Music Book Review: Double Lives in Art and Pop Music by Jorg Heiser

Double Lives in Art and Pop Music
by Jorg Heiser (Music 781.66 Hei)

As its title suggests, this book explores musicians who have also worked in the field of art, or whose musical practices sometimes expand into broader worlds. I suppose we should define some terms up front to fully understand where this book is coming from: of course music is a form of art, but generally when Heiser refers to “art” in the context of his book, he is talking about non-musical forms of art: painting, performance art, film or video work, installation art, and those kinds of activities. And there’s another phrase that comes up a lot in the book, which is “context switching,” around which revolves the crux of his observations. Here’s his definition of context switching: “This denotes 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.”

 

So ultimately we’re looking at how artists choose to move between artistic disciplines, and the unique approaches they take when doing so—some find lots of connections between such practices, while others maintain fairly separate worlds of work. Some move back and forth between disciplines regularly or are constantly working in both areas, while others go through long stretches of focus in one area or the other. I think that in many ways, the interest behind undertaking this analysis lies in the notion that we’re looking at practices that are likely reaching their final eras of remaining so discrete in terms of context. That is, the dividing lines between art media are increasingly blurred, as are the dividing lines between so-called “high” and “low” art forms, or arts made for academic or institutional audiences versus the general public. In the hyperlinked internet age, so much work in creative disciplines happens across all kinds of old lines dividing types of media, and the consumption of the arts has become less ordered, or at least less concerned with the old kinds of order that we looked at like historical chronology or geography. Heiser looks at multidisciplinary artist/musicians from roughly the 1960s to the 2010s, the modern golden age of multidisciplinary practices, and perhaps as we go forward within increasingly ahistorical and blended times, we can pick up valuable ideas from the working habits of these artists.

 

Throughout the book, there is a secondary theme at play, which has to do with the worldview under which these artist/musicians operate, broadly divided into “utopian” and “dystopian” approaches. Heiser sees these opposites as a framework through which to view sociopolitical contexts related to various artist/musicians’ practices: some are working in places or eras of social and/or political upheaval, while others are working in more peaceful times and places. These differences inform their work, of course, but sometimes it appears that they may also influence how or even why they jump between artistic disciplines.

 

The first sections of the book deal with well-known artists and musicians that help to establish what Heiser is looking for. Starting with Andy Warhol and his involvement with the Velvet Underground, we see how the Warhol’s Factory scene moved between the worlds of art and pop music, with Warhol of course getting lots of attention from Fine Art critics and art dealers and collectors, while the Velvet Underground became a very influential pop act. Then we get to explore the artistic interactions between Yoko Ono and John Lennon, who influenced one another from their diverse backgrounds, Ono coming out of the Fluxus art movement and Lennon of course being a working-class musician. After that, the book explores artists like Brain Eno, Laurie Anderson, and some relatively lesser-known but very interesting artists who also work with music.

 

It doesn’t seem that Double Lives in Art and Pop Music comes to any specific consensus about the behavior of multidisciplinary artists as a whole, and that’s to be expected. It is interesting to look at their work through various trends and polarities, though, from the utopia/dystopia opposites mentioned before, to social and political upheaval, to more practical issues like fluctuations in the economic realities of different disciplines. Heiser observes, for example, that the art world was going through rough times in the 1990s while pop music flourished, and that by the late Oughts and early 2010s, it was music that was struggling economically under the changing conditions of illegal downloading, while the market for fine arts was exploding. There are probably as many reasons for switching between disciplines as there are artist/musicians who do so, and it’s fun to read about what brings them together, as well as their unique paths.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try The Art of Noise: Destruction of Music by Futurist Machines by Ferrucio Bersoni, American Art Song and American Poetry by Ruth Friedberg or The Music of Dada: A Lesson in Intermediality For Our Times by Peter Dayan.]

[ publisher’s official Double Lives in Art and Pop Music web page ]

Recommended by Scott S.
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