Blackbirds and Growing Pains: A Conversation with Rutherford Chang (original) (raw)
Related papers
Coming Together: DIY Heritage and the Beatles
Preserving Popular Music Heritage: Do-it Yourself, Do-it-Together
Since 2012, Beatles fans have been commemorating the 50th anniversary of a number of key milestones in the band’s career. Perhaps the most notable was the release of the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” on 5 October 1962. To celebrate this occurrence in 2012, there was a series of events largely instigated by local Do it Yourself (DIY) initiatives in Liverpool and beyond. This renewed global, mainstream attention demonstrates how the resonance of the Beatles’ legacy still endures. It also shows how fans still want to mark their role in the Beatles story through often overlooked DIY practices, despite legal protection upheld by Apple Corps over the Beatles brand. In order to investigate how the beginnings of Beatles heritage practice was actually born out of DIY initiatives, this chapter will first explore the origins of Beatles related tourism in Liverpool (Cohen 2007; Leonard and Strachan 2010) and what implications the resulting institutionalization of that agenda has had on the DIY heritage practice by Beatles fans. Arguably, despite the tightly controlled corporate hold on the Beatles brand, there are still small, yet significant, ways in which fans are able to insert themselves into the Beatles story. In their work on heritage and identity, Graham and Howard (2008, p. 2) argue that value is not placed on heritage itself, but rather on “artefact and activities” that have imprinted on them meanings that provide insight into culture and society. Using this idea as the impetus for this research, this chapter investigates two main case studies: New York City artist Rutherford Chang’s exhibition We Buy White Albums, and the Liverpool Mural Project’s John Lennon Mural in the Litherland area of Liverpool. Chang’s collection of White Albums is an archive of the personal histories of the often anonymous previous owners, while the Liverpool Mural Project aims to unite Northern Irish and Liverpudlian artists otherwise divided by sectarianism. While there has often been a problematic relationship between copyright protection and fandom made all the more difficult in the digital age, these examples uncover the innovative ways in which Beatles fandom perseveres 50 years on.
Rock Music Studies, 2020
This article examines ways the authors have taught the Beatles' White Album in college classrooms. While it is possible to approach the work through the lens of satire and parody, another is to ask students to choose their favorite songs from the record to create a conventional single album, reducing its tracks from thirty to half that many. This exercise is fraught with difficulties but serves to reinforce several important lessons about artistic creation. By attempting to fill producer George Martin's role, students learn how fearless the Beatles were and how the band's original album-warts and all-is perhaps best left alone.
This article examines the art and travels of two contemporary Chinese artists – Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang – to explore how each of them successfully navigates the rapidly shifting terrains and interests of the Chinese state and the global high art industry while simultaneously articulating a distinct politics and practice of creative ambivalence. We argue that these two artists’ creative productions and strategies: (1) refute various western critics’ critique of Chinese artists as inauthentic imitators of western art who produce exotic representations of China and Chinese identity for western consumption; (2) call into question the Chinese government’s numerous efforts to simultaneously promote and control Chinese contemporary art for nationalist/statist purposes. Furthermore, we unpack how both artists deploy various resources to produce complex works that interrogate and demonstrate the clashes of power, culture and identity in global spaces of encounter.
AESTHETICS AND EXCLUSION: CHINESE OBJECTS IN NINETEENTH CENTURY AMERICAN VISUAL CULTURE
This paper explores an absence, or more accurately, an erasure.1 It is an attempt to understand why Chinese objects disappeared from American art discourse in the 1870s, despite their presence in American life and art collections. And it examines the changes that this lack of recognition occasioned in the American definition of art. My intention is to rectify this erasure as much as possible by contextualising it within the late nineteenth-century culture that gave rise to the Chinese Exclusion Laws. American exclusion of Chinese people may seem unrelated to appreciation of imported Chinese objects; indeed, the trajectories of Chinese exclusion and Chinese objects are generally researched separately. Bringing them together uncovers the political agenda underlying the American reception of Chinese art. Increasing anxiety regarding Chinese immigration effected American perception of everything from China. The framework of Chinese exclusion became the overarching environment for reception of Chinese import objects, reaching all the way into art museums, and necessitating a change in the paradigm of art to comprehend Chinese things.
Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (Introduction)
Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value, 2020
This is the introduction by C. Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp for a co-edited volume on race and the art world. Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions from historic forms of exclusion. This book offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racial representation but also issues of structural change and the redistribution of resources. In essays, conversations, discussions, and artist portfolios, contributors confront in new ways questions at the intersection of art, race, and representation. The book uses saturation as an organizing concept, in part to suggest that current paradigms cannot encompass the complex realities of race. Saturation provides avenues to situate race as it relates to perception, science, aesthetics, the corporeal, and the sonic. In color theory, saturation is understood in terms of the degree to which a color differs from whiteness. In science, saturation points describe not only the moment in which race exceeds legibility, but also how diversity operates for institutions. Contributors consider how racialization, globalization, and the production and consumption of art converge in the art market, engaging such topics as racial capitalism, the aesthetics of colonialism, and disability cultures. They examine methods for theorizing race and representation, including “aboutness,” which interprets artworks by racialized subjects as being “about” race; modes of unruly, decolonized, and queer visual practices that resist disciplinary boundaries; and a model by which to think with and alongside blackness and indigeneity.