Rock out!
Museums are turning up the volume as they strive to represent the excitement of live concerts
When London’s Tate Modern put tickets on sale for a season of concerts by German techno pioneers Kraftwerk in 2013, fans were quick to respond. Complaints across social media channels about crashing websites and constantly engaged telephones were so vociferous that they made the BBC news. As the gallery could only sell 900 tickets for each of Kraftwerk’s eight performances there were bound to be many disappointed fans.
That aside, Tate Modern did all the right things. The match of Kraftwerk’s sleek sound and the gallery’s 21st-century interior design was a marriage made in heaven, but the stampede to buy tickets was a repeat of what had happened the year before, when Kraftwerk played eight concerts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The use of gallery and museum spaces for live popular music is not new: in recent years Nick Cave has played at Tate Britain, PJ Harvey at Somerset House, both in London, and Patti Smith at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. These big-name draws all adapted their stadium-filling music to the smaller, more intimate spaces of cultural venues.
Tricky proposition
Live music will always be able to trade on its immediacy, but how can curators translate the visceral experience of a concert into attractive exhibitions in which artefacts, rather than the artist, are on show? It’s a tricky thing to get right. Get it wrong and a lot of goodwill and money is frittered away – this happened at Sheffield’s shortlived National Centre for Popular Music. The £15m venue, which was largely funded by lottery money, was open for less than 18 months from 1999 after receiving far fewer visitors than it expected. The building was eventually sold for a shade of its original cost to Sheffield Hallam University and now functions as the student union building.
The Saatchi Gallery is hoping that Exhibitionism, a large-scale show devoted to the Rolling Stones that opens this month, will attract big crowds. The London gallery – situated on King’s Road, a location that perfectly signals the legacy of the swinging sixties – is hosting the show to celebrate more than 50 years of the rock group, and has the blessing of the Stones themselves.
The band’s lead singer, Mick Jagger, has been quoted as saying, “We’ve been thinking about [doing an exhibition] for quite a long time, but wanted it to be just right and on a large scale, just like planning our touring concert productions. It’s an interesting time to do it.”
With nine rooms showing 500 original artefacts relating to the band, plus plenty of costumes, film footage and music, the advertising for Exhibitionism promises venues in 11 global cities over four years. And, in keeping with Jagger’s remark about concert productions, its gimmicky ticketing will mimic the access-all-areas passes familiar to musicians and their crews. For £60, visitors can buy a lanyard with a laminated exhibition ticket attached.
So far, 2016 has been a healthy year for music-themed displays, with the Handel and Hendrix museum opening in London too. The guitarist’s old flat in Mayfair, restored to its 1960s glory, was recently opened to the public. It sits two doors down from Handel House, the German composer’s residence.
A decade on from Jimi Hendrix’s most productive years, the Sex Pistols exploded onto the UK music scene in 1976. A number of events to mark punk’s influence on everything from music and fashion to typography have been brought together under the umbrella of Punk.London: 40 Years of Subversive Culture, which has, unpunkily, the mayoralty of London as one of its funders.
The ability of the musical genre to generate its own lasting brands is noted at New York’s Queens Museum. In partnership with the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, the Queens Museum is marking the punk anniversary with an exhibition devoted to the Ramones – local bad boys made good. Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk celebrates the band in all its three- chord glory from 10 April to 31 July.
Back in the UK, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, curators are side-stepping the problems of representing live music with an old-fashioned focus on artefacts. This month, the ICA will open an exhibition devoted to the design of, and ephemera surrounding, Metal Box, the second album released by Public Image Ltd (PiL) in 1979. Fronted by John Lydon, formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, PiL was an experimental, post-punk trio that leant in numerous musical directions simultaneously.
