TATE MODERN
Tate Modern invited The Landscapers to walk around the gallery and find a work of art that would inspire them to write a track.
It was Andy Warhol's Brillo which caught their attention. It's a large
sculpture which looks like something you'd find on a supermarket shelf. They
chose it because they 'liked the connection to consumer products.' The result
is their latest track, VaVaVoom.
You can listen to it in the gallery or here online.
The Landscapers are a production and remix team which bridge the gap between hip-hop, raggae, drum ‘n’ bass and other music forms. Comprised of Rodney P and Corin (The Seal) Pennington, both well-known names in UK music, their aim is to create new and exciting musical soundscapes.
Rodney P is a founding member of the UK hip-hop scene and has inspired a generation of British rappers and producers. He has collaborated with soul and RnB acts like Omar and Brand New Heavies and dance acts like Freq-Nasty, MJ Cole, Roni Size and Timo Mass, as well as Bjork and Nitin Sawhney.
Sean (The Seal) Pennington is one of the UK’s most acclaimed producers and musicians. Over the last decade, he has produced several of UK hip-hop’s most significant albums, including working with Trevor Jackson, The Wailers and London Posse.
Since forming last year, the Landscapers have produced Benjamin Zephaniah’s album, Naked. They are the fifth in a series of music artist to write an original track about an artwork displayed at Tate Modern.
In 1964, a gallery in New York staged an exhibition called The American Supermarket. For this exhibition a number of artists displayed and sold works of art which resembled supermarket products.
Andy Warhol created a number of objects for this exhibition, including a series of Brillo Boxes. Warhol meticulously copied every detail from the actual packaging but painted them on wooden boxes. He was so accurate that the makers of the original product took him to court.
Much of Warhol’s work is about consumer products. His paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans and Coca Cola bottles are now amongst the most iconic images created during the twentieth century. These works draw attention to the design of objects often overlooked in our everyday experience.
You can view this work in the Tate Collection.
Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh, US in 1928. He began his career as a commercial artist working on magazine illustrations and advertisements and it was during this time that he began to develop a distinctively clean and simple graphic style. His earliest works as a fine artist depicted consumer products and images from newspapers.
In the 1960s, he began to make images using the silkscreening method. This technique allowed Warhol to repeat images on a large scale. This repetition depersonalised the images, making all Warhol's subjects appear equally unimportant, whether they were supermarket products, celebrities or electric chairs. Warhol was commenting on the fact that, the mass media bombarded people with so much imagery that they had become desensitised to seeing even the most horrific of images.
He also used this technique to depicts stars like Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley at the height of their fame but the fading that occurs during the silkscreening process alluded to their inevitable decay and death. Warhol also made several series depicting 'disasters' like car crashes, suicide attempts and even the death of John F Kennedy.
Later in his career, Warhol became increasingly interested in film-making and made several films. In 1968, he was shot in the chest by a feminist activist and his health never fully recovered. He died in 1987, in New York City, at the age of 58.
You can learn more about Andy Warhol in the Tate Collection.
