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Oh Vienna!
There was a slight -- but pleasant -- misunderstanding hanging over my visit to Vienna this week. I thought I'd been flown in to provide some music at an opening party for their new show of videos by artists Korpys and Löffler (one of them, of Bush arriving at Tegel in Airforce One in 2002, actually mirrors closely the Click Opera entry the other day about Akihito's 747). As a musician prepared to do weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs -- whatever it takes to pay the rent -- I naturally accepted.
It was only when I got there and met curators Nicolas Jasmin and Flora Neuwirth that they explained (over weissbier at the Cafe Anzengruber on Schleifmuelgasse) that there was a bit more to it than that. Sure, I'd be performing at the opening party, in a room downstairs from the video installations. But a video would also be made of the performance, which would then be shown on a TV placed in the spot where the performance took place. This would then be joined by five other TVs showing five further performances. There'd also be a lecture from Nate Harrison about the TB-303 baseline composer and clips from philosopher Gilles Deleuze's eight-hour TV series L'Abecedaire. This would all appear under the title Six Sessions, a play on the name of the Secession.
My performance of pop songs (and dances), then, wasn't as throwaway as I thought. It was going to form part of an exhibition at the Vienna Secession, become an artwork in its own right. Right now, in fact, a photo of it is on the front of the Secession website.
This all raises some -- for me, anyway -- interesting questions about how I've changed, how pop music has changed, and how the art world has changed. I can now do pretty much my standard pop concert in the context of an art institution and have it accepted as an art performance. It's just as well, really -- with the trad edifice of the music industry collapsing around our ears, it's good to know that the creative effort we crooners put into our art isn't going to be lost. All those gestures we honed in the darkness of nightclubs can still be made in the brilliant light of the white cube. Rock roadies can be replaced by museum technicians, A&R men by curators. A bulbous, florid art institution in Vienna will give us safe harbour. This is all, frankly, reassuring.
Lest we should get smug, though, a visit to the Konzept.Aktion.Sprache show at MUMOK is a timely reminder of just how much more rock-n-roll than rock-n-rollers artists (and especially, for some reason, Viennese ones) have been prepared to get. Forget Iggy and the Stooges, just watch the Viennese Actionists slashing their bodies, defecating in a continuous loop, and, well, meaning it, maaaaaan. Compared with the out-there stuff going on in Vienna in the 60s, to be (as the Secession website calls me) "a musician and blogger [who] also appears internationally as an imaginary persona and performance artist at galleries and museums" is tame stuff indeed. Then again, could Hermann Nitsch sing a big weepy ballad while butchering a bullock? I think not.
As we drove around the city in a borrowed Audi, curator Nicolas Jasmin casually mentioned that the Artfacts website, which ranks 104,417 artists according to how much and where they exhibit, is now listing me as the world's 3268th (and rising!) most successful contemporary artist! Nicolas himself -- a real artist, as opposed to my flukey crossover charlatanry -- is at 6728. Now, I'm not one to take such stuff seriously -- "This means nothing to me!" -- but I'm not one to let it lie either; I immediately googled other musician-artist types to see where they were. Paul D. Miller is very close to me at 3139 (but falling!). Scanner, though, is inexplicably low, at 22,585.
To think of yourself as a serious artist (and actually be selling your work) you really need to be in the top 500. After the Secession performance I dined at a restaurant called Kiang with a bunch of people grouped around artist Daniel Richter, who teaches at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (the art school that, indirectly, caused World War II by rejecting the young Adolf Hitler). Richter, a painter, is currently at 469 on ArtFacts. Now that's what I call a real artist! No wonder he had an assistant so beautiful I could only gawp in wonder from the far end of the table... and the far end of the art charts. As Midge Ure of New Romanticist art group Ultravox once put it: Oh, Vienna!
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buckminster has just posted a clip of the Secession performance here.
It was only when I got there and met curators Nicolas Jasmin and Flora Neuwirth that they explained (over weissbier at the Cafe Anzengruber on Schleifmuelgasse) that there was a bit more to it than that. Sure, I'd be performing at the opening party, in a room downstairs from the video installations. But a video would also be made of the performance, which would then be shown on a TV placed in the spot where the performance took place. This would then be joined by five other TVs showing five further performances. There'd also be a lecture from Nate Harrison about the TB-303 baseline composer and clips from philosopher Gilles Deleuze's eight-hour TV series L'Abecedaire. This would all appear under the title Six Sessions, a play on the name of the Secession.