Metal Box was not any old album: it consisted of three 45-rpm, 12-inch records housed in circular 16mm metal film tins embossed with the band’s logo. Dennis Morris, the designer, had found the tins at a factory in Hackney called Metal Box and he bought all 60,000 of them. “The PiL exhibition focuses on the metal box the albums came in,” says Gregor Muir, the executive director of the ICA. “As an object, it is a remnant of a subcultural design and is therefore potentially quite complex.”
Muir highlights the connection between music, art, fashion, design and the politicised culture that PiL operated in. “It was a troubled time, and one of great transition,” he says.
Muir points out that the Metal Box album was very much about engaging with an object through design and that the ICA exhibition (until 15 May) seeks to trace the movements of this artefact through a range of cultural pathways.
The history of the object illustrates a journey that leads right to the present: the Metal Box factory closed some time ago and the site’s most recent iteration is, inevitably, a block of luxury flats.
This slippage of time, place and disputed history will similarly inform Detroit: City of Techno, an ICA exhibition that opens this summer. Muir stresses that punk and techno are both musical genres that deserve recognition in an artistic context.
Building excitement
The British Music Experience (BME) is reopening in Liverpool’s Cunard Building later this year. The venue had been housed at London’s O2 centre for five years but closed in 2014 and announced it was looking for a new home.
Liz Koravos, the development director at the BME, recognises that the excitement invoked by music is fuelled by a shared experience that brings people together.
“The BME uses many approaches to depict this excitement,” she says. “Our approach to the story of popular music is to divide it up into eras – we’re not trying to replace or recreate the excitement of a live performance.”
Using a range of technologies, from films and videos to playbacks and interactives, the BME aims to give visitors the opportunity to revisit their favourite moments or celebrate, learn and appreciate more about the UK’s music industry.
One exhibition devoted to a pop star that seemed to get nearly everything right was the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) David Bowie Is in 2013. Devised as a touring exhibition and co-curated by the London museum’s theatre and performance curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, the Bowie exhibition’s statistics were stag- gering. Attended by more than 310,000 visitors in London alone, with a 27% of them first-time visitors to the V&A, it was the museum’s fastest-selling exhibition: 67,000 tickets were sold before the show even opened. The accompanying catalogue constituted a major addition to the Bowie bookshelf and was a way of extending the show’s impact. Importantly for the museum’s long-term planning, there was a direct spin-off from the Bowie show into memberships: some 10,000 people joined the V&A simply to see the show.
Shared experience
“We knew from the outset that David Bowie Is was not going to be like any other exhibi- tion we had done,” says Broackes of the moment that she and her co-curator began to outline the show. Bowie was not directly involved, which was “initially disappoint- ing”, she says, but the artist made sure that the museum had access to his archives and colleagues who could help.
Broackes says she and Marsh used objects from every other department of the museum as a way of putting Bowie in his cultural and aesthetic context – the Asian prints department lent a 1905 Japanese kabuki poster that demonstrated the influ- ence of theatre on Bowie’s aesthetic. An original costume made by the 20th-century artist Sonia Delaunay, which had inspired a 1980s Bowie outfit, also came from the V&A’s stores. “Bowie provided a route through our collections,” Broackes adds.
But even with this access to a rich archive of artefacts, the museum needed to think about how it could express the excitement of Bowie’s live performances to those who had never seen him on stage.
“We’re not a rock ’n’ roll hall of fame,” Broackes says. “But Bowie was one of the greatest performers, if not the greatest, of the past 50 years.” This was something that needed to be expressed. “We ended up turning object design on its head and let the performance and theatre designers take the lead.”
Design specialists at London-based Real Studios worked with the V&A on the interiors and showcases. The audio and visual aspects of the show were planned with the help of electronics company Sennheiser and design firm 59 Productions. They devised a giant screen showing footage of Bowie on stage, which was placed at the end of the exhibition.
Broackes points to the link between the function of audiences at live concerts and at museums. The importance of sharing a col- lective experience must never be undervalued, she says, as it plays a huge part in how memorable an occasion is. Referring to the giant screen at the Bowie exhibition, she says: “It looked spectacular, but it was not until the public saw it that the show really came alive.”
