Reviews
Brian Kennon: 'Thoughtless...' (I'm With You in Rockland)
Issue 19, February 2008
Trudi, Los Angeles
30 November – 5 January
Review by Eli Langer & Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
'Refuse', as noun and verb, rocks out in Brian Kennon's show closing the 20-month run of TRUDI, the Chinatown display-window gallery project of artist Matthew Chambers. Working with printed images and text, Kennon's art repurposes and combines imagery appropriated from cultural sources such as recent art history (Ad Reinhardt, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley and Richard Hawkins) and rock ephemera and lyrics. Kennon, who also produces artists' books under the imprint of 2nd Cannons Publications, exhibits in the printed medium of posters and books. His exhibition, 'Thoughtless…' (I'm With You in Rockland), displays a grid of 12 black-and-white printed posters laid out in three rows, comprising mainly images and text lifted and enlarged from Man Is the Bastard's Thoughtless… (1996) album art and lyrics. With a collagist sensibility, the arrangement of posters assembles and layers gripping visions of social unrest and aggression culled from rock ’n’ roll, beat poetry and the history of American counterculture.
The sung voice, the rock voice and the poet’s lyrical voice are represented by pictures of Johnny Cash, Black Flag and Bob Dylan. Neil Young’s voice is invoked in the anthem 'Hey Hey, My My Rock and Roll Will Never Die', printed over the photo of a beaten and bloody 'freedom rider' whose commitment to Civil Rights activism marks him as an early protagonist in the developing social protest movements of that era. This show figures Kennon as a listening instrument tuning into oceans of static and volumes of dissonance, out of which emerges the contours of political consciousness. Politics is located in visual representations of the aural and a synaesthetic immersion in noise.
Man Is the Bastard's proclaimed 'power violence' music genre and the anti-authoritarian, anarchistic politics delivered by the lyrics give an indication of the album’s intended tenor of volatility. Cited in full, the last track, Moloch, is a verbatim adaptation of part two of Allen Ginsberg’s chilling poem Howl (1956). Ginsberg haunts the entire show: his refrain in Part III of Howl – 'I'm with you in Rockland' – is recontextualised from its original reference to a New York insane asylum to an evocation of rock counterculture. Drawing on his longstanding engagement with rock music, Kennon roots himself in a fan's commitment to tracking a vernacular of popular dissent in the graphic aesthetics, symbolism and rhetoric of rock 'n' roll's politics of protest, and to the critical implications of graphic design, typeface, font and layout.
The political idealism presented here is born out of outrage and voiced through negative affirmation: the paradox of life-affirming morality paired with death imagery, which characterises a spirit of revolt. Purely relational, negation is the oppositional strategy which advocates the possibility of a better human condition. Kennon's cover version of rock's song of disaffected rage intends to disrupt the repressive and phoney optimism of capitalism's historically cynical enterprise.
Trudi, Los Angeles
30 November – 5 January
Review by Eli Langer & Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
'Refuse', as noun and verb, rocks out in Brian Kennon's show closing the 20-month run of TRUDI, the Chinatown display-window gallery project of artist Matthew Chambers. Working with printed images and text, Kennon's art repurposes and combines imagery appropriated from cultural sources such as recent art history (Ad Reinhardt, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley and Richard Hawkins) and rock ephemera and lyrics. Kennon, who also produces artists' books under the imprint of 2nd Cannons Publications, exhibits in the printed medium of posters and books. His exhibition, 'Thoughtless…' (I'm With You in Rockland), displays a grid of 12 black-and-white printed posters laid out in three rows, comprising mainly images and text lifted and enlarged from Man Is the Bastard's Thoughtless… (1996) album art and lyrics. With a collagist sensibility, the arrangement of posters assembles and layers gripping visions of social unrest and aggression culled from rock ’n’ roll, beat poetry and the history of American counterculture.
The sung voice, the rock voice and the poet’s lyrical voice are represented by pictures of Johnny Cash, Black Flag and Bob Dylan. Neil Young’s voice is invoked in the anthem 'Hey Hey, My My Rock and Roll Will Never Die', printed over the photo of a beaten and bloody 'freedom rider' whose commitment to Civil Rights activism marks him as an early protagonist in the developing social protest movements of that era. This show figures Kennon as a listening instrument tuning into oceans of static and volumes of dissonance, out of which emerges the contours of political consciousness. Politics is located in visual representations of the aural and a synaesthetic immersion in noise.
Man Is the Bastard's proclaimed 'power violence' music genre and the anti-authoritarian, anarchistic politics delivered by the lyrics give an indication of the album’s intended tenor of volatility. Cited in full, the last track, Moloch, is a verbatim adaptation of part two of Allen Ginsberg’s chilling poem Howl (1956). Ginsberg haunts the entire show: his refrain in Part III of Howl – 'I'm with you in Rockland' – is recontextualised from its original reference to a New York insane asylum to an evocation of rock counterculture. Drawing on his longstanding engagement with rock music, Kennon roots himself in a fan's commitment to tracking a vernacular of popular dissent in the graphic aesthetics, symbolism and rhetoric of rock 'n' roll's politics of protest, and to the critical implications of graphic design, typeface, font and layout.
The political idealism presented here is born out of outrage and voiced through negative affirmation: the paradox of life-affirming morality paired with death imagery, which characterises a spirit of revolt. Purely relational, negation is the oppositional strategy which advocates the possibility of a better human condition. Kennon's cover version of rock's song of disaffected rage intends to disrupt the repressive and phoney optimism of capitalism's historically cynical enterprise.
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