While I was not moved to great delight by the prints, I liked them and would go again to look in more depth and in less crowded circumstances. I'd also need to return to listen to Vicki Bennett's LP, People Like Us as it was too warm and too busy to do that adequately yesterday.
The LP cover art installation was fascinating. Two opposite walls of LP covers almost none of which I've ever owned, with the trite exception of Led Zepplin IV.
The exhibition describes this installation thus:
...the project recalls the golden age of the record cover in the thick of post-psychedelia's goth-surrealistic art-nouveau apocalyptic landscape explosion...
The art is often viewed for at least as long as the duration of the record - for much longer than most gallery-based work. The record cover synaesthetically maps the sonic journey inscribed on the record.Yeah, that's what I thought about it too. But as I go everywhere with my archetypal radfem head on, I also could not fail to see the explicit torture motif underpinning a sizable minority of the covers on display. The torture was almost without exception of women, women's bodies and where not explicit was merely the banal encouragement of the male gaze so precious in art.
The question posed in Norman Shaw's essay in the exhibition is "Why does the devil have all the good tunes?" (Echoing plaintive cries of 70's evangelical Christians faced with keeping their young folk on the straight and narrow when tempted by good music, but off-message lyrics.)
The radfem question is more likely, "why does such great rock music have to be at the expense of the bodily integrity of women?" But that wasn't answered either at the height of the rock age or now when we are steeped in misogynist music video. The arguments would involve more and better crafted writing than I'm up for today when I want merely to feed back my instant observations on an exhibition that is thoughtful and thought provoking.
In amongst the 'apocalyptic' stuff were curious insertions. LP's by Jimmy Shand, surely the least goth-surrealistic of all musicians, while the Black and White Minstrel cover displayed a long discarded version of unthinking racism to which we are (mostly) no longer exposed. And the Tubular Bells artwork cannot be accused of transgressing any diversity issues.
It's certainly an exhibition to return to and spend more time viewing and thinking about the messages conveyed in the LP covers. It was also an opportunity to wallow briefly in memories from a time where I had to endure my brother's taste in prog rock while fielding his scorn of my enjoyment of glam rock.
Edinburgh Art Festival Programme has more details of the exhibition.
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