It seems that the effect of people coming together is what enlivens any event, from mesmeric techno sets, anarchic punk performances and seminal pop concerts to putting on an exhibition about them.
David Bowie Is: aftermath of a rock star’s death
When the news of David Bowie’s death broke across the UK on 10 January, the museum that had hosted the star’s eponymous exhibition was quick to react. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), where David Bowie Is had broken the London institution’s attendance records in 2013, responded by staging free special screenings of David Bowie Is Happening Now, a film that was part of the original show. Online tickets were snapped up quickly, but the museum made sure that some were available to visitors to the museum each day.
“We have had a deluge of renewed interest in the exhibition,” says Victoria Broackes, one of the Bowie exhibition’s two curators. “We wouldn’t rule out having it back.”
The V&A screenings proved a savvy move and sated the national hunger for mourning the pop star’s untimely passing.
In the Dutch city of Groningen, where the Bowie exhibition was at the time of this death, the Groninger Museum came up with its own rapid response.
“Our website was overloaded with visitors,” says Karina Smrkovsky, the Groninger’s head of communications, PR and marketing, of the hours following the announcement of Bowie’s death. “Normally the website sees 5,000 visits a day, but after the announcement of his death we had 25,000 visitors, and 15,000 people bought tickets online over two days.”
Prior to this, the museum was selling an average of 1,000 admissions daily online. A corner of the museum was repurposed as a place where visitors could bring flowers and sign a book of condolence, and arrangements were made to extend the exhibition’s run for a further four weeks. The show also provided an emotional outlet for some.
“Bowie fans sometimes cry when they visit the exhibition,” Smrkovsky says. “And they leave messages for him in the book.”
After the Bowie exhibition closes in Holland this month, it is likely to go to Japan next year, with details of the venue expected to be announced soon. The exhibition has already been to North America, Brazil and Australia.
David Bowie Is runs until 10 April at the Groninger Museum in Groningen, the Netherlands.
Louise Gray is a freelance journalist
That aside, Tate Modern did all the right things. The match of Kraftwerk’s sleek sound and the gallery’s 21st-century interior design was a marriage made in heaven, but the stampede to buy tickets was a repeat of what had happened the year before, when Kraftwerk played eight concerts at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The use of gallery and museum spaces for live popular music is not new: in recent years Nick Cave has played at Tate Britain, PJ Harvey at Somerset House, both in London, and Patti Smith at the Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth. These big-name draws all adapted their stadium-filling music to the smaller, more intimate spaces of cultural venues.
Tricky proposition
Live music will always be able to trade on its immediacy, but how can curators translate the visceral experience of a concert into attractive exhibitions in which artefacts, rather than the artist, are on show? It’s a tricky thing to get right. Get it wrong and a lot of goodwill and money is frittered away – this happened at Sheffield’s shortlived National Centre for Popular Music. The £15m venue, which was largely funded by lottery money, was open for less than 18 months from 1999 after receiving far fewer visitors than it expected. The building was eventually sold for a shade of its original cost to Sheffield Hallam University and now functions as the student union building.
The Saatchi Gallery is hoping that Exhibitionism, a large-scale show devoted to the Rolling Stones that opens this month, will attract big crowds. The London gallery – situated on King’s Road, a location that perfectly signals the legacy of the swinging sixties – is hosting the show to celebrate more than 50 years of the rock group, and has the blessing of the Stones themselves.
The band’s lead singer, Mick Jagger, has been quoted as saying, “We’ve been thinking about [doing an exhibition] for quite a long time, but wanted it to be just right and on a large scale, just like planning our touring concert productions. It’s an interesting time to do it.”
