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Doug Aitken
Hysteria 1998-2000 uses film footage from the past four
decades that shows audiences at pop and rock concerts working themselves
into a frenzy. The film progresses from black and white to colour
and provides a potted history of the adulation of pop and rock bands,
from Beatlemania to crowd-surfing and mosh pits. Aitken never reveals
who the performers are - it is the audience who is the star of the
show. Aitken has worked as a director of pop videos for, amongst
others, Fatboy Slim and Iggy Pop.
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Fiona Banner
Don't Look Back 1999 comprises three texts in which Banner
describes from memory the 1967 'rockumentary' of the same name,
whose subject was Bob Dylan's legendary first British tour in 1965.
This film features a seminal moment in pop iconography, in which
Dylan holds up cards with the words of his song Subterranean
Homesick Blues on, each card being discarded after every line
is sung. Her descriptions, each remembering the film slightly differently
are written in the present tense, as if she were there with him
at his concerts.
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Julie Becker
Suburban Legend 1999 examines the links between the film
The Wizard of Oz and Pink Floyd's album Dark Side of
the Moon. The title of the work refers to the urban myth that
Pink Floyd wrote the album as an alternative soundtrack to the film.
The synching between the two is supposed to begin with the third
roar of the MGM lion at the beginning of the film. Becker calls
this 'karmic occurrence'. Prompted by a user's manual written by
Becker, viewers of Suburban Legend are invited to scroll
through the video to link up the 'best' bits.
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Andrea Bowers
Democracy's Body - Dance Dance Revolution 2001 explores
the cult following in suburban Los Angeles of a karaoke dance routine
machine, where players dance to a mixture of American pop or Japanese
'dancemania'. The game demonstrates the rapid development of interactivity,
as it requires the players to use their whole body rather than merely
the twitching wrist and thumb action demanded by older video games.
Bower's work highlights the excitement of dance music, bodily interaction
with technology and the collective mentality that develops around
these pop-driven crazes.
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Candice Breitz
Double Karen (Close to You) 2000 uses sampling techniques
to cut and paste footage of Karen Carpenter singing (They Long
To Be) Close to You. Carpenter's performance has been edited
to make it appear as if she is singing a duet with herself, that
concentrates exclusively on the words 'me' and 'you'. Breitz has
stripped the song down to illustrate the relationship between the
listener and the performer with its built-in fantasy of togetherness
and intimacy. This work describes a stuttering, dysfunctional relationship
between the listener and the performer. It also reflects a conflict
between private and public personas, alluding to Carpenter's life
and anorexia-related death.
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Angela Bulloch
Angela Bulloch, in collaboration with Holger Friese, has created
a modular light mixing system that allows 1.6 million colours to
be mixed from fluorescent tubes of red, green and blue. Disco
Floor_Bootleg:16 2002 consists of sixteen modules in a four
by four arrangement, with pixels facing upwards so that they assume
the appearance of a lighted dance-floor. The piece runs with two
animated sequences relating to the different parts of the soundtrack,
which samples Chic's seminal disco track Good Times.
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Dexter Dalwood
Dexter Dalwood paints interiors of pop stars' homes, including Paisley
Park 1998 and Neverland (Michael Jackson's Bedroom)
1999, although he has never seen them. The paintings evoke both
our memories of music and the pop myths of our time. His work plays
on a 'through the keyhole' fascination for the life of celebrities,
whilst making reference to the history of painting; he reinterprets
seventeenth and eighteenth century history painting - a genre that
functions similarly to contemporary media by hyping and aggrandising
legendary incidents and characters.
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Rineke Dijkstra
The Buzz Club/Mysteryworld 1996 is a set of video portraits
of teenagers dancing in a booth that the artist set up for one night
in a club in Liverpool and in Zaandam in the Netherlands. The girls
pluck up courage to dance and show off their bodies and the boys
try to appear cool, macho and hard. Each person in Dijkstra's film
represents, by default, a different aspect of ephemeral fashion
and attitude, which has already rapidly dated since she made the
work in the mid 1990s. Dijkstra has created a charming, hilarious
and revealing portrait of youth.
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Rodney Graham
Phonokinetoscope 2001 comprises a turntable, vinyl record,
amp, speakers and a 16mm projector. The turntable and projector
are linked so that when the needle is placed on the record the projector
starts. Accompanied by a psychedelic rock soundtrack performed by
Graham, the film shows him taking a tab of LSD and riding his bicycle
through the Tiergarten in Berlin. It is a cryptic, multi-layered
re-enactment of the first acid trip taken by the inventor of LSD,
Dr Albert Hofmann, in 1943. It is also inspired by Thomas Edison's
invention of the Kinetophonograph in 1889, an early form of cinema.
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Andreas Gursky
May Day IV 2000 captures a crowd of people packed together,
milling around or dancing in a way that seems to ebb and flow with
lines of energy, despite being a static image. The dancing masses
of people illustrate a shift between individualism and a collective
tribalism as they subdivide into self-absorbed dancers, romantic
couples and adrenalin-fuelled clusters. Gursky seems to glean from
this an underlying pattern in which the attention of the crowd is
attracted towards whatever is being presented on stage, although
that focal point remains outside of the picture.
