The exhibition, 'Seen + Heard: Works and Multiples from the Collection' draws on major artworks, installations and multiples (numbered editions) from the Gallery’s Collection, which address crossovers between popular culture, music, sound and visual art.
In recent decades the Gallery has acquired a number of works that either directly incorporate sound as a component or indirectly refer to sound and music. For example, some of the first major works acquired to address this nexus (image-sound-object) are videos, prints, photographs and sculptural objects by the Korean artist, Nam Jun Paik, (1932-2006). His pioneering work in the field of sculptural sound installations, video works, performance and multimedia cross-overs position him as one of the most significant and influential innovators of the twentieth century.
Gifts of Fluxus multiples and works by the late Veronese publisher Francesco Conz in 1995 and 1997, added a unique dimension to the Gallery’s Collection. The largest collection of such material in an Australian art museum, the gifts included sound-related multiples and works by Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Emmett Williams and Milan Knizak. Prompted in part by this collection of Fluxus works, the Brisbane-based artist and collector Scott Redford has added to this distinctive dimension of the Gallery’s Collection by generously gifting vinyl records, multiples and pop culture ephemera to QAGOMA’s Collection and the Research Library Collection.
The exhibition features objects (such as records and musical scores), musical performance and sound installations, including Candice Breitz’s King (a portrait of Michael Jackson) 2005. A significant component is a collection of vinyl LP records. When the ‘long-playing’ vinyl record became widely available in the 1950s, it represented a revolutionary format for the transmission of recorded sound and, increasingly throughout the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it provided a template for designers and artists in the creation of unique imagery and graphic styles.
In an age of digital music downloads and streaming technologies, the physicality of the vinyl LP record is its defining characteristic. As a ‘canvas’ for designers and artists, the possibilities of the record cover were most creatively explored between the late 1960s and 1980s. The record covers featured in the exhibition have defined and expanded the parameters of cover design and represent a variety of approaches and styles by artists and designers from the 1950s to the present. For many collectors and consumers of LPs, record covers represented their most direct engagement with visual art and design.
Sound and music are fundamental human experiences. New technologies have transformed their production dramatically and in the hands of artists, they continue represent a rich and ever-evolving field of creative practice in which the experimental and the popular increasingly merge and blur. In recent years a number of museum exhibitions have explored this fertile and inherently popular field of cultural enquiry including Sonic Boom: The Art of Sound, the Hayward Gallery, London, 2000, Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2007, The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2010 -11 and most recently, Soundings: A Contemporary Score at the Museum of Modern Art, New York 2013.
*image (left)
Nam June Paik, South Korea, United States 1932–2006
Global groove (still), 1973
Videotape: 28:30 minutes
Purchased 1996 with a special allocation from the Queensland Government.
Celebrating the Queensland Art Gallery's Centenary 1895-1995
Collection: Queensland Art Gallery
© The artist