With nine rooms showing 500 original artefacts relating to the band, plus plenty of costumes, film footage and music, the advertising for Exhibitionism promises venues in 11 global cities over four years. And, in keeping with Jagger’s remark about concert productions, its gimmicky ticketing will mimic the access-all-areas passes familiar to musicians and their crews. For £60, visitors can buy a lanyard with a laminated exhibition ticket attached.
So far, 2016 has been a healthy year for music-themed displays, with the Handel and Hendrix museum opening in London too. The guitarist’s old flat in Mayfair, restored to its 1960s glory, was recently opened to the public. It sits two doors down from Handel House, the German composer’s residence.
A decade on from Jimi Hendrix’s most productive years, the Sex Pistols exploded onto the UK music scene in 1976. A number of events to mark punk’s influence on everything from music and fashion to typography have been brought together under the umbrella of Punk.London: 40 Years of Subversive Culture, which has, unpunkily, the mayoralty of London as one of its funders.
The ability of the musical genre to generate its own lasting brands is noted at New York’s Queens Museum. In partnership with the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles, the Queens Museum is marking the punk anniversary with an exhibition devoted to the Ramones – local bad boys made good. Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk celebrates the band in all its three- chord glory from 10 April to 31 July.
Back in the UK, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, curators are side-stepping the problems of representing live music with an old-fashioned focus on artefacts. This month, the ICA will open an exhibition devoted to the design of, and ephemera surrounding, Metal Box, the second album released by Public Image Ltd (PiL) in 1979. Fronted by John Lydon, formerly Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, PiL was an experimental, post-punk trio that leant in numerous musical directions simultaneously.
Metal Box was not any old album: it consisted of three 45-rpm, 12-inch records housed in circular 16mm metal film tins embossed with the band’s logo. Dennis Morris, the designer, had found the tins at a factory in Hackney called Metal Box and he bought all 60,000 of them. “The PiL exhibition focuses on the metal box the albums came in,” says Gregor Muir, the executive director of the ICA. “As an object, it is a remnant of a subcultural design and is therefore potentially quite complex.”
Muir highlights the connection between music, art, fashion, design and the politicised culture that PiL operated in. “It was a troubled time, and one of great transition,” he says.
Muir points out that the Metal Box album was very much about engaging with an object through design and that the ICA exhibition (until 15 May) seeks to trace the movements of this artefact through a range of cultural pathways.
The history of the object illustrates a journey that leads right to the present: the Metal Box factory closed some time ago and the site’s most recent iteration is, inevitably, a block of luxury flats.
This slippage of time, place and disputed history will similarly inform Detroit: City of Techno, an ICA exhibition that opens this summer. Muir stresses that punk and techno are both musical genres that deserve recognition in an artistic context.
Live music will always be able to trade on its immediacy, but how can curators translate the visceral experience of a concert into attractive exhibitions?"
Building excitement
The British Music Experience (BME) is reopening in Liverpool’s Cunard Building later this year. The venue had been housed at London’s O2 centre for five years but closed in 2014 and announced it was looking for a new home.
Liz Koravos, the development director at the BME, recognises that the excitement invoked by music is fuelled by a shared experience that brings people together.
“The BME uses many approaches to depict this excitement,” she says. “Our approach to the story of popular music is to divide it up into eras – we’re not trying to replace or recreate the excitement of a live performance.”
Using a range of technologies, from films and videos to playbacks and interactives, the BME aims to give visitors the opportunity to revisit their favourite moments or celebrate, learn and appreciate more about the UK’s music industry.
One exhibition devoted to a pop star that seemed to get nearly everything right was the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) David Bowie Is in 2013. Devised as a touring exhibition and co-curated by the London museum’s theatre and performance curators, Victoria Broackes and Geoffrey Marsh, the Bowie exhibition’s statistics were stag- gering. Attended by more than 310,000 visitors in London alone, with a 27% of them first-time visitors to the V&A, it was the museum’s fastest-selling exhibition: 67,000 tickets were sold before the show even opened. The accompanying catalogue constituted a major addition to the Bowie bookshelf and was a way of extending the show’s impact. Importantly for the museum’s long-term planning, there was a direct spin-off from the Bowie show into memberships: some 10,000 people joined the V&A simply to see the show.
