Not Much Compassion for Sympathy for the Devil at the Musee d'Art contemporain

Slater Bradley
The Year of the Doppelganger, 2004
Courtesy of the artist and Team Gallery

In conjunction with the Warhol exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Contemporary Art Museum is running an exhibit on the relationship between art and rock music today. With mixed media presentations, including a working recording studio, the exhibit takes the visitor on a tour through various countries that dominated the music scene since the 1967.

I’ll begin with the recording studio, since it is a somewhat of a treat to see a performance art piece that sustains for such a long period of time. Rirkrit Tiravanija created a “silent” recording studio, where the instruments are fed into a recording consul rather than an amp. This keeps the room quiet, though it is possible to listen with headphones that surround the studio. Musicians are allowed to book one hour of time during the museum opening hours, so visitors see whoever happens to have booked the time slot. This is, in many ways, a taste of not just the experience of seeing an aquarium-like perspective of how a recording studio works, but also, what the studio itself experiences as different groups of musicians work within its confines.

The rest of the exhibit is hit or miss. Most pieces are concept pieces, and without an explanation remain mysterious and somewhat uninspired. The hits include three gigantic pieces by Robert Longo who depicted dancers of the 1980s club scene in New York in graphite (pencil) and charcoal. These iconic writhing bodies are a dynamic study of the experience of movement and its contrast with one’s profession (he depicts “the suits”). Richard Prince’s portrait photos of an assemblage of artists such as David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Laurie Anderson, and Dee Dee Ramone seem less impressive in the day of the cell phone camera, where candid shots of celebrities are commonplace. Andy Warhol’s screen tests of Lou Reed, John Cale, and Maureen Tucker, though, are a good compliment to the exhibit down the street at the Museum of Fine Arts.

Moving through pieces from artists of continental Europe and the UK, the art is less interesting and the musicians less familiar. From World works, Yoshimoto Nara’s drawings are quick splash of the familiar amidst a largely unaccessablem, if not just boring, exhibit.

Warhol Live Music and Dance in Andy Warhol’s Work at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts

I remember Andy Warhol’s white hair first and foremost. He had a show in 1986 on MTV back when cable was young and MTV played music. It’s too bad that my sense of history was so brief since I could not appreciate the long relationship Warhol had with music. It is no surprise that towards the end of his life, he got involved with music’s latest incarnation: the music video. And, as the song goes, video killed the radio star. Well, not exactly, but Warhol managed to keep up with every shift in music’s sharp edge through his entire life.

The MFA exhibition examines the relationship between Warhol and music, starting with his earliest love of movie musicals with Shirley Temple and opera, progressing through his Stuido 54 days (to quote Warhol, “It was a dictatorship at the door, a democracy on the floor.”) While most people know Warhol produced the Velvet Underground, which practiced in his studio, I was surprised to learn that Warhol was even part of a band, in which Jasper Johns sang lead.

The 640 works on view for this exhibit include some Warhol pieces that don’t relate to music – but these are far and few between. On the whole, Warhol’s record covers, Interview magazine, and portraits of singers and musicians dominate. The major pieces, Elvis, Marilyn, Liza Minnelli, Grace Jones, Mick Jagger, and Debbie Harry are well known and presented in a way that they seem part of Warhol’s interest of the moment. Interestingly enough, his record covers are as symbolic of his greatest desire – to mass produce art – and in some ways are even more representative than what one thinks of as Warhol’s emblematic pieces.

The exhibit draws on the collection of one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, the Andy Warhol Museum, which supplements the holdings of the MMFA and private collectors. On the whole, the amount of material is simply overwhelming. Warhol touched every single medium imaginable, from screen printing to video to cinematic shorts to sketches and it seems he was interested in every single variant of music as well: dance, opera (he was an opera fiend), disco, rock, vocalists, punk, and experimental.

http://www.mmfa.qc.ca/micro_sites/warhol/expo_en.html