• Home
• Artists
  • Anti-Cool and Duchess Says
  • Beagles and Ramsay
  • Candice Breitz
  • Michael Paul Britto
  • Benny Nemerofsky Ramsay
  • Jeroen Offerman
  • Kevin Schmidt
  • Steina and Woody Vasulka
• Workshop
• Symposium
• Statement
• Venue
• Credits
• News/Blog

Statement

Since the earliest years of rock and roll, artists have used popular music and the materials of popular music culture to explore issues of celebrity, sexual politics, cultural and sub-cultural identity, the influence of mass media on human emotion, and the displacement of spiritual desire within modernity. Variously expressive of homage, envy, obsession, or ideological critique, artworks that incorporate the images and materials of popular music bear witness to the powerful role it plays in defining contemporary culture and its desires. This exhibition explores the use that artists have made of the popular song to reflect on its format, its contents, its mythologies and the emotions it engages.

SONG SHOW begins with the notion that the song is the most basic unit of meaning in popular music and asks whether the various versions of a song are not as much its life as its afterlife. The exhibition explores a particular form of imitation that is neither derivative nor disconnected: more embrace than impersonation. It is an exhibition that looks at the way in which media artists distill from popular songs something that cannot be reduced to reference but instead reconnects us with the special powers a song possesses once it has become caked with memories of local legend, mythic celebrity, heartbreak and misadventure.

Curators:

• Kathleen Pirrie Adams
  
• Daniela Sneppova