Karaoke Bar

Karaoke Bar
The Red Crayola with Art & Language
Project
Year	2005
Dimensions
Materials

Karaoke Bar is an installation by Art & Language with The Red Krayola.

Background

2005

In their first exhibition for three years (11th May - 2nd July) famed Conceptual Art collaborative Art & Language are to present new works at The Lisson Gallery, amongst other things including a daily karaoke show. [...] daily from 5-6 pm the space will be turned into the Art & Language Café with Karaoke and drinks.

2005

There are recent works as well as selected works and performance from the 1970s, including lyrics and songs produced in collaboration with The Red Crayola. These latter are presented as karaoke in the Art & Language café.

2005

In conjunction with the symposium Art & Language are presenting their latest work on the ZKM Museum balcony. »Art & Language and The Red Krayola«, a karaoke installation, is a product of the artists’ cooperation with The Red Krayola which harks back to tracks from the albums »Corrected Slogans and Kangaroo?« in the 1970s and early 1980s.

2013

Art & Language with The Red Krayola, Karaoke Bar, 2005. DVD on loop, posters, chairs, table

10 Posters (1977)

Photos

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  2005
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  2009
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  2015
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  2015

Track list

Incomplete list

• Don't Talk to Sociologists...
• Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock, Part I
• Keep All Your Friends
• Marches No's 23, 24, 25
• An Old Man's Dream
• Hedges

Total length: 41:10

DVD in a loop, poster, table, chairs; text and music by Art & Language and The Red Krayola from Corrected Slogans, 1976 (Drag City Records) and Kangaroo?, 1981 (Drag City Records); 10 posters by Art & Language, 1977; silkscreen on paper, each poster 108 × 80 cm, edition of 40

Exhibitions

Incomplete list

	Date	Title	Location
	May 11 - June 2, 2005	Hard to Say When	Lisson Gallery, London
	November 5, 2005 - January 8, 2006	Art & Language and The Red Krayola	ZKM, Karlsruhe
	March 10 - ?, 2006	Il Ne Reste Qu'a Chanter	Galerie de l'Erban/Ecole Régionale des Beaux-arts, Nantes
	June 6 - August 30, 2009	Schere-Stein-Papier. Pop-Musik als Gegenstand Bildender Kunst	Kunsthaus Graz

Retrospectives

Art & Language, Letters to the Red Crayola XII, 2012

As it turned out, the karaoke worked best in a small and rather informal looking room that easily became crowded. There was far more attack and brio from the singers who were standing close, not only to friends, but also to people who were nodding acquaintances at best. The effect of the larger room with the cool furniture, posters and contemporary reading matter was, as we did not predict, less conducive to singers — except rather competent and self-assured ones, including Gina Birch who sang along, following her own recorded voice. What can we tell from this? Possibly that the people who sang in Nantes were not British and therefore not quite as tight-assed as the more reluctant performers in London. I don't think that's a strong reason, as the French are not at all keen on looking foolish — and a karaoke performance is ipso facto foolish. Could it be that in the small space, where singers rubbed shoulders with others, there was a sense of mutual complicity, that the neighbours of the singers whose bodies made contact were somehow joining in? Well, perhaps the quantification of joiners-in is not the point. A certain embarrassment, a joining-in at the tip of the tongue, hut not quite achieved, is in some ways culturally superior to a jolly sing-along. But it's hardly news to say there's deflation in frustration. The karaoke text has something of the 'Index' works about it. It comes in strips and in colours and it is annotated by its own theoretical progress as (sung) lyric — as something finally to be produced by the voice. The index works might have been produced as a sort of karaoke conversation, annotated so as to be quasi-operatic. In fact, the quite often implausible lyrics of 'Corrected Slogans' are as much attached to the indexes as they are to our later and more sober reflections. (And there has to be some connection between the lyrics themselves and the levels of embarrassment and alienation available: 'That's when your heartaches begin' vs. 'Jackson Pollock was the artist of the Marshall Plan', vs. 'Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes'.) You could also say that the music of 'Corrected Slogans' crackles with some of the madness of the index-ing talk. It includes — or factors in — the dogs whose barking joins the conversation.

Reviews

Frieze

October 13, 2005

Andrew Hunt

[...] The karaoke event took place between 5pm and 6pm each day, and tracks from the album Kangaroo? (1981), such as ‘A Portrait of V. I. Lenin in the Style of Jackson Pollock’ were available to sing along to. Another ‘gross and conspicuous error’ started to operate here, but this time the question appeared to be, what kind of historical displacement occurs when we the spectators, as blind performers, sing these 24-year-old lyrics? As before, we are complicit in our own bad performance and misreading of these essay-like texts and through a historical distance provide a necessary misinterpretation of Art & Language’s work. This is an essential component of the group’s practice, and if they represent a resistance to the category of Conceptual art, where a Duchampian model is ‘emptied of its transgressive potential and rendered congenial to the managers of interdisciplinarity’, then maybe this combination of music and politics is something to strive for. If the original intention of these irreconcilable forces was to ‘stress the grammar and the sense of the text to the point of oblivion’, then through the lens of history this partnership at least still appears alien and strange, but for different reasons. When current bands are mimicking the urgency of outfits from the late 1970s, minus the political awareness, and younger artists and curators are fixated on radical models but lacking any real substance, there’s another, unwitting form of historical karaoke operating. Perhaps what we need right now are more deliberately irresponsible yet ‘real’ collaborations of this sort.

