When Ross Sinclair
designed the cover for the first album by his band The Soup Dragons, he was
accidentally setting a marker down for the relationship between his artistic
practice and his role as the band’s drummer. ‘this is our ART’ went the legend
set on a painted five-pointed star that seemed to shimmer like a wild west
sheriff’s badge. ‘USELESS, BORING, IMPOTENT, ELITIST AND VERY VERY BEAUTIFUL’.
As revolutionary slogans go, it was tailor-made for t-shirts some of us still
wear. The album was released in 1988, a few years after Sinclair had taken time
out from his studies at Glasgow School of Art to join in with a nascent
underground scene that saw the then Buzzcocks-inspired Soup Dragons play their
first gig supporting a still jangly Primal Scream. That was at Splash 1, the
Sunday night Glasgow Happening that recast Andy Warhol’s Factory in a
sticky-floored 1980s neon-lit nightclub set to a punk/psych soundtrack played
on cassettes.
Thirty-odd years on, Sinclair
continues to criss-cross between sound and vision as many of his Glasgow peers
do in a city which has in part over the last twenty years or so of DIY activity
gone some way to define a new wave of art-rock. “Artists who make music
Musicians who make art” is a new exhibition curated by Sinclair that attempts
to bring together the different strands of a crucial correlation between
artforms through the work of 100 artists who move between the aural and visual.
“I’ve always been
interested in the relationship between art and music,” says Sinclair in the
midst of unpacking a mountain of material to cram into Queens Park Railway
Club, the grassroots artist-run space overseen by Patrick Jameson and Ellis
Luxemburg, who commissioned the show. “That comes a lot from my own experience
of moving between art and music. I started at art school, then did the Soup
Dragons, then went back to art school. There was that early experience of doing
the record covers, and the exciting thing of doing multiples. Doing all that in
the context of a band, it’s the perfect way of having a conversation with the
audience, and developing a relationship with them. All the things I do now I
try to get back to the simplicity of that.”
Artists in the show
include Douglas Gordon, Graham Fagen, Vikki Morton, Michelle Hannah and
Sinclair himself, all of whom are steeped in pop culture in a way that
influences their work. Hanna Tuulikki has played in bands alongside her
performance based work, while Carla Easton continues to sing and play with Teen
Canteen. Jill Bryson from Strawberry Switchblade, will take part, as will Franz
Ferdinand bassist Bob Hardy, Keith Farquhar, Susan Philipsz, Eugene Kelly of
the Vaselines, Martin Creed, David Shrigley and Dougie Payne from Travis.
Other contributors
include Craig Coulthard, Beagles & Ramsay, Ross Birrell and Clara Ursitti.
Work from Edwyn Collins and David McClymont, both formerly of Orange Juice,
will also feature. It’s hoped as well that actor Tam Dean Burn will perform new
play by Bill Drummond based on the latter’s 10 Commandments of Art, originally
written in 2014 to coincide with the launch of The 25 Paintings, set to travel
the globe for the next quarter of a century.
“In some ways doing the show feels a bit like
doing something similar 25 years ago,” says Sinclair, “where you’d ask your
pals to do something, and they’d drop something off. Except now some of your
pals are Turner Prize winners and what have you, so there’s a real
international feel to things.”
Queens Park Railway Club
itself is key to the aesthetic the show is exploring.
“They’ve done loads of
things here,” says Sinclair. “It’s a really crazy space, because you’re literally
on the platform of Queens Park Station, standing looking at everyone getting
off the train. When they asked me to do a project, I decided that rather than
just do a show, I’d try something else.”
In 2014, Sinclair
collaborated with the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh on 20 Years of Real Life,
a project that marked two decades since the beginning of a 23-year performance
project that began with Sinclair getting a tattoo of the words ‘Real Life’.
This latest project saw him work with teenagers to create five bands, most of
whom performed in the gallery at the launch of a compilation album they played
on, titled Free Instruments for Teenagers.
“That made me want to
explore the community of artists and musicians who are around, but who can be
kind of invisible to each other,” says Sinclair. “A lot of the time now things
are done through social media, but I wanted to make something real.
“I like the fact as well
that Queens Park is an artist-run space, and if an institution had asked me to
do it, I don’t think I’d be so keen. I think the scale of it would kill it,
whereas this feels right. It’s much more punk rock, and is kind of a snapshot
of what’s in the air just now. Obviously I’ve arranged folk, so everyone
involved kind of satellites around me, but I think you could do two or three
similar things made up of work from the generation below me. Queens Park is
perfect for that. It’s very much about showing things that wouldn’t get shown
anywhere else.”
The relationship between
art and music is far from a new thing. Ex art school students from previous
generations who turned pop include Pete Townshend, John Lennon, Brian Ferry and
Brian Eno, while punk was in part founded on art school sensibilities. Record
sleeves have long been used as canvases to wrap the music in, from Andy Warhol’s
cover of the first Velvet Underground album, through to Peter Blake’s sleeve
for the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club, Richard Hamilton’s cover
for the White Album and beyond.
“I think interesting
places that have really strong art schools tend to have really good music
scenes,” says Sinclair, “and obviously in Glasgow over the last twenty years or
so, both the art scene and the music scene have been pretty extraordinary.
Obviously I work at Glasgow School of Art, and I’m really interested in the
loose connections that exist that go right back to Postcard, and I think it’s a
symbiotic thing. The Glasgow art scene, maybe not so much now, but it’s always
been artist-run and self-determined, and that really fitted in with the
independent music scene.”
“Again, there’s a
community thing I’m interested in, and I think that’s something about Glasgow
and Scotland, that everyone bar Martin Creed, whose phone number I had was so
old it didn’t work, are people I know and who I could just ask.”
Arriving a few months before the opening of Rip It Up,
the National Museum of Scotland’s major historical exhibition of Scottish pop, Sinclair’s
“Artists who make music Musicians who make art” show’s specific context aims to
avoid nostalgia. Given the pedigree of many artists taking part, however, some
kind of sense of taking stock may be unavoidable. Especially as Sinclair’s
fellow former fellow Soup Dragons, singer Sean Dickson, now known as DJ Hi-Fi
Sean, and bassist Sushil K Dade, who has recorded extensively as Future Pilot
AKA, both have work in the show.
“It’s not a memorabilia show,” says Sinclair, “although
I did go up to see Bobby Bluebell, who has this archive of folders from 1979
onwards, with all these brochures and posters that are the sort of things people
pay a fortune for on EBay. This show isn’t about looking back, and although
there’s a sprinkling of that, it’s forward looking enough to suggest that it
could happen again with a completely different hundred artists.”
A mooted fanzine and a film about the show joins the
dots right back to Splash 1, as well as to Sinclair’s design for the band’s
This is Our Art album cover. Useless, boring, impotent and elitist all this may
still be, but the fact that musical and artistic connections forged more than three
decades ago are still ongoing in a creative way remains very, very beautiful.
“I continue to be fascinated by the art and music
thing,” says Sinclair, “and if somebody asks me to do a show, I find myself
picking up a guitar and strumming out these noodles. It uses a different part
of the brain. The art thing uses the front of my brain. When it works, they
meet in the middle and there’s a really nice balance between them. I like this
idea of an artist doing music, and vice versa, and to see if it feels
different. This show in part is trying to look at all that in a quiet way, and
to try and see how it all works. In that sense, it couldn’t be more the
opposite of stepping into a shiny gallery.”
Artists
who make music Musicians who make art, Queens Park Railway Club, 492 Victoria
Road, Glasgow, March 2nd-25th, Friday-Sunday, 12-6pm.
Product, February 2018
ends
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