Provocative cover art featuring afros, spaceships, and breast and phallic symbols – once censored and protested – brightly hang near murals mapping the beginning, end and possible rebirth of rock ‘n’ roll. The floors are covered with favorite and widely disliked vinyls, including little-known albums. Neon signs with various slang for female body parts glow next door. You are witnessing “Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967.”
For the Museum for Contemporary Art’s 40th anniversary, the institution has put together an exhibition that takes an in-depth look at the intersection of rock music and art. Showing Sept. 29 through Jan. 6, the exhibit contains art that manipulates images, sound and space, creating works that illustrate the same sort of passion and intensity of the music phenomena to which they are dedicated.
“Rock is a serious art form unto itself,” says the exhibition’s curator Dominic Molon, who conceptualized the show. Named after a 1968 Rolling Stones song, “Sympathy for the Devil” deals with rock starting in ’67 because it’s a point when rock became a force. The release of Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced, The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Doors’ and Grateful Dead’s self-titled debut albums made 1967 a golden year for the genre.
Molon cites Andy Warhol’s production of The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico as the beginning of a strong relationship between rock and avant-garde art.
Many of the artists whose work is featured are musicians or worked in the music industry, so their connection becomes more intertwined. An example of this is Mika Tajima’s work, whose exhibit is named for her band New Humans.
“This is highlighting the way collaboration can work,” Tajima says. The wall panels, which are shades of gray and orange, can be moved around to become different things. Sometimes they represent the walls of the studio, while other times they’re bulletin boards. A crackling sound also accompanies the installation, thanks to a version of “Sympathy for the Devil” that is so distorted only the peaks of the song can be heard. “It sounds like the anticipation for an album to play,” Tajima explains.
This understanding of the music and how it plays into an artist’s creative process is even evident in the installations’ arrangements. Robert Longo’s untitled life-size charcoal drawings – which show people wearing business attire in very intense poses – were necessary to display in a set of three to reflect the chords played in punk music.
As expected with art, there is much commentary evident in the displayed pieces. One room has a huge stack of posters in the middle of the floor that read “What Would Neil Young Do?”, which visitors are free to take. “It shows how we internalize rock figures, and they become a part of our ethics,” Molon says.
To bring the connection closer to home, there are number of activities for visitors to participate in, including creating their own screen-printed T-shirts and bags, as well as a studio where visitors can record their own demos. ?
Medill senior Niema Jordan is a PLAY writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