Le Monde

March 24, 2006

Bérénice Bailly

Les artistes conceptuels peuvent s'adonner au karaoké. Le vernissage de l'exposition consacrée au groupe Art & Language dans les locaux de l'Ecole régionale des beaux-arts de Nantes (Erban) en fournissait, le 10 mars, une preuve inattendue. Membre fondateur du très sérieux collectif anglo-américain créé en 1968, et toujours actif, Michael Baldwin s'y laissait aller aux joies du chant sous-titré, réactivant une pièce ancienne, Karaoke (1975-2005).

Un écran, de la musique, des mots défilant : seules les paroles sont un peu... particulières. Où il est question d'Internationale et de kangourou noir ; où "postulat" rime avec "conglomérat" ; où le mythique plasticien Joseph Beuys est traité de "rejet gériatrique de la Luftwaffe". "C'est vrai, c'est un fasciste", tient à souligner l'artiste britannique. Qui livre, un peu plus tard : "Ce qu'on voulait montrer avec cette pièce ? Que Trotski est musique."

Esprit caustique, violence politique, épuisement du langage, remise en question de tous les stéréotypes de l'artiste : l'argumentaire développé depuis quarante ans par Art & Language (en textes, affiches, peintures, disques, revues...) a bouleversé la vie du jeune collectionneur Philippe Méaille. Il est à l'origine de cet hommage, avec le directeur des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, Pierre-Jean Galdin. [...]

Rock-Paper-Scissors: Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art

2009

Art & Language has been challenging the traditional concept of art since 1966 by denying any individualistic view of art and taking Marxist and linguistic analyses as their starting point. How far can art objects be replaced by linguistic concepts? In the early 80s, and then again in recent years, Art & Language wrote lyrics for The Red Krayola band. Back in 1976, they worked with the only permanent member of the band, Mayo Thompson, on an album that appeared under the Art & Language name. The Karaoke Bar that Art & Language have installed draws on that album, Corrected Slogans (1976), and Kangaroo? (1981), one of the joint albums they did with The Red Krayola. The public are invited to pick up the microphone and sing along themselves as part of the installation, following the text shown. The musical cue makes it clear that karaoke is not so much a musical experience as a social one. In the age of SingStar and Guitar Hero, karaoke already seems to belong to a history in which making music together in public premises enters the private sphere of a new domestic music; where one normally dreams of occupying the privileged position of a star within the virtual opportunities of one’s own home, one unexpectedly finds oneself in a position of having to advocate in song the controversial ideas of Art & Language, for example that one should not talk to sociologists. Contextualised by cover pages of the periodical published by Art & Language, questions of narrator position and legitimation for talking publicly are thematised.

Gossip Pop: A Performative Investigation of the Role of Pop in Contemporary Art Practice

March 2013

Sue Ellen Dodd

[...] Just as people make a party, in the operational scenarios for this work outlined above, people provide the power, or they don’t. It’s a choice. Although the artist presents the choice, he or she cannot control it. It rests with the viewer.

There is a similar participatory choice for the viewer in Karaoke Bar, 2005, by Art & Language with The Red Krayola. Formed in 1966, this Marxist-oriented conceptual art group Art & Language, in this instance comprising Mel Ramsden, Charles Harrison and Michael Baldwin, worked with Mayo Thompson’s former Texas-psychedelic band Red Krayola. The authorship is divided between an artistic group with a title or "brand" and a "real" band. They produced three LPs between 1976 and 1983 featuring political theory as lyrics (by the artists), sung in an out-of-key deadpan manner, accompanied by backing music with rudimentary instrumentation (by the band).

The songs were reworked in this instance as karaoke tracks with the lyrics appearing as text on a large screen. The audience are invited to pick up the microphone and sing along, striking the familiar living room pose of the Singstar or Guitar Hero pop star. “[W]here one normally dreams of occupying the privileged position of a star within the virtual opportunities of one’s own home,” the gallery guide states, "one unexpectedly finds oneself in a position of having to advocate in song the controversial ideas of Art & Language." [...]

Posters of periodical covers published by Art & Language reference the tension between the multiple format and commercial commodity of the magazine and the epistemological production of artists versus the authorised "serious" journal format, such as would be published by an academic institution. These are hung on the gallery wall adjacent to the karaoke screen, with couches and coffee table covered with Art and Language publications: a microphone faces the screen. In this artwork, a blatantly political ideology (but one produced by artists) combines with the triteness and disposability of the karaoke form to create a participatory performance mode for the institutional museum context. Rhetorical speech, so often used in politics, is here subverted into pop karaoke, providing an opportunity for amateurs to have their moment in the limelight, but voicing the artist’s concerns. [...]

