 Wednesday, July 20

Binary Audio Misfits Lacrosse Pelle Carlberg Binary Audio Misfits was created This band’s debut album, This New Pelle Carlberg has been making when two highly original bands Year Will Be for You and Me, music since 1985, playing with from different cultures and inspired critics to use words like bands on the Swedish scene like continents found each other on “euphoric”, “upbeat” and Amanda om natten and Edson, with MySpace. In the winter of 2007, “sunshine pop”. It was named which he recorded three albums. the French rock band Expérience, album of the week by Rough Trade In 2005 he embarked on a solo an old acquaintance of Spanish and received stellar reviews across career and has since released three audiences, contacted the Texan Europe. Bandages for the Heart, albums, two of them on the hip-hop group The Word a second album with the same prestigious Labrador label. Association to ask if they would be euphoria but a much sharper edge, His influences are varied, willing to participate in a track for confirmed Lacrosse’s talent and ranging from Cat Stevens, Simon & the album that Expérience was took them on a lengthy European Garfunkel, ABBA and The Beatles working on at the time. After the tour where they earned a reputation to Echo and the Bunnymen, The recording session, the two bands for explosive live performances. Smiths, Teenage Fanclub, Belle & were thrilled with the end product Two vocalists with amazing Sebastian, The Velvet Underground, and decided to work on a few more energy, incredibly mellow guitars The Beautiful South, Doktor songs together. The result was and dazzling melodies are the Kosmos, Jens Lekman and B.A.M! LP, the first album of the band’s weapons of choice. Barely Suburban Kids with Biblical Names. Binary Audio Misfits, a head-on restrained madness hides behind And although it’s hard to believe, collision between belligerent hip- the appearance of a fundamentally his music has a lot of each of them; hop and prickly rock. upbeat pop style. his compositions are pop songs www.myspace.com/ www.lacrosse.nu with an undercurrent that is surreal binaryaudiomisfits Photo: Sebastian Tim in some cases and hermetic in others, but almost always luminous. www.pellecarlberg.se AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 102

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Thursday, July 21 Wednesday, July 27 Thursday, July 28

Hidrogenesse Micah P.Hinson & The Pioneer Lonely Drifter Karen As the band’s own website Saboteurs vs. Trompe le The person hiding behind the proclaims, Hidrogenesse is an Monde by the Pixies pseudonym of Lonely Drifter Karen “electronic art-rock duo, At “We Used to Party” concerts, is Tanja Frinta, born in Vienna in composers of populist pop songs, a well-known solo artist or band 1979 and currently living in producers of romantic-sexual performs all the tracks on an album Barcelona. This album, named after mantras, authors of Situationist by an artist or artists whose music a character in Lars von Trier’s The dance tunes, performers of the has been a special source of Idiots, features the tinkling ivories mystical-comic genre… inspiration and pleasure for them. of Majorcan pianist Marc Melià. Hidrogenesse is Carlos Ballesteros In this case, Micah P. Hinson, who Marc is a fan of Jacques Brel and and Genís Segarra. Since the end has become a kind of icon among the chanson, whereas Frinta prefers of the last century, they have Spanish indie and not-so-indie German cabaret and Kurt Weill, released a number of albums, audiences, is coming to Nocturama but all of these disparate influences including Así se baila el siglo XX, to perform his version of one of the come together in music full of Eres PC/Eres Mac, Gimnàstica best alternative rock albums ever evocative melodies and sinuous passiva and Animalitos”. released, Trompe le Monde, which arrangements. Carlos and Genís are currently signalled the end of the Pixies’ The band's debut album, Grass participating in an exhibition at recording career in 1991. This Is Singing, was released in 2008, Fundació Joan Miró with an adoptive Texan (born in Memphis) and last year they presented their installation entitled Moix, for which will become Black Francis for an second project, Fall of Spring. they have recorded a new track. evening to belt out classic anthems www.myspace.com/lonelydrifterkaren www.myspace.com/hidrogenesse like “Planet Sound”, “Head On” Photo: Sandrine Derselle and “The Sad Punk”, accompanied by the Zaragoza-based band Tachenko. www.micahphinson.com AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 103

