From noise to Beuys: Bennett Simpson on art and pop music - Sound

In art, the embrace of pop and the struggle against it make sense of each other and replay the old dichotomy between new wave and punk. Where the former mines music as commodity code and postcritical spectacle, the latter disdains it for the same things (while still putting faith in its ability to transport, critique, and create anew). A response to this double bind can be found in the return to modernist negativity one sees in Steven Parrino and Jutta Koether's "band" Electrophilia. Taking inspiration from America's long history of electric noise culture--the A-bomb, Kerouac, Little Richard, the Grateful Dead, the Stooges, Suicide--Parrino started Electrophilia in the mid-'90s as an analogue to his painting practice. The group's performances can be endurance tests of immersive improvised feedback, throttling bass and synth giving way to the buzz of amplifiers. In a recent collaborative exhibition. "Black Bonds," at the Swiss Institute in New York, Koether and Parrino paired this sound with an installation of their respective paintings (for which they are both better known). Parrino's resembled crumpled heaps of broken stretchers and canvases poured with thick, glossy black enamel. Koether's were more ethereal--large dusky works overscrawled with fragments of words and knotted lines. It was hard to tell if the works had been made as such or if they were failed paintings "blacked out" and reborn in theatrical defiance. The ambiguity was intentional, in any case, and only helped set the stage, literally and metaphorically, for the exhibition's other main component, a program of weekly performances by noise musicians Merzbow, Black Dice, Foot, Christian Marclay, and Electrophilia itself. The ritual negativity of these concerts, on the avant-gardist extreme of the pop spectrum, combined with the abnegation and insistence of the paintings, suggested a dialectic whose origins could be traced, in a not unobvious way, back to the Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich's legendary Dada venue of the 1920s. If the parallels between that time and now--cultural quiescence, economic bust, threats of war--could be imagined burning though the exhibition's dark catharsis, incommensurability was quick to follow. We are no longer shocked by noise: Another Hugo Ball, Thurston Moore cannot be. One was left with the sense that a recognition of anxiety may, today. be its own reward.

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Koether's increased role as a facilitator of art around music recalls certain projects by Martin Kippenberger, Albert and Markus Oehlen, Kai Althoff, and Cosima von Bonin, a group of artists, once all based in Cologne, with whom she is often affiliated. Althoff and the Oehlen brothers, for their parts, have played with the groups Workshop and Van Oehlen, respectively, for many years. Workshop is perhaps the more traditionally "pop" group in this scene. Like Althoff's paintings, its several albums since the early '90s show a sophisticated deployment of historical stylization--part rock, folk, psychedelia, and soul--put to vaguely spiritual ends. Van Oehlen plunders rock motifs with abandon and suggests Albert Oehlen's painting work with its aggressive juxtapositions and piling on of digitally sampled forms. The critic Diedrich Diederichsen has written that in Oehlen's painting, "it's not a question of the number of elements, but of the distinctions among them--these being as great as possible while still allowing interferences and relationships to develop." The same statement could apply to Van Oehlen's music, in which, for instance, glam histrionics and off-rhythm guitar become propositions to think between. Cosima von Bonin's video works Pryde: Exigencies, 1999, and Alles Roger Commander, 2001, are further examples of this kind of distinction-opening, as they occupy a slippery, playful ground between music video, musical theater, and institutional critique. Against images of preteen tomboys frolicking with sled dogs in a remote mountain kennel, Pryde's disco sound track features a male voice crooning instructions for the installation of one of von Bonin's stuffed fabric sculptures: "I should be smoothed out...." The (melo)drama of art's material conditions continue in Alles Roger, which marshals a chorus line decked out in nautical garb to document the (actual) transport of another of von Bonin's sculptures to a recent exhibition of her work in Hamburg.