Pop! Art School Reunions
Pop Music, Pop Art, and Art Schools have long and entangled histories, from Warhol’s dalliance with The Velvet Underground to John Lennon, David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Kim Gordon, M.I.A. to Florence Welch. This special issue of Riffs journal calls for a reunion of these elements, but with an added ingredient: experimental music and performance. It is no accident that pop music was conceived in art schools in the 1960s and ‘70s at the same time that the boundaries between fine art, experimental music and performance were most fluid and least policed. Or that for the seminal art book project Notations (1968), John Cage and Alison Knowles aimed to include examples of music from Arnold Schoenberg (writer of cabaret songs as well as pioneer of serial music) to The Beatles.
Artists’ practices were often intuitive and immediate – they didn’t wait to be told what was appropriate to expressRather than simply expanding the discourse, then, this special issue begins by emphasising the necessity of doing, of enactment. Special guest artist Anat Ben-David (Chicks on Speed; Fine Art, Central St Martin’s) is leading workshops with fine art and music students exploring improvisation, song-writing, image-making, and performance, with informal performances at two: Birmingham School of Art (25 March) and the University of Leeds (18 March).
This series of events will act as the canvas and catalyst for contributions to Riffs, reflecting on the relationships between Pop Music, Pop Art, Art School, and Experimental Music and Performance. Riffs is an online journal for “Experimental Writing on Popular Music”. In the spirit of not predetermining what is appropriate in this context, we are open to responses in the form of reviews, photo essays, lyrics, theoretical speculations, collages, AI pieces, or other artworks and creative interventions. In this way, the journal becomes – for this issue only – a kind of exhibition catalogue for a series of Performance Art / gigging events crossed with a peer-reviewed journal of writing on pop music… .
Some Reading (further suggestions welcome)
Atton, Chris. “Curating popular musics: authority and history, aesthetics and technology.” Popular Music 33/3 (2014), 413-427.
Baker, Sarah, Lauren Istvandity, and Raphaël Nowak. “The sound of music heritage: curating popular music in music museums and exhibitions.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 22/1 (2016), 70-81.
Banes, Sally. Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater in New York 1976-85. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998.
Berry, Ian (ed.). Tim Rollins and K.O.S.: A History. Saratoga Springs, NY: Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, 2009.
Chicks On Speed: Don’t Art Fashion Music, exh. cat., Dundee Contemporary Arts, 2010.
Colab. “Times Square Show – Promotional videos. Accessed 18
January 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klRFk6lZT8s
Coley, Byron, and Thurston Moore. No Wave: Post-Punk,
Underground, New York, 1976-1980. New York: Abrams Image, 2008.
Crow, Thomas. The Long March of Pop: Art Music and
Design 1930-1995. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
Diederichsen, Diedrich. Aesthetics of Pop Music. Cambridge:
Polity, 2023.
Diederichsen, Diedrich. “Tearing Down Open Borders.” In See This
Sound: Promises in Sound and Vision, edited by Cosima Rainer, Stella Rollig, Dieter Daniels, and Manuela Ammer,
39-45, exh. cat., Linz: Lentos Kunstmuseum, 2009.
Drummond, Bill. 17. Penkiln Burn, 2008.
Fairchild, Charles. “Caught Between the Spectacular and the Vernacular: The Illusory Demos of the Popular Music Museum.” Music & Politics 12/2 (2018), 1-30.
Fink, Robert. “Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.” American Music 16/2 (1998), 135-79.
Francis, Mark (ed.). Pop. Survey by Hal Foster. Revised ed. London: Phaidon, 2010.
Frith, Simon, and Howard Horne. Art Into Pop. London: Routledge, 1987.
Graham, Stephen. Sounds of the Underground: A Cultural,
Political, and Aesthetic Mapping of Underground and Fringe Music. Ann
Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2016.
Heiser, Jörg. Double Lives in Art and Pop. Berlin: Sternberg, 2019.
Hennion, Antoine. “The Musicalisation of the Visual Arts” (1997).
Translated by Jérôme Hansen. In Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 2/2
(2008), 175-82.
Joseph, Brandon W. Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony
Conrad and the Arts after Cage. New York: Zone Books, 2008.
Kane, Brian. “Musicophobia, or
Sound Art and the Demands of Art Theory.” nonsite 8
(2013). http://nonsite.org/article/musicophobia-or-sound-art-and-the-demands-of-art-theory
McKeon, Ed. ‘The Concept Album as Curatorial “Medium”:
Colin Riley’s In Place.’ TEMPO 75
(2021), 46-56.
Marquis, Alice Goldfarb. Pop Revolution: The People Who
Radically Transformed the Art World. London: Tate, 2013.
Mednicov, Melissa. (2018). Jukebox Modernism: Popular Art and Popular Music. NYC: Routledge.
Moore, Alan W. Art Gangs: Protest &
Counterculture in New York City. New York: Autonomedia,
2011.
Music Gallery. “History.” https://musicgallery.org/about/#history
Popular Music History 13
No.1 & 2 (2020). Popular Music and Curation. Edited by Holly
Tessler.
Roberts, Mike. How Art Made Pop And
Pop Became Art. London: Tate, 2018.
Rogers, Holly. Sounding the Gallery: Video and the Rise
of Art-Music. Oxford: OUP, 2013.
Sanders, Jay. Rituals of Rented Island: Object Theater, Loft Performance, and the New Psychodrama –
Manhattan, 1970-1980. Exh. cat. New York:
Whitney, 2012.
Schoonmaker, Trevor (ed.). The Record: Contemporary ART
and VINYL. Exhibition catalogue. Durham, NC: Nasher Museum of Art at Duke
University, 2010.
Strange, Simon. Blank Canvas: Art School Creativity from Punk
to New Wave, Bristol:
Intellect, 2022.
Stubbs, David. Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen. Winchester: Zero Books, 2009.
Walker, John A. Cross-Overs:
Art Into Pop / Pop
Into Art. London:
Routledge, 1987.
A Playlist (suggestions welcome…)
Chicks on Speed, Utopia.
Anat Ben-David with Anna Dennis/Richard Scott, The Promise of Meat
John Cage The Beatles 1962-1970 (1989) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCV2LDh421o&t=4s] from the project Hyper Beatles by Aki Takehashi]