6^th October 2006-7^th January 2007 /  CAAM, 11, 13 Los Balcones St.

Curiator:  Xabier Arakistain
Production: CAAM, Modern Art Atlantic Centre MARCO, Contemporary Art Museum, Vigo Montehermoso Cultural Centre, Vitoria With the special cooperation of TVE, S.A.
Sponsor: La Caja de Canarias

THE CAAM PRESENTS SWITCH ON THE POWER!. NOISE AND MUSICAL POLICIES, WITH WORKS BY ARTISTS FROM MUSIC AND ART.

The rooms in the CAAM are going to receive the exhibition SWITCH ON THE POWER! Noise and Musical Policies until 7^th November, 2007, which joins a group of artists coming from the world of art and music, sharing performing and aesthetic strategies. This exhibition remarks and deepens in the interaction emerged between these artistic disciplines through several pieces of art and/or audiovisual documents. A concert was celebrated in Plaza del Pilar Nuevo because of its inauguration on Friday 6th October, with the performances of Alaska and Nacho Canut, Pam Hogg, Cheeks on Speed, Ann Ben David and Roberta Marrero.

The title of the exhibition—Switch on the Power!— plays with the polisemy of the English sentence (power as electrical current and as authority),and is related to the spirit if inmediacy and autonomy which has frequently characterized these musical and artistic movements. The subtitle—Noise and Musical Policies— remarks these practices’ subversive character , the noise, understood as a disturbing element which is introduced in a system with the intention of modifying it, and in the necessity to see these practices as policies which have their own languages and structures.

The project rejects the temptation of showing current music as one more topic in art and is focused on the peculiarity of some discursive practices which are common to pop, rock and other musical styles artists as visual creators. Some of these artists were part of trends such as the happening, Fluxus, Body-Art, the different slopes of the performance, etc., or part of others which have followed the ideas from those artistic trend developed through the 20^th century to reinvent them with own new contributions, making up discourses which usually transmit alternative values or critical political contents.

In any case, all these discourses have been focused on the use of the body, reconstructed from particular parameters, as an aesthetic symbol for its public presentation. A body which has created a language which has frequently used the voice and which has been characterized by relating different disciplines as the scenic or visual arts, dancing and/or several rituals about the body movement, cinema, literature or design. But specially, a body which is moved by the sound which it itself creates, by musical proposals which have come to be significant in the contemporary musical state and which, besides, have taken into account contexts such as the so called club culture, the pop, rock and electronic music phenomenon.

Artists: 

Short comment on the exhibition:

From the moment when Andy Warhol collaborated with the mythical band The Velvet Underground in the seventies, a new trend of work and artists directly related to the visual arts and popular music appeared. The film by Warhol, The Velvet Underground and Nico (1966) is a great example of this interdisciplinar relationship. But other two artists stand out in the history of the musical and audiovisual intersection because of having been pioneers in watching popular music as a new area where to act from artistic basis. One of these artists is Yoko Ono, whose last work Onochord is going to be presented, the other artist is Laurie Anderson who established the basis of some artistic practices which now are admired by great ammount of fans in works such as Oh Superman, 1981 . It is the same case as Chico and Chica, Anat Ben-David, Planningtorock, Begoña Muñoz, Tobias Bersntrup or Chicks On Speed. This last band, formed by women, will develope an original performance during the opening night of this exhibition.

Otherwise, the rock and pop social and cultural phenomena have created significant examples of artists who, coming from the musical world, have also used the aesthetic and performing strategies characterizing the audiovisual arts. Alaska and Nacho Canut, Siouxsie Sioux or Nina Hagen offer, for the first time in a museum, a summary on their careers; Lene Lovich presents The Power of Performance, a short film speciallt realized for this exhibition, and Peaches presents the video-clip Fuck the Pain Away. Completely influenced by the languages created around rock, other works by artists such as Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Jon Mikel Euba or Jean-Luc Verna are exhibited. In these works the artistic relevance of the performing strategies developed in rock is remarkable. At the same time, Carles Congost analyses and recreates in his Un mistique determinado the teenage pop culturel. Its success can also be found in the band Killer Barbies and their video Crazy, realized by Silvia Superstar herself.

