Vinyl records are a totem of the past, a nostalgic symbol of a time when Americans seemed to share more — at least in the way of music: People of a certain age can still remember when, say, Carole King’s 1971 Tapestry sold 25 million copies and engulfed the nation.
Simultaneously, vinyl records are up to the moment. Young hipster collectors now snatch them up both for the sheer physicality of playing a vinyl record and the artistry involved in record covers. DJs like the sound of vinyl: as local legend DJ Le Spam (Andrew Yeomanson) says, an MP3 download is like “a fax of a song.”
Visual artists have long put vinyl to their own uses, and the exhibition at the Miami Art Museum, The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl has a bit of everything: outsider artists, emerging artists and established icons like Ed Ruscha. Within the show, vinyl records are photographed, melted and deconstructed for other ends: most of the work has little to do with music directly, and remain conceptual works of art.
The Record — encompassing 99 pieces by 41 artists — originated at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, N.C. According to Nasher curator Trevor Schoonmaker, the show’s strength lies in its adherence to a mission of remaining serious contemporary art. “Some of the work refers to pop culture, but we don’t have any music ephemera, posters or whatever.”The intersection of pop culture and high art is tricky terrain, but it can be done right. In 2008, MOCA’s Sympathy For The Devil: Art and Rock & Roll Since 1967 revealed the not-so-quiet artistry of rock. Last year, at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, the show Artist Unknown/The Free World created a compelling portrait of contemporary life using countless Facebook images of ordinary people.
At MAM, the first exhibition room of The Record strikes just the right note. In the middle of the room is a thoughtful sculptural installation by William Cordova, a Peru-born Miami artist who was exhibited – along with locals Adler Guerrier and Bert Rodriguez — in the 2008 Whitney Biennial. The piece, Greatest Hits (para Micaela Bastidas, Tom Wilson, y Anna Mae Aquash) 2008 consists of a stack of 3,000 vinyl records, Peruvian gourds, a VHS tape and candles. Focusing on the ideas of transition and displacement, the monolithic work refers to three icons: Bastidas, a 18th century Peruvian independence martyr; Aquash, a 1970s leader in the American Indian movement; Wilson, a 1960s record producer known for his work with Bob Dylan.
The first exhibition room also has Laurie Anderson’s 1977 Viophonograph — a hybrid-creation between a record player and violin that Anderson played in concert — and David Bryne’s 1978 photo-montage for the album cover of Talking Heads’ More Songs About Buildings and Food. Created with a Polaroid Big Shot camera, the 90-inch-by-90 inch piece is a life-size rendering of the band, pieced together with countless close-up photos.
A smaller project space, covered in plywood and photos contains an installation by the New York-based artist Xaviera Simmons, Thundersnow Road, North Carolina, 2010. Simmons, also a DJ, created a character of a folk rock singer posing for moody circa 1973 album liner photos in rural North Carolina. She then asked friends in music groups — Rain Machine, Midnight Masses, etc. — to compose songs based on the photos, ultimately making an entire vinyl album. This is perfectly-realized conceptual art, a world onto itself, filled with humor and loss, “Once we all listen to music with chips planted in our brains,” Simmons says, “maybe the first quaint iPods will inspire art shows.”