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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 Alondra Bentley, a Spanish singer- The prehistory of the then-quintet the most brilliant music of the songwriter of English extraction, began with the making of the demo 1960s, The School’s style is a burst onto the music scene in 2006 Salud y belleza in 2004, an British version of sunshine pop with a handful of songs written in explosive device wrapped in teddy- that blends light and shadow to her mother tongue which quickly bear plush that earned them a spot produce a contagious, ultra-melodic became a hot topic of conversation among the finalists in Proyecto pop sound that you can dance and among professionals of the Spanish Demo. Even before the release, cry to simultaneously. Their music industry. That same year, word-of-mouth had made it one of sophisticated, upbeat tracks with her demo was chosen as one of the the most anxiously awaited debuts a hint of melancholy are inspired season’s best by the Disco Grande of 2007. The band’s war cry – by The Beach Boys (and the show on Spanish National Radio, “Now the free world wants a fantastic American Spring produced hosted by the prestigious music blazing fire” – struck a chord with by Brian Wilson), The Beatles, critic and journalist Julio Ruiz. their audiences: this trio from the Phil Spector and 60s girl bands. After this promising beginning, in country set the online forums on Not to mention, of course, other 2009 Bentley released her first fire and rattled music pundits with more modern groups who share album, Ashfield Avenue, which their live songs, deafening sound similar roots and also wrap their confirmed Alondra’s success with and powerful lyrics. Before the year dulcet melodies in marvellous music journalists and listeners was out El hombre del siglo V was string and keyboard arrangements, alike. released, an album that ended up such as Belle & Sebastian, Listening to Ashfield Avenue becoming a compilation of oddities Saturday Looks Good to Me, brings to mind the great women of and included tracks from their early Camera Obscura or Lucky Soul. music history, evoking artists of the demos, new recordings and a few www.theschoolband.co.uk stature of Joni Mitchell and Nina songs that no one had heard before. Simone, but it also reminds us of Confirmed as the most important male vocalists like Nick Drake. new Spanish band of the year on Thanks to the success of her debut every music ranking, they continued album, Alondra set out on a tour to give non-stop performances which has continued for nearly two throughout 2008. years now, and she was invited to Año santo was released in May perform at some of the most of 2010, and even with the important music events in Spain handicap of a debut that topped and England, including the every list of the decade’s best Benicassim International Festival, Spanish albums, the press Primavera Sound, Sonorama and unanimously acclaimed it as their La Mar de Músicas. best work yet. www.myspace.com/alondrabentley www.articapro.com/artistas/triangulo Photo: Blanca Galindo -de-amor-bizarro Photo: Thomas Carret AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_180711:01 18/07/11 10:31 Página 104

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Wednesday, August 10 Thursday, August 11 Wednesday, August 17

Klaus & Kinski Arizona Baby Christina Rosenvinge The first line in the story of Klaus & The biggest surprise of the year The female vocalist par excellence Kinski was written almost by shoots off acoustic bullets and of the Spanish indie scene started chance, when Alejandro convinced basic philosophy. They are Arizona out as one-half of the duo Alex & Marina to sing a Beatles cover so Baby, a trio that has shaken up the Christina and later as lead singer that he could test the home sound Spanish music scene with an of the rock band Los Subterráneos, studio he had set up, way back in irresistible adventure of desert two projects which made her the summer of 2005. Five years epics and evocative fantasies called tremendously popular in Spain and later, Klaus & Kinski have two Second to None. Barely five weeks South America in the 1990s. In albums under their belt, a large fan after its release, this album of dust- 2000 the artist moved to New York, base and the respect of the music coated beauty and Spartan where she launched a solo career critics. Those who know Alex best austerity was already being with three albums recorded entirely say that he belongs to the new identified by the majority of in English. After returning to Spain, generation of young people who national journalists, from the most she began writing lyrics in Spanish have been abducted by technology, mainstream to the most indie, as again and released Verano Fatal, which is quite true; however, it is one of the top three albums of the an album co-composed with the equally true that he has proven to year. From Mondo Sonoro to Asturian singer-songwriter Nacho be one of the most talented Rolling Stone, Arizona Baby’s Vegas. One year later, Christina composers of the Spanish indie recordings and live performances conquered all and sundry with her music scene to emerge from that have rocketed to the top of every sublime Tu labio superior (Warner, same generation. His well-known best-of-the-year list. They’ve also 2009), whose songs kept her proficiency on the guitar and his received several national awards in hopping from one Spanish stage to wise choice of travelling companions the best new band category and the the next for nearly two years, after are two additional factors that UFI (Independent Phonographic which she set out on a South helped make Klaus & Kinski the Union) Special MySpace Band of American tour of Argentina, Chile, sensation of the 2008-09 season. the Year Award. Arizona Baby is an Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Mexico. In April 2010 the duo released acoustic rock trio capable of Her latest album, La joven their fantastic second album making even the best electric band Dolores, was released by Warner in entitled Tierra, trágalos, which was quake in their boots, with a look January of this year. enthusiastically received by both that’s appealing and impressive. www.christinarosenvinge.com audiences and critics, and since They hail from Valladolid and have then they have been busy been playing together since 2004. presenting their latest work on http://arizonababyrocks. stages throughout Spain and at blogspot.com events like Festival do Norte, Photo: Ricardo F. Otazo Contempopranea, Sonorama, Lemon Pop, etc. www.myspace.com/klausandkinski AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 105

