LPs and VIPs--LP jacket covers and paparazzi photos showcase "celebrity"

Carnegie, Jul/Aug 2002 by Romero, Margie

Long before he became one himself, Andy Warhol was fascinated with celebrity. Two shows on view this month at the artist's North Shore museum investigate celebrity and fame from opposing perspectives.

In The LP Show, more than 2,000 album covers-from the 1940s through the end of the century -detail how musicians and record companies used graphic representation to create identity-and sell the product.

But a look at the flip side of fame is captured in Off Guard: The Photographs of Ron Galena. This debut exhibit features approximately 300 images taken by Galella, the seminal American paparazzo notorious for his pursuit of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. In his 30-year career Galella has aimed (his camera) to unwrap carefully constructed identities and reveal the person behind the persona.

Each of these displays continues the post-war artistic revolution begun by Andy Warhol, the audacious progenitor of Pop Art. With his own origins in commercial illustration, Warhol recognized the power of mass-production. He knew these journalistic and much-distributed depictions could be emotionally charged and immediate, imbued with visual excitement and technical excellence, capable of sophisticated humor and dark exploration. Both The LP Show and The Photographs of Ron Galena, whose images have been reproduced countless times, challenge the idea that art is precious, esoteric, and one-of-a-kind.

Like the work of Warhol, each of these shows documents the foundations of the current global mediaplex and lifts the hood on the machinery of star-making. There is a democracy of desire in the voracious public appetite for these art forms. Long after Andy Warhol, the fascination with celebrity continues.

June 23- August 18

Music fans growing up in this era of digital file-sharing technology don't know what they missed: the kick of dreamy Saturday afternoons spent browsing through bins at the local record store, picking a band because it looked cool on a 12-by-12-inch album cover, flipping over the bright jacket to read the substantial liner notes on the back. The LP Show gives those generations raised on cassettes, 8-tracks, compact discs, and MP3's a taste of what is was like to live in the age when people tried not to scratch their vinyl.

The LP Show debuted last summer at the New York gallery Exit Art, curated by journalist Carlo McCormick. A senior editor at Paper magazine, as well as a music and art writer for magazines such as Art Forum and Spin, McCormick, 40, says he, "Came of age when record jackets, in terms of ambition, were at their most grand and pompous."

July 23 - September 1

The shoe has been on the other foot lately for Ron Galena, the photographer whose gonzo style went a long way toward cementing the idea of paparazzi in the popular imagination. For more than 30 years, Galena's candid pictures of famous people have appeared in newspapers and magazines, from The New York Times to The National Enquirer. In the past few months, however, Galena himself has been showing up in the news.

The tables got turned with the recent publication of Greybull Press' The Photographs of Ron Galella, featuring an introduction written by Tom Ford, creative director of Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, and a launch party held at Gucci's chic Rodeo Drive store. McCormick also recognizes their power, and considers album covers "landmarks in the culture." To find the best material for this show, he visited about 60 people he describes as obsessive record collectors and looked at millions of images.

His intention, he explains, was not to come up with a rock'n roll hall of fame, but rather to produce a history of experimental graphics. Therefore, his choices were about the visual art and not the sound. He says, however, "There are times when the music and the cover are intimately bound together." One example is an album whose jacket features a picture of Ike and Tina Turner in white-face. "The music was tongue-in-cheek and full of irony," McCormick says. "Quite often what the band was trying to say on the inside is reflected on the outside." Other times, however, the album illustration was produced by an anonymous record company artist whose only goal was to push the product by creating an image.

The Ike and Tina Turner record is in a section headed Race. Other themes include War, Death, Religion, Sex, and Drugs. Additional groupings are based on motifs, such as all smiling faces, or people photographed from behind. There are sections on Liquor, Inebriation, and Cocktail Culture, whose images McCormick describes as "teasing forms of visual seduction." Space Age Bachelor Pad Music has its own area, full of graphics of rocket ships and women dancing on the moon. Early Psychedelia is represented and so is Prog Rock. The jazz label Blue Note, whose jacket illustrations featured odd angles and great color-saturated photographs, has its own cluster. Sometimes the curator threw in a record cover just because he liked its type font.

"I didn't try to be willfully obscure," McCormick says. He did program a special section by famous artists, including a jacket Andy Warhol did in the 1950s for jazz musician Kenny Burrell, and another Warhol created for a recording of Tennessee Williams reading The Glass Menagerie. Christian Marclay, who is part of the current Whitney Biennial, created a kitschy installation out of Herb Alpert's 1965 disc Whipped Cream & Other Delights.