Double Lives. Visual Artists Making Music

It is quite remarkable how many fine artists also made music. This was much more than just an interest in another medium. Public musical performances and the production of recorded music involve different ways of working, different environments, and also the confrontation with a different audience.

This is why art critic Jörg Heiser refers to a “contextual shift” between the fine arts and music when he writes about this phenomenon beginning in the 1960s. Alluding to the fact that some artists did not make their work in other fields transparent and open, his book is called Double Lives. It is certainly true that there are many different ways in which individuals can either combine these two fields in their lives and work—or keep them separate. In some cases, work in both fields was only known to insiders. Other artists, by contrast, made a deliberate use of the frame of the fine arts for their musical performances. There is a broad spectrum with many intermediate forms.

Double Lives will focus on fine artists who wrote or produced music, who performed it in public, or who were members of artists’ bands. This raises the question as to the difference between pure musicians and artists and those working in both fields. The exhibition will also address the role of music by fine artists within the history of 20th and 21st century music.

Double Lives will present “only” music, which will be linked with visual material, with videos and photographs of concert and studio performances. The exhibition will thus respect the significance of the artists’ choices of performance situations.

As early as 1913, the year of his first ready-made, Marcel Duchamp used principles of chance as a compositional method in his Momentum Musicale, while in the same year futurist Luigi Russolo designed his first noise instruments (Intonarumori). Already in classical modernism, fine artists were developing questions and methods that were to define not only the fine arts but also the musical avantgarde. After World War II, the phenomenon of fine artists making music became more and more significant. Key impulses came from John Cage, a pioneering composer and musician in so many ways, who was always in close contact with fine artists and also himself created a number of visual artworks. In the second half of the 1950s, he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, where key members of the later Fluxus movement were among his audience. In addition to Fluxus artists, in the 1960s and 1970s, more and more fine artists also came forward as musicians. Their approaches, questions, and methods often resembled those of the fine arts, as in the case of the Americans La Monte Young, Charlemagne Palestine, and Tony Conrad, whose positions were close to minimal art.

The same is true of the musical work of European artists, which remained closer to the Western musical traditions than the music of their American colleagues.

Important representatives of the double life between the fine arts and music are also to be found among the protagonists in the shift from rock and pop to punk and new wave music. With the success of these new musical movements, and simultaneous with a booming return to painting after the years of conceptual and performance art, the late 1970s and the following years saw a high point in the phenomenon of bands consisting partly or entirely of fine artists. It was not least the art schools that became key focuses for the development of a more or less professional (or often also deliberately amateurish) collective form of musical performance.

From the 1990s, the music of fine artists entered into a period of stylistic pluralism, corresponding to developments in the visual arts.

Curators: Eva Badura-Triska, Edek Bartz

Artists and bands:
Alva Noto (Carsten Nicolai); Laurie Anderson; Christian Ludwig Attersee; Beauties of the Night (Christian Egger, Manuel Gorkiewicz, Markus Krottendorfer, Alexander Wolff); John Cage; Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band (Alex St. Clair Snouffer, Jeff Cotton, Jerry Handley, John French); Charlemagne Palestine; Chicken (Hari Ganglberger, Nicholas Hoffman, Katrin Plavčak); Tony Conrad; Martin Creed & Band; DA EAT (Stefan Branca, Mattias Vatter, Phillip Zaiser, Thomas Zipp), Hanne Darboven; Destroy all Monsters (Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Jim Shaw, Niagara); Die Tödliche Doris (Tabea Blumenschein, Käthe Kruse, Wolfgang Müller, Nikolaus Utermöhlen); Essachai Vow (Christian Kosmas Mayer, Alexander Wolff); Marcel Duchamp; GRAF+ZYX; Hotel Morphila Orchester (Paul Braunsteiner, Loys Egg, Franz Machek, Wolfgang Stelzer, Peter Weibel); Yves Klein; Jutta Koether; Laibach (Milan Fras, Dejan Knez, Daniel Landin, Ivan Novak); Les Reines Prochaines (Teresa Alonso, Fränzi Madörin, Muda Mathis, Pipilotti Rist, Regina Florida Schmid); Christian Marclay; Molto Brutto (Gunther Damisch, Josef Danner, Blihal, Andreas Kunzmann, Gerwald Rockenschaub); Monoton; Phill Niblock; Hermann Nitsch; Markus Oehlen; Yoko Ono; O.T. (Lothar Fiedler, Helge Leiberg, A. R. Penck, Christoph Winckel); Nam June Paik; Pas Paravant (Felix Dorner, Karl Kowanz, Renate Kowanz-Kocer, Wolfgang Poor, Günther Schrom, ManfreDu Schu, Wolfgang Stengel, Hans Weigand); Stephen Prina; Gerhard Rühm; Luigi Russolo; Selten gehörte Musik (Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Dieter Roth, Gerhard Rühm, Oswald Wiener); Suicide (Alan Vega, Martin Rev); Emily Sundblad mit Pete Drungle und Ensemble, The Alma Band (Herbert Brandl, Josef Danner, Martin Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Markus Oehlen); The Pop Rivets (Brand Buds, Wild Billy Childish, Big Russ, Little Russ), The Red Krayola with Art & Language (Kathryn Bigelow, Ian Burn, Jesse Chamberlain, Christine Kozlov, Nigel Lendon, Mel Ramsden, Paula Ramsden, Terry Smith, Mayo Thompson); The Wired Salutation (Andrea Belfi, Angela Bulloch, David Grubbs, Stefano Pilia); Throbbing Gristle (Chris Carter, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter Christopherson, Genesis P-Orridge),  Wolfgang Tillmans, Trabant (Viðar Hákon Gíslason, Þorvaldur H. Gröndal, Ragnar Kjartansson, Gísli Galdur Thorgeirsson, Hlynur Aðils Vilmarsson), Wendy Gondeln (Albert Oehlen); Heimo Zobernig with Marcus Geiger, Martin Guttmann, Hans Weigand.

Live in Concert:

Beauties of the Night (Markus Krottendorfer, Alexander Wolff, Manuel Gorkiewicz, Christian Egger)
June 28, 8pm
Hermann Nitsch (organ concert)
October 4, 7pm
Hanne Darboven (played by Michael Duch)
October 6, 10pm
Essachai Vow (Christian Kosmas Mayer, Alexander Wolff)
October 11, 7:30pm
Emily Sundblad and Band
October 25, 7:30pm

Contact
Please check our website for regular updates on our program.
For further information please contact: Katharina Murschetz
T +43 (0) 1 52500 1400 / press [​at​] mumok.at