Pop Goes the Artist
New Lecture for summer 2014
POP GOES THE ARTIST: FROM WARHOL TO DYLAN
Something a little different - 20th C American, rather than 19th C British Art. Recently I've had a chance recently to look closely at some fascinating works of Pop Art. And it all ties in rather neatly with my work on music and the visual arts. So here's a taste of Pop culture:
Bob Dylan's Pictures:
And if you want to find out more, click here: http://www.halcyongallery.com/artists/bob-dylan
POP GOES THE ARTIST: FROM WARHOL TO DYLAN
Something a little different - 20th C American, rather than 19th C British Art. Recently I've had a chance recently to look closely at some fascinating works of Pop Art. And it all ties in rather neatly with my work on music and the visual arts. So here's a taste of Pop culture:
Bob Dylan's Pictures:
‘The press never let up’, Dylan wrote in his
autobiographical Chronicles: Volume One (2004). ‘Once in a while I would
have to rise up and offer myself for an interview so they wouldn’t beat down
the door.’ Dylan answers his critics by creating his own headlines. In his world, Robert Zimmerman can transform
himself: as he told his audience in 1964, ‘I have my Bob Dylan mask on.’
Throughout his career, Dylan has been accused of borrowing,
cutting and pasting. His 2001 album Love and Theft acknowledged as much in
the title. Joni Mitchell infamously called
him a plagiarist. ‘Everything about Bob is a deception’, she said in 2010. But many
others take different view. He is
beloved by cultural historians who write academic essays about intertextuality
and his use of the ‘embedded’ quotation.[i] (These very essays can then be parodied by
Dylan and his collaborators, Luc Sante and B. Clavery, in the catalogue for the
Revisionist Art exhibition held at
the Gagosian Gallery, New York in 2012). Dylan is both a jester and an
alchemist, transmuting base-metal into gold.
He has always woven old tunes, or fragments of poetry, or snapshots into
his own creations. In Dylan’s lyrics we find echoes of Ovid and T. S. Eliot,
Proust and F. Scott Fitzgerald. In his
songs, we hear snatches of Dust-Bowl ballads, Plantation-era spirituals and
Irish laments. We are unfazed by contemporary
musicians sampling recorded music. But this sharing of songs was second-nature
to Dylan, learning his craft in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village. In the folk tradition, both in the USA and in
Britain, songs are passed around, new verses added, tunes played faster or
slower, sung with anger or with yearning.
Each performance revises the original.
So ‘The Girl from the North
Country’ (1963) is Dylan’s take on Martin Carthy’s ‘Scarborough Fair’. Carthy
approved the process of transformation. ‘That was … completely legitimate,’ he
said, ‘Bob never hid anything. And he made his own song from it. That's what
folk music is all about.’[ii]
Sometimes it is the tune, sometimes the story, sometimes the chord
structure: Dylan’s art has always been
underpinned by appropriation and reworking.
The tales told in traditional songs also resurface in his
works of visual art too, his prints and drawings. Greed, guilt and jealousy. Exile and tragedy.
Outlaws and temptresses. The folk stories are spelt out in banner headlines. These blatant texts also take us back to
Dylan’s starting-point, when he wrote ‘finger-pointing’ songs, protesting about
politics and fame. The words splashed across faux magazine covers are the grandchildren of the slogans he held
up to the camera in the 1965.
Dylan’s choice of medium – the silkscreen print – is another
gesture towards 1965. This was the year
that he came into contact with Andy Warhol.
At the time, Dylan was close to Edie Sedgwick, a young woman who starred
in many of the underground movies made at Warhol’s Factory. That summer, Warhol persuaded Dylan to sit for
one of his Screen Tests, a trial by camera. After enduring his silent, slow-motion
portrait, Dylan toured the Factory. He
saw Warhol’s monumental silver screenprint of the Double Elvis (now in
MOMA, New York), and he took it home. Later Dylan acknowledged Warhol as ‘the
king of pop.’ But, he went on, ‘One art
critic in Warhol’s time had said that he’d give you a million dollars if you
could find one ounce of hope or love in any of his work’.[iii]
The silkscreen medium strengthens this
sense of emotional detachment. The
prints are handmade objects, each differing slightly from the next. But the expanses of unmodulated flat colour
make it hard to see the artist’s hand at work.
And the process of photographic screenprinting (used by both Warhol and
Dylan) reinforces the distance between maker and object. For Warhol, silkscreen was the ideal
instrument for challenging consumer society and celebrity culture. A commercial artist by training, Warhol
turned the art of the advertisement back on itself.
It is impossible for Dylan to work with silkscreen without
comparisons being made with Warhol’s productions. However, Dylan’s use of the technique is
deliberate and singular. He plays with
the disjunctions between the text, the image and the mechanistic manner in
which each work appears to be made. This
is a collage, but we cannot see the joins.
He has sampled brand identities, seamlessly overlaying them with
impossible statements. The medium,
despite all its associations with Pop and the Factory, is made to take second
place to the collision of words and pictures.
Dylan never makes it easy for his audience to understand his
message. He told us back in 1965, ‘You
have to listen closely’. [iv] But however hard you listen, it can still be difficult
to disentangle his meaning. The
sleeve-notes for Highway 61 Revisited,
to take just one example, are impenetrable: ‘the songs on this specific record
are not so much songs but exercises in tonal breath control…the subject-matter
– tho’ meaningless as it is – has something to do with the beautiful
strangers’. The saloon piano on Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues may be out
of tune, his voice ‘a thin, wild mercury sound’. Yet this album is a masterpiece, with a
jagged, apocalyptic climax that sweeps past Ophelia, Cinderella, Einstein and
Casanova. Dylan defies categorisation:
no-one sings like him, no-one writes like him.
He throws up smokescreens. Even
in his autobiography, he slides from decade to decade without stopping to
explain. We struggle to keep up with his
train of thought. We should not expect his pictures to be straightforward. That is not his way.
Dylan has always been a magpie. As a young singer-songwriter, he gathered and
sifted, adding new words to old tunes, changing key, mood or instrument,
restless, ears open. But as he said in
2004, ‘You can’t do something forever. I
did it once and I can do other things now.’[v] As he moves into the world of painting and
print-making, he is still a magpie. This
time, his sources are visual. Images are
unpicked and rewoven. They have been
troubling him a long time. Back in New
York in 1961, he stayed in an apartment full of books and magazines and guns,
things that caught his eye: ‘books about Amazon women, Pharaonic Egypt,
photobooks of circus acrobats, lovers, graveyards’.[vi]
These are the eclectic images that
resurfaced, forty years later, when he wrote his own life-story, or at least
one version of the truth. And they are
the same images that haunt his print-making..
Bob Dylan’s art is not constrained by medium. Texts, pictures and tunes intersect and
reverberate. As he wrote, ‘Folk songs
were the way I explored the universe, they were pictures and the pictures were
worth more than anything I could say’.[vii] Some projects are left as songs without
words. Others are double works of art,
with text and image sitting uneasily together.
It is the unease, the unresolved tension, our inability to predict what
will happen next, that makes Dylan’s work consistently exhilarating.
[i]
See for example, Christopher Rollason, ‘Tell-tale signs – Edgar Allan Poe and
Bob Dylan: towards a model of intertextuality’, Atlantis, Dec. 2009,
p.41
[ii]
Martin Carthy interviewed by Matthew Zuckerman in 1995, quoted by Zuckerman in ‘If there’s an original thought out there, I could use it right now: The
Folk Roots of Bob Dylan’, posted www.expectingrain.com,
20 Feb 1997
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