Carsten Nicolai, bausatz noto ∞, 1998/2015, exhibition view “Damaged Music Vol. 2”, Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 17.12.2022-14.5.2023 © Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / Thomas Bruns
Vinyl is right here to remain; this we now know. Gross sales are hovering and file outlets suppose nothing of asking (gulp) £30 a pop for an album. However it wasn’t all the time this fashion. West Berliner Ursula Block was prescient in figuring out the risk to vinyl from different applied sciences. From 1981 to 2014 she ran a file store and gallery referred to as gelbe MUSIK, (‘Yellow Music’) in sleepy, bourgeois Wilmersdorf, removed from the techno hipsters in Mitte and the punky anarchists of Kreuzberg.
Within the enamel of the enlargement in CD gross sales, 1989, Block arrange a extremely profitable travelling exhibition referred to as ‘Damaged Music. Artists’ Recordworks’. This featured file covers made by artists as authentic works; sound producing objects; books and publications that contained a file, and information made by visible artists themselves. Over thirty years later she now offers us an expanded Quantity 2, a survey of round 700 art-related information organized in ten sections. If that’s not sufficient of a thrill there’s additionally sound works from the Nationwide Gallery’s personal wonderful assortment.
The works right here fill a prolonged extension of the gallery house; it seems like a full mile of rooms. We start with a piece that was particularly designed for the gallery again in 1998: gelbe MUSIK by Hans Peter Kuhn. Block’s store’s title comes from a Wassily Kandinsky quote. The artist, like Messiaen and Scriabin, was fascinated by synaesthesia: a state the place one sensory pathway (e.g. color imaginative and prescient) results in involuntary experiences in one other, corresponding to sound. There’s a big {photograph} of the store/gallery house at evening, an inviting sight with its home windows lit up an evocative vivid yellow. We hear intriguing feels like these made by the clunking sling puck video games you get in amusement arcades.
On the partitions of this primary house we additionally see album covers from Eno’s Discreet sequence: Bryars, Nyman, Toop/Eastley, and the remaining. Fittingly the sequence is mounted with obsessive precision, like a minimalist set up by Donald Judd. In indignant distinction to such calm there’s a canopy on the adjoining wall exhibiting a imply William Burroughs; he’s sporting a Stetson and he’s armed with a rifle. He stands with John Giorno. And right here’s Giorno once more on one other cowl, this time with Glenn Branca, obtrusive out at us on a disc entitled Who Are You Staring At?
Jean Dubuffet, Musical Experiences, 1973© VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022© Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / id3d-berlin
The second room options albums and covers by canonical artists corresponding to Miró and Picasso: test the latter’s economical line portrait of Satie on a piano recording by Aldo Ciccolini. Right here too we discover Kurt Schwitters’ Ursonate as carried out by Jaap Blonk. Elsewhere Piotr Nathan has minimize up vinyl information into little snippets to type Snowflakes (1988–89), a ten by ten piece grid of plastic slivers that appears from a distance like Japanese calligraphy framed by the pristine white partitions.
At this level on the tour you’re given a set of headphones and an iPhone. Straightforward directions allow you to to level the digital camera at codes beside the useful wall texts after which hear in to a collection of lots of the albums. I tune in to Emeka Ogboh and, unseen, jig away like a prat. There’s an set up work right here, too: Nam June Paik’s TV-DG (1993) which has a sculpture of Nipper, the HMV canine, observing his personal picture on a small TV display as he’s filmed by a tiny digital camera sitting alongside.
The soundtrack now switches to Yoko Ono screeching away as she performs ‘Don’t Fear Kyoko (Mummy’s Solely In search of a Hand within the Snow)’ from 1971 solely to settle, click on, with the following work alongside: a tranquil sequence from Hanne Darboven’s album Der Mond ist Aufgegangen referred to as ‘Vierjahreszeiten 1981/82. Opus 7’. In a close-by wall cupboard there’s some unadorned vinyl to have a look at. Right here’s Christian Marclay’s Untitled (Document And not using a Groove) (1987) that’s exactly what it says it’s. Subsequent door to it is a black frisbee made to seem like a vinyl file, a usually amusing work by David Shrigley referred to as merely: I accumulate information, I’m obsessive about them (2012).