My performance of pop songs (and dances), then, wasn't as throwaway as I thought. It was going to form part of an exhibition at the Vienna Secession, become an artwork in its own right. Right now, in fact, a photo of it is on the front of the Secession website.This all raises some -- for me, anyway -- interesting questions about how I've changed, how pop music has changed, and how the art world has changed. I can now do pretty much my standard pop concert in the context of an art institution and have it accepted as an art performance. It's just as well, really -- with the trad edifice of the music industry collapsing around our ears, it's good to know that the creative effort we crooners put into our art isn't going to be lost. All those gestures we honed in the darkness of nightclubs can still be made in the brilliant light of the white cube. Rock roadies can be replaced by museum technicians, A&R men by curators. A bulbous, florid art institution in Vienna will give us safe harbour. This is all, frankly, reassuring.
Lest we should get smug, though, a visit to the Konzept.Aktion.Sprache show at MUMOK is a timely reminder of just how much more rock-n-roll than rock-n-rollers artists (and especially, for some reason, Viennese ones) have been prepared to get. Forget Iggy and the Stooges, just watch the Viennese Actionists slashing their bodies, defecating in a continuous loop, and, well, meaning it, maaaaaan. Compared with the out-there stuff going on in Vienna in the 60s, to be (as the Secession website calls me) "a musician and blogger [who] also appears internationally as an imaginary persona and performance artist at galleries and museums" is tame stuff indeed. Then again, could Hermann Nitsch sing a big weepy ballad while butchering a bullock? I think not.
As we drove around the city in a borrowed Audi, curator Nicolas Jasmin casually mentioned that the Artfacts website, which ranks 104,417 artists according to how much and where they exhibit, is now listing me as the world's 3268th (and rising!) most successful contemporary artist! Nicolas himself -- a real artist, as opposed to my flukey crossover charlatanry -- is at 6728. Now, I'm not one to take such stuff seriously -- "This means nothing to me!" -- but I'm not one to let it lie either; I immediately googled other musician-artist types to see where they were. Paul D. Miller is very close to me at 3139 (but falling!). Scanner, though, is inexplicably low, at 22,585.
To think of yourself as a serious artist (and actually be selling your work) you really need to be in the top 500. After the Secession performance I dined at a restaurant called Kiang with a bunch of people grouped around artist Daniel Richter, who teaches at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts (the art school that, indirectly, caused World War II by rejecting the young Adolf Hitler). Richter, a painter, is currently at 469 on ArtFacts. Now that's what I call a real artist! No wonder he had an assistant so beautiful I could only gawp in wonder from the far end of the table... and the far end of the art charts. As Midge Ure of New Romanticist art group Ultravox once put it: Oh, Vienna!
buckminster has just posted a clip of the Secession performance here.
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(Anonymous) 2007-11-30 11:09 am (UTC)(link)no subject
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(Anonymous) 2007-11-30 12:00 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
[Error: unknown template video]
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[Error: unknown template video]
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The guy hired to direct the video for "Vienna" was quite excited at the possibilities afforded by the canals and the Renaissance architecture - until it was explained to him that he was getting mixed up with Venice.
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(Anonymous) 2007-11-30 12:52 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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That does seem to have been a bit of a turning point in the fate of popular music as an art form, though, 1984/85. It was the moment when pop said "We are the world, we are so huge, blah blah blah" (as Iggy so elegantly paraphrased it). And after an artform gets those sorts of delusions of grandeur it's all downhill. There can only be a deflationary "sharp correction" at that point.
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The attitude projected by MQ can be seen in their mascot, Gefesselter Mann, who can be seen in various advertisements wrestling Mozarts in an epic battle against cultural stagnation.
Everyone seems to believe this particular mythos of cultural rebirth in Vienna, and my own observations support this. In any case, it could be a good example of a self fulfilling prophecy!
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A friend of my Mum's asked me to rewrite her CV a few days ago. She works as a backing singer. She worked with Midge Ure and other 80's acts like Scritti Politti; I had to google them all to try and find a list of her credits coz she hadnt kept any of her old invoices.