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Thursday, August 18 Wednesday, August 24 Thursday, August 25

Fiera Francisco Nixon Julio de la Rosa Fiera is a band comprising Pablo Francisco Nixon is the stage name Julio de la Rosa made his first Peña, Daniel Alonso, Darío del used by Fran Fernández (Gijón, appearance on the cover of one of Moral and Javier Rivera (members 1971), former singer and songwriter his studio albums, La Herida of Pony Bravo). Their most for two iconic Spanish indie bands, Universal, the first to be co-released immediate influences are post- Australian Blonde and La Costa on the national indie labels Ernie punk bands like The Fall, PIL, Brava. and King of Patio, and the fourth Suicide, Liquid Liquid, Pere Ubu Since launching his solo career of his career since his band, El and Palais Schaumburg, and as Francisco Nixon in 2006, he has Hombre Burbuja, broke up. Spanish groups such as Derribos released three titles on the Siesta Julio has inhaled and perspired Arias and Parálisis Permanente. label: Es Perfecta, El perro es mío Jerez, Seville, Manchester, Istanbul, They also looked to now-legendary and the mini LP Gloria y la belleza New York, Barcelona and Madrid, bands like Einstürzende sureña, aided by his regular observing, creating and sharing, Neubauten when choosing the guitarist of choice, Ricardo Vicente, writing part of his musical and combination of instruments that formerly of La Costa Brava. personal history in the ebb and flow produce Fiera’s unique sound. Like all of Fran’s previous of these cities. His poetry is like his Fiera made their first undertakings, Nixon has become a vision, like his entire life – real, appearance at Nocturama (CAAC, fixture on the Spanish music scene. incisive, stimulating, cynical and Seville) in August 2008, where the His name regularly appears on the romantic. His music is unique, audience heard the first versions bills of Spain’s most important playing with time, sound and of the songs composed by Pablo music festivals, and he is silence. Julio de la Rosa has known Peña, the band’s vocalist, bassist considered one of the best Spanish love in myriad forms: true love, and lead writer. pop songwriters. His “Erasmus mirror love, reflected love, brotherly After years of hard work, Fiera Borrachas” was named the Best love, generous love, devastating finally cut their first LP, which was Song of 2009 at the Independent love, labyrinthine love… all of recorded by Raúl Pérez at his La Music Awards organized by Unión which he had to experience so that Mina Studio. Déjese llevar (2010) Fonográfica Independiente (UFI). today we, the listeners, can feel, was released by El Rancho Casa de www.myspace.com/frannixon hold our breath, float, and dance Discos, a company created by the Photo: Estudio Syx with a secret smile or howling with members of Pony Bravo to handle laughter. Julio de la Rosa is one of their professional activities. Like the most genuine musicians we everything that El Rancho have, and La Herida Universal is produces, Déjese llevar was his best album yet – probably just released under a Creative because it’s the latest one he’s Commons licence and can be given us. downloaded free of charge from the www.juliodelarosa.com band’s website. www.fierafierafiera.com AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 106