Schallplattensammlung des Hamburger Bahnhof — Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart, 2019 Ankauf der Sammlung Damaged Music von Ursula Block, erworben mit Hilfe der Ernst von Siemens#) Musikstiftung und der Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung sowie 2022 erworben durch die Freunde|der Nationalgalerie, © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie / Thomas Bruns
The following room options subject recordings, sound collages from rural and concrete sources, and so we get Emeka Ogboh once more. Berlin loves Ogboh; he’s even bought a sculptural work on the roof of the newly restored palace within the centre of town. There are additionally examples on this house of maximal and minimal music’s going from the aforementioned Glenn Branca and his ‘Lesson No. 1’ then settling all the way down to the extra serene Steve Reich. Right here too are sound sculptures, collages as with Ferdinand Kriwet’s Hörtexte – Radiotexts (2007) that post-dates Holger Czukay’s improvements however pre-dates Jan Jelinek’s experiments with radio and TV transmissions. Close by are examples of OpArt on covers: Bridget Riley, after all, and Victor Vasarely’s work for Xenakis’ LP sleeves. The headphones now blare Kriwet’s voices in a cacophony of chatter.
Peace returns once more with a lovely wall-mounted set up by Christina Kubisch referred to as The True and the False (1992) that appears, from the top of the room, like an artwork deco flower association. Near that we see that the ‘flowers’ are in reality twelve grinding discs, their surfaces coated with fluorescent blue pigment; the cables to those are the stems. Every disc makes a quietly soothing metallic sound. Bliss.
Higher-known imagery arrives subsequent up with a sequence of well-known covers by Raymond Pettibon for bands like Black Flag and Sonic Youth. The latter even have 4 of their classics mounted with designs taken from work by Gerhard Richter (Daydream Nation), Mike Kelley (Soiled), William Burroughs once more (NYC Ghosts and Flowers) and Richard Prince (Sonic Nurse).
Little question you’ll discover a few of your personal private favorite covers someplace right here. For me these included Cosima von Bonin’s designs for the Moritz von Oswald Trio, a sequence that features a rainbow-coloured rolling pin, a femur patterned with the Irish tricolour, and an orange and white toy V2 rocket. Then there’s Warhol’s good Kodachrome sequence for John Cale’s The Academy in Peril album from 1972 and Hipgnosis’ fantastically droll cowl textual content that parodies file firm manipulation and capitalist mores for XTC’s Go 2.
Unsurprisingly German pop music options in one more room with Chicks on Pace, To Rococo Rot, Roman Flügel, and Alva Noto all current and proper. Albums made by the Vinyl Manufacturing unit are inventoried, together with artworks by the likes of Thomas Demand. A bit of covers from the extra instant previous additionally characteristic within the subsequent to final room as ‘Damaged Music Now’: this consists of Martin Creed’s gurning mug together with different works by Jeremy Deller, Mark Leckey, Anne Imhof, and the fantastic Michaela Melián from Monika Enterprises. Seeing Rodney Graham posing as a singer-songwriter reminds us of the unhappiness of his latest demise. Close by there’s one other sort of shocker altogether as Joseph Beuys performs Sonne statt Reagan (1982) on a TV pop present with what seems to be the German Bananarama.
Two Scottish artists based mostly right here in Berlin have installations: Susan Philipsz and Douglas Gordon. The latter’s Douglas Gordon Sings the Better of Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground (For Bas Jan Ader) (1993) sees the artist visualised on a TV set. He’s mendacity on the ground listening to songs from Transformer by his headphones. You may hear in to him with one other pair of headphones as he gamely covers ‘Good Day’. The present finishes powerfully with Philipsz’s poignant Battle Broken Musical Devices (Shellac) (2015) which options the Final Put up as performed by the precise bugle that sounded the Cost of the Gentle Brigade together with a tuba, a flute, a clarinet, a trumpet, and a saxophone that every one survived conflict.
Damaged Music Vol. 2 is each massively entertaining and extremely instructive, an introduction to many different worlds of differing music’s, completely different visions. Make a journey over!
Damaged Music Vol. 2. 70 Years of Information and Sound Works by Artists is on on the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin till 14 Could 2023
