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:

‘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.

 And if you want to find out more, click here: http://www.halcyongallery.com/artists/bob-dylan





[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


[iii] Chronicles: Volume One, p.174


[iv] Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, p.1


[v] Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown, p.122


[vi] Chronicles: Volume One, p.41


[vii] Chronicles: Volume One, p.18

Comments

Popular Posts