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Gary Hume
Gary Hume has gained international recognition for his beautiful
high-gloss paintings. His subjects have included a range of celebrities
from Tony Blackburn to Patsy Kensit, chosen, says Hume 'for their
ability to describe beauty and pathos'. Michael 2001, his
painting of Michael Jackson, suggests a vacuous quality that comes
from over-familiarity with Jackson's increasingly shocking face.
The gloss of the works add to a sense of the subjects' shallow beauty,
tawdriness and showmanship, which are themselves an extremely seductive
part of pop life and art.
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Mark Leckey
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore 1999 is a dream-like video of
crowds at various dance clubs, covering a period of thirty years.
The footage progresses from Northern Soul and jazz funk clubs in
the 70s to Casuals and acid house in the 80s and hardcore raves
from the 90s. This work reveals a fascination for the culture of
clubbing by capturing the authentic spirit of the times and a sense
of wistful nostalgia that develops with age. Leckey's piece charts
a time of innocence, irresponsibility and hedonism inspired by the
love of music and dance.
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Dawn Mellor
Dawn Mellor's paintings of Madonna, Britney Spears and Courtney
Love examine the camp, and near-caricature quality of these female
stars. Mellor's paintings catalogue the cultural references that
these pop stars recycle for their changing images - including the
popstar as whore, nun, little girl and rock chick - which are in
turn used to help prolong otherwise short careers in the fickle
world of pop. Her paintings imply desire and fandom and investigate
the relationship between artist and female muse.
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Chris Ofil
Chris Ofili's energetic paintings explore and challenge contemporary
black experience, sampling African art, popular culture, hip hop
and rap music. Afrodizzia 1996 features hundreds of black
faces amidst a cosmic storm of colour and carefully applied decoration,
featuring musical icons such as James Brown, Louis Armstrong, Michael
Jackson or Little Richard. Names are spelt out onto clumps of elephant
dung that have been attached to the canvas. Ofili's painting captures
much of the energy and excitement of the music that he name-checks
as well as paying homage to black musical heritage and traditions.
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Julian Opie
Julian Opie's work highlights the importance of a clearly recognisable
image to aid the consumption and identity of music. Opie's portraits
are developed from photographs he takes which are then digitally
reworked. The resulting images use minimal detail to convey the
uniqueness of each subject's face. Opie's portraits of Blur for
the cover of their Best of album continued the tradition
of artists producing pop album covers. The romantic, escapist quality
of his simplified image of an airport runway, engines - footsteps
- voices 1999 is enhanced by a soundtrack from St Etienne,
for whom Opie has produced several CD covers.
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Elizabeth Peyton
Elizabeth Peyton paints somewhat idealised portraits of celebrities
and friends and has said that she never paints anyone she does not
admire. She paints from photographs and her subjects have included
Liam Gallagher, Sid Vicious, Kurt Cobain and Jarvis Cocker. Peyton's
paintings demonstrate how we begin to build a relationship with
celebrities through consuming their images. The paintings have an
intimacy in both scale and execution, and the fan's attention to
detail that reflects Peyton's sincere feelings towards the subjects.
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Ricky Swallow
Ricky Swallow produces models from 1960s and 1970s record turntables,
to create miniature portable scenes that recall his favourite moments
from science fiction films and local museum displays. The needle
on these models appear to be stuck in the groove, in an endless
present defined by the rotation and twitching of forms, recalling
the earlier mixing techniques of DJs Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash.
Swallow and his musical counterparts give the essentially redundant
technology of the turntable new life as they remix chronologies
and references.
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Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans' photographs are suffused with the spirit and
inspiration of music, which creates a multiplicity of shifting associations
and contexts. The tensions and connections across his images operate
as a remixing of musical memories and sensations, from clubs to
choirs, Detroit techno to music technology. Tillmans readily acknowledges
the power of music, and that colour, light and composition have
close and deliberate correlations with melody and rhythm in his
contingent work. Winner of the Turner Prize in 2000, his photographs
have appeared in The Face, Vogue and i-D magazine, and blur the
barriers between fine art and commercial photography.
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Gavin Turk
Pop 1993 is a life-size sculptural self-portrait in which
Turk depicts himself dressed as Sid Vicious performing Frank Sinatra's
song My Way. He is also imitating a famous gunslinger image
of Elvis which was memorialised by Andy Warhol (which can be seen
in Pin-up on the ground floor) and later re-used in Julian Temple's
film The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle. Embodying the spirit
of remixing, the work presents the image of artist and pop star
as an embalmed museum icon, made safe and consumable to nullify
the shocking effect the young Presley and Vicious had. Pop
operates as a wry play on the reduction and commodification of cultural
memory and youthful rebellion.
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Gillian Wearing
Slight Reprise 1995 is a video of performances by air guitarists
strumming to heavy metal in their bedrooms. Wearing's work is characterised
by her investigations into human behaviour, influenced by watching
1970s fly-on-the-wall documentaries. She works collaboratively with
members of the public whom she records on film, video or photograph.
Slight Reprise has a diaristic quality and is a portrait
of fandom and the passionate love of music, but also of wish fulfilment
and adult play.
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