See This Sound: Audiovisuology: A Reader

2015

Christian Höller

Between 1976 and 1983, the conceptual art group Art & Language engaged in a series of musical collaborations with the rock band The Red Krayola, which they revisited in 2005 in their installation Karaoke Bar. The setting of this work is modeled on the typical layout of a karaoke bar: two benches face the standard karaoke projection of lines of text against a blue background, with the lines changing from red to yellow as the song progresses; a cocktail table holds a microphone, which visitors are free to use; the wall sports a gallery of posters that shed light on the historical context of the collaboration. Visitors to karaoke bars can usually consult thick catalogs listing the numerous sing-along songs available; Art & Language and The Red Krayola provide copies of magazines such as The Fox and Art-Language, which in the mid-1970s expounded the group’s theoretical superstructure. Likewise, the posters on the wall are not typical for the setting, but rather include record sleeves and posters taken from Art-Language. For example, the collection features the grotesquely misshapen and coiled man, arms extended like a snail’s antennae, who graced the cover of Corrected Slogans (1976, re-released in 1982), as well as woodcut-like industrial workers in the style of popular socialist realist iconography. The music featured in Karaoke Bar consists of the joint recordings by Art & Language and The Red Krayola, in which catchy refrains alternate with unconventional recitatives with Marxist-Leninist language. Even thirty years after their composition, they have lost none of their historical incisiveness.

[...] An example of an entirely different approach to dealing with both sensory overloads and sensory deficits is the Karaoke Bar created in 2005 by Art & Language together with The Red Krayola. This installation also focuses on rock music’s historical radical potential (or loss of it), and it, too, translates its manifestations into a contemporary form of everyday entertainment architecture. However, the position of the viewers is quite different than that in [Mike] Kelley’s work, for they are incorporated into the image/sound configuration in an entirely different manner. Not in the sense that an attempt is made to compensate visually or by means of an installation for what is otherwise not representable in terms of musical possibilities of boundary transgression; instead, the musical source material is in a sense overcoded with both artificial installational and everyday cultural means. Thus, the endeavor is not to compensate the excess of one medium (e.g., sound) by another (e.g., visual excess); rather, the compensation, if this is the correct term, takes place at the multisensorial and, ultimately, intellectual level.

The essence of this overcoding is significant breaks inserted into almost all aspects of the karaoke arrangement. Thus, the scrolling texts (and the accompanying music) are not just average pop fare, but rather consist of excerpts from the albums that Art & Language and The Red Krayola recorded together between 1976 and 1983. At that time, the two bands were experimenting with applying a pop-song format to extracts from Marxist theory, seditious pamphlets, slogans reshaped as poetry, historical aperçus, and the like, and they were giving generous musical scope to the resulting mutual breaks. Even thirty years later, this blending of forms made up of catchy refrains, unconventional recitatives, and Marxist diction ("And we will be fed / Breakfast in bed / And served by a fat millionaire") has lost none of its incisiveness. The breaks created by the old periodicals displayed in the installation (The Fox and Art-Language) and the posters taken from them and hung on the walls are also consistent with the format. This mix creates an atmosphere that, while formally corresponding to the setting of a singing booth, is actually diametrically opposed to it thematically.

Finally, the installation includes an extremely significant modification of the conventional karaoke setting. Whereas in the usual karaoke the instrumental versions of songs are played and participants sing the lyrics, in the work of Art & Language and The Red Krayola the integral original versions, including the singing, are played. The supposed moment of empowerment granted to hobby vocalists in the conventional setting is denied them here, or at least there is no attempt to make it the defining characteristic of the elaborate installation. While anyone can sing or bellow along as heartily as he or she wishes, the installation does not depend on the participation aspect, the subjective factor, so to speak. It is as though the artists do not want to saddle the visitors with responsibility or with the obligation to recognize the music (given that it is known only to the initiated). Or as though any visitors familiar with the sounds could join in the singing as the whim takes them, as has always been the case for pop fans listening at home or at public concerts, without any particular guidance being required.

The sensory overload orchestrated here is entirely unspectacular, if not to say unremarkable. The only element that does not fit are the above-mentioned breaks within the conventional, but here strangely reconstructed setting of the karaoke bar. The choice of the installation format leads Karaoke Bar to expose a sensorium in which almost every aspect of music reception (e.g., the songs, the original sound, the read-along texts, diverse accessories, posters, magazines) is individually addressed, indeed is practically spelled out in full. It is as if nothing should be left to chance when it comes to listening to this music; as if the degree of freedom with respect to an art form that once promised liberty were laid down in advance. What is missing from the installation, therefore (notwithstanding that they are overaddressed), are the visitors themselves. Through the abundance of media in the installation, the visitors are reminded of how creative and empowering it must have been to receive music in quite another way—whether in private or at concerts. In contrast, the détournement of the popular karaoke booth format, in which the musical added value is channeled in the direction of an omnisensorial stimulation, reveals the degree of muffling of the recipient (to put it pointedly) that accompanies today’s frequent overdetermination of music reception. This muffling is counteracted by the breaks in the installation, and it is this tension that lends the work its relevance and value.