Shared experience
“We knew from the outset that David Bowie Is was not going to be like any other exhibi- tion we had done,” says Broackes of the moment that she and her co-curator began to outline the show. Bowie was not directly involved, which was “initially disappoint- ing”, she says, but the artist made sure that the museum had access to his archives and colleagues who could help.
Broackes says she and Marsh used objects from every other department of the museum as a way of putting Bowie in his cultural and aesthetic context – the Asian prints department lent a 1905 Japanese kabuki poster that demonstrated the influ- ence of theatre on Bowie’s aesthetic. An original costume made by the 20th-century artist Sonia Delaunay, which had inspired a 1980s Bowie outfit, also came from the V&A’s stores. “Bowie provided a route through our collections,” Broackes adds.
But even with this access to a rich archive of artefacts, the museum needed to think about how it could express the excitement of Bowie’s live performances to those who had never seen him on stage.
“We’re not a rock ’n’ roll hall of fame,” Broackes says. “But Bowie was one of the greatest performers, if not the greatest, of the past 50 years.” This was something that needed to be expressed. “We ended up turning object design on its head and let the performance and theatre designers take the lead.”
Design specialists at London-based Real Studios worked with the V&A on the interiors and showcases. The audio and visual aspects of the show were planned with the help of electronics company Sennheiser and design firm 59 Productions. They devised a giant screen showing footage of Bowie on stage, which was placed at the end of the exhibition.
Broackes points to the link between the function of audiences at live concerts and at museums. The importance of sharing a col- lective experience must never be undervalued, she says, as it plays a huge part in how memorable an occasion is. Referring to the giant screen at the Bowie exhibition, she says: “It looked spectacular, but it was not until the public saw it that the show really came alive.”
It seems that the effect of people coming together is what enlivens any event, from mesmeric techno sets, anarchic punk performances and seminal pop concerts to putting on an exhibition about them.
David Bowie Is: aftermath of a rock star’s death
When the news of David Bowie’s death broke across the UK on 10 January, the museum that had hosted the star’s eponymous exhibition was quick to react. The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), where David Bowie Is had broken the London institution’s attendance records in 2013, responded by staging free special screenings of David Bowie Is Happening Now, a film that was part of the original show. Online tickets were snapped up quickly, but the museum made sure that some were available to visitors to the museum each day.
“We have had a deluge of renewed interest in the exhibition,” says Victoria Broackes, one of the Bowie exhibition’s two curators. “We wouldn’t rule out having it back.”
The V&A screenings proved a savvy move and sated the national hunger for mourning the pop star’s untimely passing.
In the Dutch city of Groningen, where the Bowie exhibition was at the time of this death, the Groninger Museum came up with its own rapid response.
“Our website was overloaded with visitors,” says Karina Smrkovsky, the Groninger’s head of communications, PR and marketing, of the hours following the announcement of Bowie’s death. “Normally the website sees 5,000 visits a day, but after the announcement of his death we had 25,000 visitors, and 15,000 people bought tickets online over two days.”
Prior to this, the museum was selling an average of 1,000 admissions daily online. A corner of the museum was repurposed as a place where visitors could bring flowers and sign a book of condolence, and arrangements were made to extend the exhibition’s run for a further four weeks. The show also provided an emotional outlet for some.
“Bowie fans sometimes cry when they visit the exhibition,” Smrkovsky says. “And they leave messages for him in the book.”
After the Bowie exhibition closes in Holland this month, it is likely to go to Japan next year, with details of the venue expected to be announced soon. The exhibition has already been to North America, Brazil and Australia.
David Bowie Is runs until 10 April at the Groninger Museum in Groningen, the Netherlands.
Louise Gray is a freelance journalist