The Brooklyn Rail

Two students at a Catholic university in Houston, Texas, start a band that eventually records one of the most experimental albums of the psychedelic era. After the band breaks up, one of the founders moves first to New York to work as the assistant of a famous artist, then to London, where he teams up with a highly politicized art collective with whom he makes audio and video recordings featuring the artists awkwardly chanting political tracts to a basic rock backing. One member of the collective leaves to teach at a university in the northern English city of Leeds. Among his colleagues there are an art historian who specializes in a Marxist reading of 19^th century French painting and another art historian who takes a feminist perspective. Three Leeds students (two from the art department, one from the English department) form a band, along with a non-student drummer. The music they make is informed by their studies: "When I went to Leeds,” one band member recalls, “I was into post-Expressionist American artists like Frank Stella. While I was there, I got into Impressionism. The Impressionist period had many parallels with now: Manet was using formulae and iconography from a tradition, but he put it together in a way that was uncomfortable.” His art history professor “had been involved with the Situationist International. We talked about the way a work of art works in its context, with its public, the way it has to find its market place.” The paintings he was making—tight black grids interrupted by smears of paint—reflected the conceptual bent of the art collective his painting teacher worked with. After the band he helped form had become celebrated in the U.K., the U.S. and beyond, for its riveting juxtaposition of angular post-punk rock, catchy lyrics of incisive social critique and a deconstructive approach to all aspects of pursuing pop success, the guitarist recalled how his abstract paintings were mirrored in the band’s music: "It would be the juxtaposition of tight, fixed patterns that were very physically energizing and relentless, which would largely be supplied by the bass and drums, and the guitar, which would sometimes completely go along with that, and sometimes not. If you took one of these elements out and made it ordinary, the whole thing would lose its authenticity. Every part of it had to be radical. It was building musical tension in a precise way."

(Mayo Thompson, Fredrick Barthelme, Robert Rauschenberg, Charles Harrison, Mel Ramsden, Michael Baldwin, Andy Gill, Jon King, Hugo Burnham, Dave Allen, T.J. Clark, Griselda Pollock)