Tania Cross, Famed, Katharina Merten, NYT, Jochen Plogsties, Robert Seidel, Martin Wöhrl, Arthur Zalewski: 12"

12″

Eight artistic perspectives show their works under a single heading. However, the context they refer to extends far beyond the medium of the LP itself. POP music as a product of the 20th century is not only defined by music itself. Empathic, visual and performative components play an equally significant role. Within this scope the different actors will transform and analyse the theme in their own subjective way.
Tania Cross (New York) combines her artistic approach with the purpose of using felt-tip drawings as posters announcing her next musical appearance. This is similar to independant bands from the 1990s such as Bikini Kill or Le Tigre from the Riot Grrrl Movement who used collages and drawings for their posters. Cross summarises the important facts in a punk-like style.
In “The Dark Side of the Moon“, from Famed (Leipzig), one stands in front of a clumsy round neon circle which is illuminated and black at the same time, creating a simple contrast that leads the spectator to the poles of melancholy and desire: the typical emotional aggregate conditions in the language of pop.
With “inverted collection”, Katharina Mertens’ (Leipzig) priority is the transformation of a product produced by music industry into the context of visual art. Within the working process, the mass produced medium of vinyl becomes a unique piece where it can only be used once and afterwards is rendered useless. The titles of the chosen songs such as “Little Lies”, “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off”, “Heroes” or “Enjoy the Silence” are still readable to the audience and in doing so open up a subjective connection. The music occures within the reading.
The label NYT considers itself as an interface between music and visual art. For this exhibition they show a collaboration between the DJ Jan Barich alias Map.ache and the painter David Schnell.
The painter Jochen Plogsties (Leipzig) reenacts preexisting motifs. In this process he refers to icons of art history, as well as, in this particular sitation, to a album cover and examines the images as to questions of reproduction, artistic roots and contemporary visual strategies.
Robert Seidel (Leipzig) extracts basic patterns of soul, funk and ska album covers. He adapts the composition in a recognizable way as here in the example of Madness. In the details he is scratching, mixing and looping independently.
Martin Wöhrl (Munich) uses existing album covers and reduces their distinguishing and style features to the point that you can barely tell if the recorded music is country or classic or pop. What remains is the mere reduction of coloured squares.
In the silk screen prints of Arthur Zalewski (Leipzig) pieces of pop cultural resonant spaces are isolated and set in grids one above the other. Variability and repetition – the silk screen prints reflect on the beat of an inaudible song.