Five American Portraits

Five American Portraits
Studio album by The Red Krayola with Art & Language
Released	January 26, 2010
Recorded	August 2009
Studio
Label	Drag City
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Track listing

Side A

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Portrait of Wile E. Coyote"	5:03
2.	"Portrait of President George W. Bush"	12:16
3.	"Portrait of President Jimmy Carter"	5:59

Side B

No.	Title	Length
1.	"Portrait of John Wayne"	15:05
2.	"Portrait of Ad Reinhardt"	5:49
Total length:		44:12

Background

Related works by Art & Language

• 
  "Portrait of President George W. Bush in the Style of Jackson Pollock" 2006
• 
  "Portraits of John Wayne, Jimmy Carter, Ad Reinhardt and Wile E. Coyote" 2007
• 
  "Five American Background Songs" 2009-10
• 
  "Part of an American Portrait" 2013
• 
  "Tell Me, Have You Ever Seen Me? II, Xi Jinping" 2014
• 
  "Map to Not Indicate" 1967

Personnel

Performers

• Gina Birch - vocals, bass
• Alex Dower - drums, percussion, sound effects
• Jim O'Rourke - bass "John Wayne" first verse
• Q - saxophones, trumpets, instrumental and sound effects
• Tom Rogerson - piano
• Mayo Thompson - vocals, guitars, piano
• Tom Watson - guitars

Chorus vocals

• Dan Cox
• Alex Dower
• Matt Ingram
• Q
• Fred Somsen

Technical

• Dan Cox - engineering
• Matt Ingram - engineering
• Mayo Thompson - mixing
• Butchy Fuego - mixing
• Rian Murphy - mixing

Retrospectives

Mayo Thompson, 2023

Five American Portraits is a rehash of American cliches from dixie to "The Eyes of Texas are Upon You". Also Mozart, on the Ad Reinhardt tune, that's Mozart's piano concerto.

The fellows in Art & Language, Mel [Ramsden] and Michael [Baldwin], wrote those lyrics. They're descriptions of paintings that they were making — which was, rather than "he's a this kind of that kind of guy," it talked about where the hair went. And they even wrote me one for Trump, which I didn't want — I will not publicize that... freak — but it had a beautiful first line, like, "a shock of piss-colored hair."

Mayo Thompson, 2010

Those are all people chosen by Art & Language, and they generated those texts for paintings that they were making, for works that they were making. And we’ve done so many things over the years together they thought perhaps I might like to try to put it to music. They sent it to me and I did want to do it. And so that’s the way it happened. But they made the selections.

Mayo Thompson, 2010

RO: On this most recent album, why did you choose these five people that you did?

MT: I didn't choose them; Art & Language chose them.

N: Do you know why they did?

MT: (laughs) No. I don't. George Bush, I can think that they might have chosen him because historically they've done portraits in various styles. They've done "Portrait of V.I. Lenin" in the style of Jackson Pollock, so there's a relation there. And they've done a portrait of Bush in the style of a certain Pollock painting which had a certain history. I can't remember exactly how it worked out, but it was shown somewhere in the East, and Lenin's name had to be taken off of it.

I don't know - there are certain kinds of indexicalities that they could answer better than I, and I don't really know them. And I haven't really concerned myself with them, not because I'm not interested in them or anything else like that. It's just that, you know, I wanted to make the record. They've written lyrics and given them to me over the years - well, these things were not written as lyrics. They were written as descriptions of representational works they were making.

RO: Kind of like instructions.

MT: Well, yeah. They describe the features, and when they looked at the lyrics, they thought to themselves, 'Ah, Mayo might like this.' So they called me up and asked if I'd like to see what they were doing with these texts that they had gotten together, and I said by all means, send 'em to me. I looked at 'em and I said, 'Oh hell yeah, I'll do something with that.'

I started thinking about the problem of the very idea of making portraits of these people, and what would go into a portrait, what makes something a portrait, what makes it possible to see these people and to bring them to life, so to speak, or to bring them before one, to conjure them before yourself. It's an interesting formal technical problem. I'm interested in the problems of representation. I have the privilege to involve myself in those kinds of questions rather than other sorts of stuff. So I do. [...]

Butchy Fuego, 2011

I had been a fan of Mayo Thompson's prolific output for years, and had the opportunity to assist Mayo & Drag City on a previous project which I'm not at liberty to discuss due to a non-disclosure agreement. What I can say about it is that it involved time travel, another legendary avant-guardian and an agent of "the company" assisting my efforts. Mixing Five American Portraits at my studio Top Cat International was a joy and a breeze. DC mogul Rian Murphy was in the house simultaneously cracking the whip and jokes. Mayo was in rare form executing his laser-like vision over the session. The combination of The Raincoats' Gina Birch and the ever-confounding aural collaborations of The Red Krayola with Art & Language proves to be a potent combination. DON'T MESS WITH MAYO.

Reviews

Prefix

January 12, 2010

Mike Wood

Dusted

January 20, 2010

Jon Dale

Pitchfork

January 25, 2010

Andrew Gaerig

PopMatters

January 25, 2010

Richard Elliott

Philadelphia Inquirer

January 31, 2010

A.D. Amorosi

AllMusic

Thom Jurek

Uncut

March, 2010

OutsideLeft

April, 2010

Alex V. Cook