ROCK AND ART
Wednesday, December 2, 2009 at 3:51AM You've got a guitar. That's no reason to get a paintbrush
Paul Morley concedes that pop music and art have much in common. But, by and large, those who can do one of them shouldn't be allowed near the other
The Observer, Sunday 19 April 2009
Article history
I don't know about you, but in my constantly updated list of the top 20 things likely to lead to an instant anxiety attack, with accompanying stabbing melancholy, at No 12 is "paintings by rock musicians". (No 1 is reading lists, No 2 is the making of lists, and No 3 is complaining about lists, but I've learned to take medication for this, as otherwise in a world made up of lists I would not be able to move a muscle.)
The art of very few rock musicians is not the needy equivalent of a side project, or hobby, produced by those who decide that because there are fans interested in their music there will be interest in any apparently artistic thing they do. I can live with the modest watercolours and sketches of Bob Dylan, not feel that the lonely spaces, rough colours and nonchalant scratchings compromise the intimate universe of sensation he's created through the nuanced linking of thinking and music. They're sort of charming - possibly therapeutic - visual notes austerely suggesting a special, spooky imagination temporarily at rest, and it would be churlish to feel disappointed that he is not as much a Manet, Picasso or Duchamp outside of song, and his sublime, reckless control of such.
Captain Beefheart/Don Van Vliet, of course, is no dabbler, just a painter who also made music - Magic Band member Zoot Horn Rollo described Beefheart music as "Jackson Pollock trying to play John Lee Hooker" and if turned into sound his pre/post/ill/-logical paintings of people, beasts, plants, and spirits would exist in more or less the same cracked but soothing time/space frame as his music.
Joni Mitchell says she sings her sorrow and paints her joy, and it's around about her paintings, nice and attractive as they can be, and not too dispiriting when used for her record sleeves, that the problems surface: compare the drenching sentimentality, stale symbolism and stiff autobiographical sincerity of her paintings with the shifting, elusive quality of her songs. And, alas, there's the unavoidable key element of whether anyone would be interested in the work as art if it wasn't for the fact she was who her songs and voice say she is. This goes for just about every rock musician artist, all the way up to Bowie and Dylan - and Beefheart and Brian Eno escape this indictment both because of the art they produce and the fact that their music emerges from their personal ideas and private visions about life, experience, memory and time in the same ways as their art. Their art does not seem like pretty souvenirs you would buy in a gift shop virtually attached to their image, best transferred to tea towel, fridge magnet and umbrella. The dashing, persuasively reserved painting actions of ex-Clash bassist Paul Simonon, and the deadpan squalls and chattering abstractions of the Stone Roses' John Squire, could have a modest independent life if they had different biographies, but not quite cost the same.
Fragile Pete Doherty's fragile paintings using his blood for paint might perhaps be taken more seriously if he hadn't been tabloid bludgeoned. The works perhaps explain why his songs can seem a little bloodless. Beck collaborated with his grandfather, the Fluxus artist Al Hansen, on an exhibition but Beck's twee, sticky collages - or "orchestrations" as he preferred to call them - of found bits and pieces looked lacklustre next to Al's skewered, affectionate and essence-fixing absurdism.
Beck comes nowhere near to replicating the lively, patched-together electro-comic panache of his songs, which are in effect the post-Fluxus works of art. His songs, as thrilling pieces of play, accidentally echo a little of the calculation of Duchamp. His "works of art" make you wince - they're ultimately as camply bad as Tony Bennett's canvases - and confirm that even one of the great pop artists exposes himself badly outside the relatively sheltered rock world.
Joni's songs lure you into the strangeness of existence, and use tonal colours and textures unique to her. The paintings go the other way, and are a presentation of consoling obviousness using colours and techniques you can most directly spot in the art of other rock musicians. You can't miss her love for Van Gogh - she's Fan Gogh number 1. Her subject matter also has a naive obviousness - the unblushing obviousness of a Twitterer - and a lot of rock musicians who toy with art, seduced by the hollow glamour of the gallery showing, the idea that they have found a way to inform others of the ordinary things on their mind, share the vanity, insecurity and artlessness of the chronic Twitterer.
It is this artlessness, this instant standardised nostalgia, that is a common theme in rock musician artists who, when the trappings supplied in the rock world are removed, lose whatever dignity and even mystique they might have picked up as, say, ex-members of the Beatles or ex-Jefferson Airplane sirens or salaried members of the Rolling Stones.
Paul McCartney's gauche paintings possess all the ugliness he exiles from his music, as a devoted sentimentalist and professional sweetheart, but none of those other things he also exiles, consciously or not - depth, shadow, intrigue, luminosity. If turned into sound, his art would be de Kooning trying to play Black Lace. Grace Slick battles with Ronnie Wood for the saddest possible example of the rock musician artist earnestly raiding their professional musical life and turning it into kitsch mementos. If Ronnie played guitar like he draws and paints - he gaily knocks out fellow Stones, Ali, Elvis, Womack, chimps, trees - he would be of no use to even a non-league equivalent Rolling Stones tribute band. On some art equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing, his Jim Morrison portrait might just edge out Grace Slick's - Ronnie goes for some kind of brute intensity, Grace for the pretty and saintly. Both do the standard rock star artist compositional thing, and have the subject vacantly stare ahead, with no hint of the tense, tangled inner life that made them who they ended up being. Or maybe they have both brilliantly captured deadness. Joni's whimsical Jimi features a burning guitar and angel wings. Grace's mundane Jimi is concealed by sky and clouds. Ronnie doesn't do Jimi, although a couple of his Jaggers come close and his many unmoody, eerily approximate paintings of Keith Richards would be a little better if they were painted in his own blood. Keith's or Ronnie's. Better still, Pete Doherty's.
Grace, to be fair, seems a little more aware of her place as gallant amateur with a hall of fame name than Ronnie, and if you have ever wondered what a Beryl Cook painting of Jerry Garcia would look like, thanks to Grace, you can now know. As the writer and singer of White Rabbit, she's naturally done a few jolly Alice paintings, with about as much appreciation of surrealism, wonder or any acid sensibility as Pam Ayres. Grace's sickly-sweet tableaux paintings of the Monterey and Woodstock festivals from the backstage point of view of someone who was there and participated live up to her motto that she was too stoned to remember most of the details. They seem inspired by the Where's Wally books, with a hopeful dab of cockeyed Simpsons gaiety.
Oddly enough, many paintings by rock musicians do feature this similarly bright but insipid, almost childlike colour spectrum, as though they all shop in the same store for supplies, and don't seem to mind that the cosy, story-telling art they produce reveals an embarrassingly limited imagination and often a weird kind of fluffy optimism. No sign yet of Amy's smoked banana art, Duffy's melodramatic lipstick swirls, Cheryl Cole's Hieronymus Bosch visions of life with the girls, Lady GaGa's pen and ink drawings of her sunglass collection... I'd better stop before I give Simon Cowell an idea for a new show. (Judges: Cowell with Lily Allen, David Furnish and Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen.)