Self-portrait of the artist as consumer

Interesting piece here by Simon Reynolds on Sonic Youth’s latest album The Eternal. Interesting not because it’s about Sonic Youth (pictured here, guest-starring on The Simpsons), but because of how heavily referential he argues their latest work to be. If, as the touring exhibition ‘Sonic Youth Etc.: Sensational Fix’ suggests, the band sees their music as part of a broader multi-disciplinary approach to cultural production, and given how heavily referenced Sonic Youth are in the art world, that this band should make an album that wears its influences so clearly upon its sleeves makes sense, albeit of a slightly disappointing kind. As Reynolds writes:

‘There are plenty of other bands who do this kind of heavily referential work (Stereolab and Saint Etienne spring to mind) but listening to The Eternal, I suddenly started thinking about how it was an odd place from which to write songs. At least, looking at it from the standpoint of seeing songs as the expression of personal experience. It’s not the only standpoint, it’s quite an old-fashioned one, but it does happen to be the approach and mindset of just about all the artistic, literary and musical icons Sonic Youth are honoring on The Eternal. You can’t really imagine Gregory Corso or Darby Crash operating like that. Their art would be a lot more expressionistic and cathartic and torn from the soul. No doubt Sonic Youth have arrayed these touchstones before their audience because they find them imperishably inspirational (perhaps that’s why it’s called The Eternal?). And, for sure, it’s perfectly possible to be profoundly moved by works of art in other mediums than the one you work on. But moved to write a song about it? (One tune on The Eternal, ‘Calming the Snake’, is apparently Kim Gordon “musing on visions of Death in painting”.) It all seems oddly meta, to have more in common with the kind of thing that goes on in the art world. Like the re-enactments done by people such as … well, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (whose works include the restaging of a legendary fan-bootlegged 1978 Cramps concert at a mental asylum). Or like the artist Phil Collins with the Smiths songs/karaoke video installation the World Won’t Listen, which is just about to get its UK debut at The Tramway in Glasgow.’

If you were to try and identify, in a very generalized, shooting-the-breeze-in-the-pub-with-friends sort of way, some of the salient features of art in the past decade, one characteristic that might come up for discussion is art’s referential turn. Not in the sense of a return to Pictures Generation appropriation – although that’s undoubtedly in the mix somewhere – but in the conflation of producing and curating. This can, for instance, be identified in the way meaning is ascribed to objects and images through materials – ‘the blue sculpture is the same colour as King Ludwig II’s favourite slippers, and the painting on the wall is made using the same brand of acrylic paint as Andy Warhol used for his Brillo boxes but it’s all explained in this book I’ve made which is printed using the same letterpress Max Miedinger used for the first versions of Helvetica…’ It can also be seen in the work of artists who use the methodologies of the archivist or curator, whereby the artwork relies upon the cumulative effect of a range of found objects or images – usually of significant pop-cultural resonance or notable historic value – or works by other artists, collected together under one umbrella. (A recent example of this tendency might be Goshka Macuga’s commission for the newly-reopened Whitechapel Gallery, ‘The Nature of the Beast’.) At best, these strategies raise crucial questions about ownership and authorship, or can create surprising juxtapositions of meaning or complex semiotic equations within a given space. At worst, the effect is much the same as having someone show off to you how cool and recondite their tastes are. Either way, the cultural value is usually generated somewhere other than at the source of production itself. That Sonic Youth, a band who have long identified themselves with visual artists, should be paying explicit homage to their forebears shouldn’t, therefore, come as too much of a surprise.

When, at some point in the future, we come to look back on the art, music and design of this decade, I wonder how much of it will appear curiously fixated on the past?