Art: Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, Yale University Press, 228pp, €50The Sex Pistols played their first gig not in some grotty fleapit dive bar, as might be expected, but in the common room at St Martin's College of Art, London.
The band was opening for Bazooka Joe, whose lead singer, Adam Godard, later changed his name to Adam Ant and formed Adam & The Ants.
It was 1975, the year Patti Smith released Horses, the cover of which was shot by renowned photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who also provided the cover imagery for Television's early album covers.
That same year, Talking Heads, a quartet of former art students from the Rhode Island School of Design, gave their first performance at the legendary CBGB. As Colin Newman, a member of the punk band Wire, stated, their music "wasn't 'arty', we were doing fucking art. Punk was art. It was all art".
These synergies are evidence of what Dominic Molon, the Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, calls "the Faustian bargain" that has existed for 40 years between avant-garde art and rock'n'roll. The MCA recently mounted an ambitious exhibition to examine the cultural history of this dynamic relationship, which took off in earnest when Andy Warhol met The Velvet Underground in 1967. Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 is the catalogue published to accompany this exhibition.
The fact that The Who's Pete Townshend witnessed artist Gustav Metzger's destruction of a bass guitar while Metzger was guest lecturing at Ealing Art College in the early 1960s illustrates the direct influence the art school experience had on future rock stars.The art-band phenomenon began when art college students as gifted as John Lennon, Bryan Ferry and David Bowie picked up guitars. These days, an art school background is both a pedigree and a tradition, upheld by bands as fine as Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Franz Ferdinand, among others. What is less discoursed upon is the counterinfluence rock exerts on visual arts practitioners, which is the focus of this catalogue. Molon strives to demonstrate this influence solely through the presentation of works of art.
The material is organised geographically. Over half of the text is devoted to the two rock and art capitals of the world, New York and London. The story begins in 1967 when, Molon tells us, Andy Warhol taught the Velvet Underground how to "bring sophisticated avant-garde strategies into the more widely distributed cultural context of rock music". This importation continued into the 1970s with figures such as Patti Smith, Television, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads, all concentrated in a network of downtown clubs in New York.
Also concentrated in that network of downtown clubs were the artists, foremost amongst them Robert Longo, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Richard Prince. The famous graffiti of CBGB provokes a meditation by Richard Hell on the condition of youth: "The kids believed themselves to be unique individuals; the walls they covered with that claim are the proof that it's a delusion".
EACH SECTION OF the catalogue concludes with a series of plates of the artworks discussed. Some of the work betrays a puerile and blokey aesthetic, but much is intriguing and evocative, particularly the photographs of Melanie Schiff, Aleksandra Mir and Rodney Graham; the video stills from the work of assume vivid astro focus, Pipilotti Rist, Slater Bradley and Marnie Weber; installations by Jason Rhoades, Jutta Koether, Dave Muller, and Rirkrit Tiravanija; and the drawings by Robert Longo, Mark Flores and Mungo Thomson - the latter drew the empty drum kits of Led Zeppelin's John Bonham and The Who's Keith Moon, both of whom died prematurely.
Thomson also made The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan 1963-1995, featuring an aural collage compiling every extant instance of the on-tour Dylan addressing his live audience and its collective response, with all the music edited out. In a memorable essay on the powerful mythology of Los Angeles, Jan Tumlir writes that "We hear this [ Dylan's] exchange in Thomson's work in a way that neither side could possibly have heard at the time the recording took place. And this is because the artist, in his expertise as the ultimate outsider, places us right in the communicative breach between them."
Speaking of ultimate outsiders, there are illuminating and occasionally unflattering insights into central crossover figures such as Yoko Ono, Brian Eno and Malcolm McLaren. McLaren says of his boyband The Sex Pistols: "Rather than just while away my time painting, I decided to use people, just the way a sculptor uses clay".
The catalogue includes a timeline of the past 40 years, providing a useful historical framework that offers further perspective on the art and rock crossover. There are as many ways to navigate this book as there are readers and readings, and no doubt there are as many ways to curate such an exhibition as there are curators, but Molon has put together an absorbing, intriguing and generously illustrated catalogue.
The exhibition on which this catalogue is based opens next at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, on May 31st and runs until Sept 8th
Claire Kilroy's latest novel, Tenderwire, published by Faber, is about a musician