Love Letter, Love Letter
Dan Howard-Birt

Popular music is for many young people a significant tool in establishing, understanding and conveying identity. Music television, the music press, elaborate LP or CD packages and the transgressive, yet strangely ubiquitous, urban flyposting strategies all contribute to the image both of the collective sound of a pop music sub-set (lad-rock, nu-metal, fey-indie etc.) and to that of a particular band or singer. For the not-so-passive listener of fan this 'image' is intensified by those like minded peers who choose the same strata of music as their own, hence fashions for dress, hairstyle, even language. For the fan, then, these gestures of conformity display a desire for affinity with the attitude or world view of that band and its followers. 'What that singer says is in accordance with what I think' and simultaneously 'I think what I do in the light of revelations of this community'.

Although it is probably smart to argue that the packaging is seductive, way before the impressionable adolescent has considered his or her own world view, and smarter still to presume an almost unnegotiable rift between a band's image and their constituent members 'real' lives (the package, the image, the identity; all constructs borne of any number of motives aside from the obvious capital one; a fear of growing old, a route into the always other terrain of glamour, and of course the simple longing to be accepted and wanted by a populous). Positioning the listener as overtly receptive is suggesting that Pop music is the autonomous sphere of influence that it absolutely is not.

While these grander issues to a small extent remain, there is a space where wrenching a song from an album (and that bands oeuvre), or movie soundtrack and recontextualising it within an interpersonal relationship is able to sufficiently reframe that song so that now it bears witness to a shared experience and communicated idiosyncratic meaning. This space is the compilation tape.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's ongoing series 'Love fucks you up' draws attention to this often overlooked musical arena, evolving from 'A Tape for Iain / A Tape for Jane' in which facing pages of Everything magazine [1] imaged the inlay sleeves of two compilation tapes, along one spine "A Tape for Jane", along the other "A Tape for Iain", and below handwritten lists of the tracks that would appear on these imaginary cassettes [2]. This silent reciprocal giving and receiving by the artists of these gifts, these tokens of affection, is shown to us magazine readers. We are given a small insight into this moment of their intimacy, but we are not invited in to the relationship, we aren't permitted to hear the songs. We can only read the titles and imagine the significance of the gift.

In 'Love fucks you up' various friends and their partners are asked to make compilation tapes for each other, the covers of these tapes are then enlarged as prints for exhibition. Without necessarily being hung as pairs, and because the work overall is authored by Iain and Jane and not by the compilers of the cassettes, there isn't the same hermeticism and thus separation for the relationship signified within the work [3]. Instead, the poetic potential of each list of lucid titles is brought to the fore. Should the viewer be familiar with a particular song, he or she, at best, can still only imagine its significance to the compiler and receiver of the tape in the light of their own experience. Instead the texts become romantically aspirational lyrical distillations occasionally punctuated by musically associative points of reference.

Existing simultaneously is the monitor-based piece 'Fucked up lover' in which the makers of the tapes, unsequencially edited, recall anecdotes, attempting to explain the significance of the particular chosen songs. At times this evolves tangentially into eulogising about the band or the partner for whom the tape was made, though often precise moments; concerts, bedrooms, dance floors are recalled and described. The video jumps back and forth between speakers describing similar moments, and though we the viewer begin to imagine who is with who, we can never be sure. Corresponding buildups result in differing emphasis or plain contradiction. And when the speaker attempts to vocalise just what the song means to them and their relationship they invariably fail, stumbling through "err"s and "umm"s to either give up, or resort to platitudes ("y'know"), or in the most telling moments, the songs own lyrics. Where the song was once brought into the relationship, now to an extent the relationship is lived through the song. This work isn't a subtle commentary to its wall-based sister, it doesn't explain anything, rather it similarly embodies an understanding of music's ability within the context of romance to transcend cliché and begin to act as an extra-linguistic (in spite of it's lyrics) communicative bond. A force that can be taken up by any number of actual, platonic or imaginary relationships and carry for each one a different meaning.

________________________
notes:
[1] Everything Magazine. Issue 2:2, March-June 1998
[2] These tapes incidentally do exist, even in the later works where friends are asked to contribute tapes it is the whole item that is asked for and not just the sleeve. Maybe the sonic element will one day appear in art works, but as it stands, importantly in this context as I will go on to suggest, the viewer is given only the sleeve and must imagine the cassette playing.
[3] The 1995 work 'I've built my world around you' consisting of 100 compilation cassettes in a wall-mounted display rack, the spine of each hand-labelled "A Tape for Jane volume 1 (2, 3, etc...)" actively encourages this relationship to be understood within the framework of initial romantic obsession to mature interdependency.

Fucked up lover (video still)

Dan Howard-Birt

Dan Howard-Birt is an artist and curator based in Dundee, Scotland. In 2001 he curated Modern Love, an exhibition of London-based artists conceived in two parts. Beginning at Hobbypop Museum in Dusseldorf the show later returned to London, with the addition of the members of Hobbypop, to be represented at VTO Gallery.

Invitation to Hobbypop Museum

Excerpt: "This work isn't a subtle commentary to its wall-based sister, it doesn't explain anything, rather it similarly embodies an understanding of music's ability within the context of romance to transcend cliché and begin to act as an extra-linguistic (in spite of it's lyrics) communicative bond. A force that can be taken up by any number of actual, platonic or imaginary relationships and carry for each one a different meaning."

Related works
Fucked up lover
Love fucks you up
Everybody else is wrong
Anyone Else isn't you

Related shows
Modern Love in Dusseldorf
Modern Love in London

Related essays
Anonymous Lovers'
JJ Charlesworth, 2005
'The music is all that matters...'
Momus, 2005
'Tape Me I'm Yours'
Steve Lamacq, 2005

Related sites
Dan Howard-Birt
Modern Love web site
Modern Love at VTO Gallery