Jörg Heiser | Double Lives in Art and Pop Music

Jörg Heiser

Double Lives in Art and Pop Music

London, UK: Sternberg Press, 2020

352 pp., 15.2 × 21 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

One of the first books of theory that I owned was called Art Into Pop by Simon Frith, which I bought in my mid-teens. The 1987 title explored the idea that a disproportionate number of important musicians (from John Lennon to David Byrne) attended art school. Many of my personal favourite 'visual' artists cross over into pop music, or vice-versa; Laurie Anderson, Yoko Ono, Brian Eno, and Rodney Graham to a lesser extant. Others, like Candice Breitz, Cary Leibowitz and Jeremy Deller, use the subject of pop music in their practice.

I haven't started this title yet, but it seems to be a continuation of sort from Frith's now 35 year-old book. The main subject seems to be Heiser's notion of “context switching", which he describes as “the movement of a cultural producer from one art form to another—considered, crucially, in connection with associated markets, milieus, media technologies, and institutions (their contexts), which includes the social factors that shaped the art forms in the first place.” 

Double Lives in Art and Pop Music also explores the fertile space between high and low culture that invariably arises when discussing the cross pollination that happens when artists work in more than one discipline. (I've always tried - unsuccessfully - to get the term "mono-brow" to catch on). 

 

The book is available for $39 CDN from Art Metropole, here. 

"Why did Andy Warhol decide to enter the music business by producing the Velvet Underground, and what did the band expect to gain in return? What made Yoko Ono use the skills she developed in the artistic avant-garde in pop music, and what drew John Lennon, in turn, to visual art? Why, in 1982, did Joseph Beuys record the pop single “Sonne statt Reagan,” and why, around the same time did, West German artists such as Michaela Melián move into pop music?

In Double Lives in Art and Pop Music, Jörg Heiser argues that context shifting between art and pop music is an attempt to find solutions for contradictions faced in one field of cultural production. Heiser looks closely at the careers of artists and pop musicians who work in both fields professionally. The seeming acceptance and effortlessness today of current border crossings can be deceptive, since they might be serving vested economic or ideological interests. Exploring a pop and art history of more than fifty years, Heiser shows that those leading double lives in art and pop music may often be best able to detect these vested interests while he points toward radical alternatives."

- publisher's blurb