After googling all these old geezers, you realise they're all still at it ;o)
Scritti Politti toured the UK in 2006 and Midge Ure recently released a single in germany I think.
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(Anonymous) 2007-11-30 01:20 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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(Anonymous) 2007-11-30 01:55 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
la di da
(Anonymous) 2007-11-30 01:33 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
Not necessarily. It depends how you look at it. That's like saying if a musician isn't in the top 40 he isn't a serious musician. How do you define 'serious'? I'm sure there are many out there who take their work seriously (myself included, ha ha!) but since they don't end up in the usual contemporary art 'channels of distribution and legitimation' like galleries etc. doesn't mean they aren't 'serious artists'.
In fact I feel that often the reverse is true - these days in contmeporary art, we're seeing huge advances in the aesthetic and FORM used, yet not always of substance - the content seems to be ever increasing frivolity. One could even say that today, the only 'serious artists' are precisely those who turn their backs on this pernicious 'system' which seems to be dominated by accountants and often resembles nothing more than an extension of the leisure industry.
and then
(Anonymous) 2007-12-01 12:59 am (UTC)(link)and doesn·t that make all those words superfluous?
ay yai yippee yeah
and then
and doesn·t that make all those words superfluous?
ay yai yippee yeah
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I was going to say "No, you're wrong!" and adduce as proof an article in the current edition of Modern Painters about paintings which use lists. But I found out a new edition of the mag had replaced it (I must have been browsing the old one in Sweden, where the new edition hadn't arrived yet) and that there are no references to it anywhere online anymore. So maybe you're right -- lists are last month's thing!
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I'd love to show this photo out of context and ask people "What do you think is going on here?" Actually, it seems like Out of Context would be a good title for the photo even here in your journal!
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I am still trying to come up with some better story for his lack of attention to you in this photo than "he's checking the white balance."
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(Anonymous) 2007-11-30 03:57 pm (UTC)(link)Also, if you had to leave Berlin, which would be your second choice city?
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Tokyo.
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look nazis are only marginally funny
Pick some other historically significant and traditionally "controversial" figure to add some kind of half-assed extra edge of meaning to your posts.
Re: look nazis are only marginally funny
By the way, talking of Meese (who already has a Hitler connection (http://imomus.livejournal.com/303574.html)), there were weird posters in the art college, an appeal signed by Meese. "Dear Friends," it read, "during a performance on November 21st in Room M20 I lost my own penis. Whoever finds it, please give it to me on December 10th in person, or to my best friend Daniel Richter. Thanks!! your Jonathan Meese".
And there's a picture of an artificial penis.
Re: look nazis are only marginally funny
It also has one of my favorite movie lines ever -- "Hitler, come on. I'll buy you a lemonade!"
lol detachable penis
That doesn´t make sense at all. I bet most people would keep reading if you just said PENIS in giant sparkly font, too.
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Also, I think your links might be a bit mucked up as far as the rankings...
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Momus Saint-Aubin
Performance Art or Crime?
Faithful community of ventilators
(Anonymous) 2007-12-01 10:57 pm (UTC)(link)artist of Scottish of aka (constant 1960). The momus (named for the
Greek god of derision) is known especially as a musician and a
blogger, but appears to him also internationally as an imaginary
artist of Person and execution to the galleries and the museums.
In 2006, for example, it accompanied dubious Whitney Biennale like
"by guide of excursion of" in the direction of its "mission of
the information" of measurement; with policy with the absurd
comments. In its blog daily on the noise, art, architecture, design, porn, and the daily momus of the ethnology (imomus.livejournal.com) amuses a
faithful community of the ventilators with its dry mood. Since the
Eighties, it had produced the eclectic albums of noise like CIRCUS
MAXIMUS, PERVERTED of OFFER, the PHANTASMAGORIC GASOLINE, the CHAMPION
of TENNIS of OSKAR or the MILK of 2006 published OCKY. Its musical model
extends from the acoustic guitar to the electronic noise of minimalist to
the disco music and the abundant momus of synths. Lives and functions
in Berlin.
Re: Faithful community of ventilators
(Makes mental note to record an album with that title, then, on second thoughts, considers it too American-sounding.)