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CLOSING CONCERT

Wednesday, August 31 Thursday, September 1

Coque Malla Maga On his latest album, Termonuclear, Special concert/surprise celebration Coque Malla has revealed his of the band’s 10th anniversary. tremendous talent for writing music. Maga are back. The trio has closed “The songs on Termonuclear are the book on one era (with three inspired by true experiences, but albums, a couple of EPs and tracks they fortunately become fiction, on various compilations) and begun a they turn into how you’d like things new one at Mushroom Pillow with the to be or how you wish they could band’s own experience and that have been.” And it is there, in the shared with Germán Coppini on their writing, that the great composer joint project, with Sr. Chinarro (the emerges, the talent of one who rhythm section is the same featured knows how to handle sensitive, on Antonio Luque’s last two albums), personal material and turn it into with Deluxe (Miguel participated in a universal creation, one we can all Reconstrucción) and with Tote King. identify with in equal measure. The Jordi Gil was responsible for the album was recorded in analogue production of A la hora del sol, an format, on “tape” like the great addictive, timeless album marked by classic albums, with a trio playing the personality of a voice that is live in the studio: Coque on unrivalled in Spanish-language pop. acoustic guitar, the former The album was recorded at “Ronaldo” Ricardo Moreno on Sputnik Studios in Seville with Jordi drums, and Nico Nieto, the album’s Gil, who also produced El mundo co-producer (and Coque’s crucial según and Ronroneando by Sr. ally during the thermonuclear year), Chinarro. The band was accompanied on bass. Then came the recordings during the recording sessions by for enhancing the tracks: delicate Israel Diezma (lap steel guitar on strings to underscore certain “Último mar”), Joaquín Calderón sections with their chamber-music (violin on “La Balsa” and lead guitar sound, and splendid tonalities on “Garagato”), Manolo Solo (backup contributed by pop’s most timeless vocals and lyrics for “Sí, pero no lo (and now quite rare) wind soy”), Javier Centeno (trumpet on instruments. “Garagato”), Germán Coppini (lyrics http://www.coquemalla.es for “Garagato”) and César Díaz Photo: María Vázquez (keyboard), who also joins the group in their live performances. 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 AAFF 11to21 n.2 ING_150711:01 15/07/11 19:19 Página 108

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Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo

Avda. Descubrimientos entrance

Education Workshop D Workshops A E C

A Instituto A Andaluz del Patrimonio B 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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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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EXHIBITIONS

Annika Ström. Songs by Annika Ström Alonso Gil. Cantando mi mal espanto Shipping May 26 – September 11, 2011 (Singing My Troubles Away) HD arte Kortmann Art Packers & Shippers (APS) Coordination July 21 – November 6, 2011 Acknowledgements Yolanda Torrubia Coordination Frans Hals Museum| De Hallen Haarlem, Installation Raquel López Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Workplace BGL Ingeniería audiovisual Installation Gallery, Susanna Koenig, Andrea Linnenkohl Signs BNV Fotocromía Lineal Audiovisual installation La Chanson Subtitles Bienvenido Gil Desenfoque Painting July 21 – November 13, 2011 Assistance to wall paintings Manuel Jesús Cruz Coordination María José Sánchez Barrera Woodwork Alberto Figueroa Carpintería Olivera Audiovisual installation Ruth Ewan. Del pasado efímero Signs Salas (The Ephemeral Past) Fotocromía Lineal Painting June – October 16, 2011 Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual Manuel Jesús Cruz Coordination Assistance to wall paintings Woodwork Yolanda Torrubia Pedro Delgado BNV Israel Díaz Iglesia Installation Signs Museographia Acknowledgements Fotocromía Lineal Colección Cajasol Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual Shipping Ricardo Garrido HDArte Acknowledgements Galería Meyer Kainer, Video Data Bank, Woodwork María-Ángeles Alcántara-Sánchez, Jesús Carpintería Olivera Matt Stokes. Nuestro tiempo (Our Time) Arpal, Martina Aschbacher, Lindsay Bosch, Instalaciones Martínez July 21 – November 6, 2011 Marta de Gonzalo, Sandro Grando, Amber Subtitles Hickey, Gil Leung, Sue MacDiarmid, Erin Coordination Desenfoque Manns, Publio Pérez Prieto, Juan Pérez Luisa Espino Graphic design for Did You Kiss the Foot that Agirregoikoa, Glòria Pou, Paul Rooney, Kicked You? project newspaper and Fang Installation Bert Ross, Mike Sperlinger, Mika Taanila Sang project poster Grupo 956 The 2 Group Audiovisual installation Translation of Did You Kiss the Foot that Kicked Simeon Corless You? newspaper and Fang Sang poster Anna Nesbit África Vidal Acoustic installation Transcription of Fang Sang audio INASEL Miguel Ángel Álvarez Highfield Translation of The Gainsborough Packet poster Translations for Six Signs project and of Real Arcadia subtitles Okodia - Grupo Traductor África Vidal Signs and production of Six Signs project Signs Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual Fotocromía Lineal Trillo Comunicación Audiovisual Acknowledgements Galería Ancient&Modern, Rob Tufnell Woodwork Gallery, and to all the people who Carpintería Olivera collaborated with the songs of A Jukebox of Painting People Trying to Change the World 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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PUBLICATION

