Sound And Vision

by Luca Beatrice

Softcover, perfect-bound, 202 pages.

Music and art have gone together at least as long as there's been singing in church, but Sound & Vision opens in 1967, when the covers of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Peter Blake) and The Velvet Underground and Nico (Andy Warhol) announced that musical collaboration with Pop artists was here to stay. It moves on to the artist-muse relationship, with attention to Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith, who lead to Punk, New Wave and the artists of the East Village. In the 1980s, art-school musicians like the Talking Heads and Sonic Youth fused the primitive energies of rock with the intellectual refinements of art school, emerging with a unified aesthetic just as videos were raising the importance of the visual. Today, videos and art of all kinds continue to create and influence the market for music, and collaborations are thriving, from schoolmates Damien Hirst and Blur to partners Bjork and Matthew Barney and ur-hipsters Beck and Marcel Dzama. Sound & Vision observes the fertile mixing of photography, painting, music and video, a node of interdisciplinary connections that has slowly become a major influence in the historical development of both pop music and visual arts. Includes works from Keith Haring, Julian Schnabel, Raymond Pettibon, Damien Hirst, Mike Kelley and Matthew Barney, among others.