In the seventies, the German band Kraftwerk popularized the electronic music developing a unique work which has been revealed as founder of several events which have taken place in music and art in the last two decades. The exhibition is formed by some performances of the band and several videos by another German band, DAF (Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft), which addressed the use of the electronic music towards the Punk postulates.

 Two artists are found questioning the frontiers between disciplines and artistic contexts and being astride the culture of club and rock, fashio or art: Leigh Bowery, who, after his death, has received several retrospectives from which we can remark the las edition of the Biennal in Venice. We are presenting a selection of the performances realized in the nineties with his musical band Minty.It is in this context that the British fashion designer and performer Pam Hog has been included, producing for this project a piece of work containing a mini-collection of clothes and different videos where she performs her songs. As an example of the new practices in the context of the current Londoner culture of club, the artist Ladypat is contributing with a selection of videos of his own and collaborating with different artists on the stage.

As far as the relationship among art, rock and politics-understood in the classical sense of the word- is concerned, the exhibition includes the emblematic work by Dan Graham Rock my Religion and the video Save the Planet, Kill Yourself by Chris Korda, who invites us to penetrate into the strategies which linked music and political activism during the decade of the nineties. The exhibition, in Gran Canaria, after having been exhibited in the MARCO (Vigo), is showing for the first time a work by the versatile Diamanda Galas titulada Schrei27(1994-2000), it consists on a sound piece where she alternates vocal exercises and silences, a common artistic practice in this artists’ work since 1979; in this work the reflection is about the first genocide in the 20^th century, suffered by the Armenian people. Finally, the video by the British artist Genesis P-Orridge and his band Psychic TV is recuperated twenty years after its emission on the programme La Edad de Oro, in TVE, directed by Paloma Chamorro. Next to this video, the information about the project PANDROGENY (which Genesis is performing nowadays) will be included.

 About the curator:

Xabier Arakistain is an independent curiator. He was responsible of the programme in the Exhibition Lounge in the Fundación Bilbao Arte Fundazioa, Bilbao, between 2001 and 2003,where he curiated exhibitions sauch as Doble filo (Shirin Neshat e Ghada Amer), Royal Blood (Erwin Olaf), Guerrilla Girls 1985-200 and Leigh Bowery, apart from a serie of specific projects by Manu Arregui (On my own), Itziar Okariz (Trepar edificios), Eulalia Valldosera (Konstellazioak) y Carles Congost (Un Mystique determinado). In 1999 he presented the exhibition Trans Sexual Express in Bilbao Arte. In 2001, with Rosa Martínez (co-director of the last Biennal in Venice), organized a travelling exhibition adapted to each of the welcoming places: Trans Sexual Express Barcelona 2001 (Centre d´Art Santa Mónica, Barcelona), Trans Sexual Express Budapest 2001 (Mücksarnok Kunsthalle, Budapest) and Trans Sexual Express A Coruña 2002 (Kiosko Alfonso, A Coruña). In 2002 he presented the project Anunciando un Nuevo presente, Tracey Emin and Gaüeca in the Gran Bilbao magazine and in 2004 the retrospective dedicated to Leigh Bowery in the Museo Textil in Barcelona (Textile Museum in Barcelona). For the last twenty years he has been directing the debates “Feminismos, sexualidades y artes” (Feminisms, sexualities and arts) in the ARCO Exhibition in Madrid. Xabier Arakistain also works as a curator for the exhibition Para todos los públicos/For all audiences, inaugurated last March in the Rekalde Lounge in Bilbao. Nowadays he is preparing the show Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, 45 años de arte y feminismo (45 years of art and feminism) for the Arts Museum in Bilbao.

 If you are interested in receiving graphic material or further information, please ask for it to:

Press and Communication Department
Fax: 928 321629
Tlf: 902 311824
Esta dirección de correo electrónico está protegida contra los robots de spam, necesita tener Javascript activado para poder verla