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Pop Art Blur and Damien Hirst? Pet Shop Boys and Sam Taylor-Wood? No doubt about it, pop stars dabbling in art is a bad idea. But what happens when the roles are reversed? Brass bands playing KLF hits and kylie tributes, that's what. Who says that 'throwaway' Top 40 pop hits can't be the legitimate launch-pad for serious art? The '90s have seen gaps between so-called high and low culture closing, and fast. Who better than artists - talented peers grooving alongside us at clubs, processing meaning out of the gigs and pop flotsam everyone holds precious - to see that these supposedly wide gulfs are filled at last? The coming wave of younger American and British artists have confidence in pop culture; their obsession with the soundtracks underpinning our lives forges a cool, interdisciplinary approach to art and live alike. Jane Pollard, of artist/curatorial collaborators Forsyth & Pollard, echoes the feelings of this next generation with total accuracy and a refreshing devil-may-care attitude: "Sometimes we'll do a project and ask ourselves, 'Just what fucking level is this on?'" "Not many people of our generation haven't grown up surrounded by pop music, for me it was the best was to escape, whether at a disco or at home listening to Morrissey in my bedroom," muses Georgina Starr, probably the most famous British artist flirting with pop today...
Historically, the marriage between art and pop is problematic. Despite the tradition of the British art school as a melting pot for ideas and a meeting place for disciplines, the snobbishness of culture vultures means that deeply Romantic work such as the American artist Elizabeth Peyton's studies of Liam, Jarvis and Kurt Cobain or Jessica Voorsanger's idolatry of David Cassidy often meets with short shrift. Yet we know pop stars thirst for the credibility derived from dabbling in art. Often these ambitions merely aspire; witness David Bowie's wallpaper or those regrettable Groucho Club commissions - Dave Stewart courts Damien Hirst; Blur, despite a shared Goldsmith's pedigree, misfire doing the same; Siobhan Fahey buys into Sarah Lucas' bad-girl aesthetic. Credibility happens only when that pretentious aura of mutual self-congratulation isn't present, as in Sam Taylor-Wood's enjoyably straightforward videos for the Pet Shop Boy's recent Savoy Theatre shows. Despite the art-school tradition shared by today's visual artists and clued-up musicians from Sonic Youth to Jarvis Cocker, few of the '90's link-ups have the same resonance as the efforts of Warhol and Peter Blake over 30 years ago; perhaps today's musical movers and shakers are too self-absorbed and career-conscious or inhibited by irony and the past to come up with anything truly ground-breaking. Artists inspired by pop, however, see music and its stars as a rich seam worth mining at every opportunity. Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard are 24-year-old obsessives with Goldsmith's degrees and a flat packed to the rafters with records and memorabilia. As artists and curators they've consistently referenced the soundtrack to their lives - and ours. "Taking inspiration from pop music acknowledges something that everyone uses as a tool of self-expression and communication" Jane enthuses. "There's very little in our work that's contrived. Most of it comes from real life. I've Built My World Around You came from being apart for the first time over Christmas; Iain made me lots of tapes and it progressed to the point where we bought a wooden holder and made 100 tapes." As a piece of work, it's so obsessional that it collapses any kind of sentimentality you'd get from making a compilation tape that's meant to have a mutual meaning. Another piece, Why Can't I Be You?, dredging up Iain's memories of gallivanting around Kent as a teenager in Robert Smith drag, links Iain and Jane's cataloguing of shared passions to their next pre-occupation; live arts installations focusing on the 'shared experience' of the tribute band and audience identification with the Stars In Their Eyes world of the tribute performance. Events like Doing it for the Kids, a Fantasy Band League playground where 'Kylie Minogue' and 'David Bowie' carry out the duets record company executives only dream about, or The World Won't Listen, capturing the strange emotional landscapes of Smiths fans on-stage and off, are playful and - most importantly - fun.
Promoters of tribute bands claim to give audiences the opportunity to see groups which no longer exist or have become inaccessible. Iain and Jane were attracted not to the camp irony of seeing Virtual Jarvis down the local pub; instead, they were intrigued by the distance from the idol twinned with the immediacy of fan-worship. "I like tributes because they take one step away from the 'real' thing," laughs Jane. "Your relationship to groups often happens on a fan level - the big gigs, the record sales, the investiture in an icon - but your relationship to the tribute is shared because the people on-stage are massively obsessed fans." Iain agrees; "It's really endearing watching people trying so hard." Their next installation, The Smiths is dead, at London's ICA, returns again to The Smiths on the tenth anniversary of the group's demise, rich pickings for obsessives. "We like putting the band into a place, building a scene and bringing in the fans," Jane enthuses. "It's a happening and a hellishly accessible one"... Obviously, the nex step for many of the artists working in and around the pop arena is the production of their own music. Ian Forsyth and Jane Pollard have made a CD single, Never More Than This, as their contribution to this year's New Contemporaries exhibition; directing a group of musicians into making a boy bandesque track that belies their status as total indie kids and offers dance remixes. Unnervingly polished, it is their first attempt at writing songs. Perhaps the best and most honest lesson to be learned from these artists' obsessions and inspirations is the importance of accessibility and lack of pretension in any artistic sphere, not just the seemingly oh-so-rarefied circles of the art world. Increasingly, the world creative people move in is becoming smaller and more readily linked; those at the cutting edge of culture are simply paving the way for the rest of us. "People have a good time and wind up thinking closely about art and we're benefiting from having the freedom, as artists, to do whatever the hell we want," laughs Jane Pollard. "If we don't stick our collective necks out now to follow our interests, we're wasting chances. Or maybe we're just young enough to get away with it!"
Pop Art This article originally appeared in i-D Magazine, The Obsession Issue, August 1997
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