DC, July 2011
1,488 words
In London, England there is a colossal modern art gallery housed in a converted power station by the side of the Thames called Tate Modern. The building is a monument to human artifice and maximalism, with every one of its vast external surfaces covered in details and embellishments that you normally wouldn’t find on walls that were built to have very specific, functional purposes: to keep sound and dirt in, to keep foreign objects out, to make sure that the turbines could keep spinning whatever the weather. Before you even get inside to see the art, you can happily spend an hour or two studying the lines and patterns and mouldings and tiling and veneers applied to the brick and stone of the structure. It’s a testament to the fact that many of us, when it comes down to it, really do believe that more is more.
Inside the gallery, however, in its main exhibition space, a very contradictory lesson is being taught. The Tate’s splashy summer exhibition this year is a blockbuster career retrospective of the 20th century Spanish surrealist painter Joan Miro. The majority of Miro’s work was completed using quite traditional materials – although he made some sculpture, his primary form was the ages-old old on canvas painting - but his progression as an artist tells a fascinating story. He started out painting in a relatively conventional way, completing still life studies and portraits that were quite bright and trippy but otherwise very ‘normal’. He painted objects as they were, so that his depictions of people were clearly people, oranges looked like oranges, the sky was clearly our earthly sky. Soon though he started doing something different with his paintings, attempting to boil things down to their essence rather than depicting them in detail. Miro tried to evoke as much emotion and feeling as he could while presenting as little of an object as possible, reasoning that people can have a more intense, personal reaction to art when being asked to use their imagination to interpret forms than when the artist presents a detailed picture that leaves little room for interpretation.
As a result of this, his paintings became more simple and surreal – for instance, in his paintings of Catalan peasants from the area where he grew up, Miro didn’t paint their faces and clothes and tools. Instead, he portrayed the peasants in shorthand, with four objects representing them: two disc-like eyes, a distinctive red hat, and a wispy beard. Through that simple depiction, he evoked a wealth of feeling, with observers of the art coming away with a sense of the wisdom of the simple man (from the beard), the pride that the peasants took in their local heritage (from the Catalan red hat), the hardness of the peasant existence (from the grey colouring of the wisps of beard), and the constant need of the peasant to observe the world to gauge weather patterns and the state of the soil (from the gazing eyes). Miro realised that he didn’t need to paint any more than that to say what he wanted to say, and that sometimes a simple formula holds true: simplicity plus imagination is greater than detail and overproduction.
That same formula can hold true in the music world too, both when it comes to business and in relation to the creative process. On the business end, the dominant construct at the moment seems to be that the best way to build a stable, successful band is by deploying a huge range of complex tools. You need a 360-degree revenue sharing strategy to leverage your merchandising sales to offset declining income from recorded music. You need a dynamic branding strategy to harness new and old media to turn your band from simply one of thousands of wannabe’s to a viral sensation. You should still sign with a label and a promoter rather than going it alone because that gets you access to chains of corporate-controlled venues that allow for optimal tour routing and cross-promotion opportunities. In short, for all of the stories proclaiming that the “old music industry is dead”, the new model being promoted by a lot of industry experts looks a lot like the old one, just with corporations taking an ever-increasing share of a broader range of spoils. You buy in, because you’re told that it’s still the best way forward…
…or you don’t. You do a Miro, and boil things down to their essence. What are the tenets of how to build a successful career, when you get down to it? What are your equivalents of the beard, the hat and the eyes? Well, you need to create great music. You need to put it out online, and then tour like crazy. And you need to sling some t-shirts to make some money, as you’re not going to do that by selling records. If you do those things well, you might well succeed. If you don’t, then no amount of leveraging your brand synergies to create dynamic co-vending opportunities will bail you out. This is exactly the approach that punk rockers evolved in the 80s and 90s, to the extent of creating their own touring routes by setting up relationships with VFW halls and community venues, and then sharing the details of those locations to other aspirant bands. And it’s exactly the approach being taken now by a range of underground acts, and expressed most articulately by rapper MC Lars, ex Coheed and Cambria drummer turned hip-hop artist Weerd Science, and their acolytes in the independent rap scene.
On his mixtape “Indie Rocket Science” and most recent album “Lars Attacks”, Lars attempted to sketch out the principles of his Miro-esque approach to the business. First, don’t assume you’ll make money by selling records (as expressed articulately by Lars guest rapper MC Frontalot: “you try to sell music, and they’ll look at you funny / it’s not a transaction that necessitates money”). Next, before you do anything, make sure that you have created some art that you’re proud of, and that you’ll feel proud of performing every night. After that, don’t be too proud to try to sell merchandise and related products whenever you can, as that’s the only way that you’re going to make enough to be able to carry on recording and touring. Lars and Frontalot expresses this bluntly using the terminology that other rappers have used when talking about the hustle, albeit with a rather more retro frame of reference than the usual talk of Frank Lucas: Lars notes that “part of the job, I mean the other part from caring / is taking t-shirt money like we’re modern robber barons” while Frontalot puts together what may be the modern thesis on musical money-making:
“We know every fabric weight,
every drop ship price,
every line screened density,
and Designs are precise…
And we savor all your savvy
as it leads you to our wares,
up in the gilded age of geekery
we’re so sneakily prepared.
This fool-proof method -
Making just the shirts you want:
With my top hat and my monocle
and your money I abscond”.
Bands are also realising that mimicking Miro artistically can sometimes pay dividends. Critics have frequently alleged that the beloved punk band Alkaline Trio lost some of their appeal when they moved away from the rawness of their earlier material and began experimenting with glossy production and layered instrumentation. In 2011, however, the band have sought to put the focus back onto their song writing and ability to create dark, sexy, moody music by releasing a record called Damnesia for which they have re-recorded some of their finest songs in a simple, acoustic-led style. Basically, it’s is four object theory in action: strip back the overdubs and layered recordings, and go back to simple drums, acoustic guitar, a touch of piano and some beautifully hoarse vocals. The resulting record works wonderfully, summoning a mood of gloom and smoke but leaving room for your imagination to fill in the gaps around the skeleton sounds.
In the gallery next to the Miro exhibition, there is a show by a New York-based photographer called Taryn Simon. Simon presents her simple portrait-style photos with a huge amount of supporting material, from artist-written explanations of their content to other, related photos to extracts from documents and archive material. For her, this works, as the extra explanation adds richness and insight that the photos on their own cannot offer. But it’s not the only way of doing things, as Miro proves – his work would lose some of its tremendous power and emotional weight if he felt the need to explain each abstraction, to append photos of his source material, to fill in all the blanks for you. And so it is in music, where sometimes detail and front can be the way to go, but at this particular moment in time simplicity and reduction may be even more effective.