AUTHORS Images: Published by Peio Aguirre Of Matt Stokes’ works: JUNTA DE ANDALUCÍA is an art critic and independent curator. Courtesy of the artist, Lüttgenmeijer Consejería de Cultura Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes (Berlin, Germany), Workplace Gallery Publisher is Director of the Centro Andaluz de Arte (Gateshead, UK) and ZieherSmith (New Juan Antonio Álvarez Reyes Contemporáneo, art critic and independent York, USA) Deputy Editor curator. Views at CAAC on p. 93: Luisa López Moreno Matthew Collin Guillermo Mendo is a journalist and writer currently based in Editorial Coordinator Inside cover page, from left to right, Georgia. He has worked as a foreign Luisa Espino correspondent, broadcast journalist, up and down: magazine editor and features writer for Basia Bulat / Rainbow Arabia / Depedro / Editorial Assistants publications such as the Big Issue, The Binary Audio Misfits / Lacrosse (photo: Alberto Figueroa, Raquel López, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Moscow Times, Sebastian Tim) / Pelle Carlberg / Yolanda Torrubia Face and Mojo. His previous books include Hidrogenesse (photo: Darío Peña) / Micah Copy-editor This is Serbia Calling, The Time of the P. Hinson & The Pioneer Saboteurs / Rebels and Altered State: The Story of Lonely Drifter Karen (photo: Sandrine Fernando Quincoces Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. Derselle) / The School Texts translation Chris Fite-Wassilak Inside back page, from left to right, Paul Hammond: Spanish to English: is a writer and curator based in London. up and down: Pedro G. Romero. www.growgnome.com Alondra Bentley (photo: Blanca Galindo) / Deirdre B. Jerry: Spanish to English: Pedro G. Romero Triángulo de Amor Bizarro (photo: Peio Aguirre, Raj Kuter, Juan Antonio is an artist. Thomas Carret) / Klaus & Kinski / Álvarez Reyes, Nocturama 2011. Jonathan Griffin Arizona Baby (photo: Ricardo F. Otazo) / is a British writer and editor living in Los Christina Rosenvinge / Fiera / Francisco Design and Layout Angeles. He contributes to Frieze, Art Nixon (photo: Estudio Syx) / Julio de la Florencia Grassi, www.elvivero.es Review, Mousse, Flash Art and other Rosa / Coque Malla (photo: María publications. Vázquez) / Maga (photo: Jopo/Emerre) Printing Will Hodgkinson erasOnze Artes Gráficas is the author of Guitar Man, Song Man and Photomechanics The Ballad of Britain, and writes on music Margen and culture for The Guardian, The Times, Acknowledgements: Mojo and Vogue. To María José Rodríguez Bisquert and all Binding Raj Kuter the artists and authors of the texts and José Luis Sanz is a graphic artist, writer and editor of the images. literary magazine Vacaciones en Polonia. © This Edition: JUNTA DE ANDALUCÍA. The views and opinions expressed in Consejería de Cultura this publication are those of the individual authors and should not be © Texts: The Authors attributed to 11 to 21. © 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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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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Song as a Force of Social Transformation ACIssue 2 CAAC uyOtbr2011 July–October