Thank You for the Music, Installation View. Image courtesy of Kiasma.

Thank You for the Music recently ended the second part of its showing at Kiasma, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. The exhibition presents works by artists inspired by music, musicians, and the way individuals and communities experience a place, their past, and themselves, through the myths and rituals surrounding music. In particular, the notion of performance in the construction and reconstruction of an individual’s identity surfaces through several of the works in the exhibition.

Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, Kiss My Nauman, 2007. Image courtesy of Kiasma.

Titled in reference to Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up  (1967), Kiss My Nauman (2007) by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard is a four-channel video installation where the members of Dressed to Kill, a Kiss tribute group carefully paint their faces in preparation for a performance. With a close-up view of each member in surrounding separate screens, one stands within a zone of intimacy, gaining access to the concentration and collectedness of a musician during the period before a performance, where the putting on of a mask conceals yet reveals the bareness beneath.

Petri Ala-Maunus, (Left) A Tribute to Petri Ala-Maunus, 2009, (Right) Oh Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby, 2009. Image courtesy of Kiasma.

The idea of performance as a means of disclosure of an individual’s vulnerability emerges in Petri Ala-Maunus’ works, from the viewpoint of one who seeks to fulfill a teenage dream of becoming a rockstar. In Oh Baby, Baby, Baby, Baby (2009), Ala-Maunus strums a guitar to a song he composed when he was 16. With the yellow floral wallpaper and pink stuffed rabbit behind him, Ala-Maunus as rockstar is at once comical and mournful, of the search, effort, and impossibility of achieving the fame and glory of a past imagined ideal. A related work A Tribute to Petri Ala-Maunus (2009) is an LP with a music station area that features the original recording done when Ala-Maunus was 16, together with versions by invited musicians.

Candice Breitz, Britney Spears Monument, Berlin, September 2007, 2007. Digital c-print mounted on Diasec 70 7/8 x 165 3/16 in. (180 x 419.6 cm) © the artist. Courtesy White Cube

Three large photographic works by Candice Breitz occupy the walls in one gallery, surrounding the viewer with monuments to Britney Spears, Abba and Marilyn Manson. These monuments celebrate the legacy of each idol in the way their style have permeated communities of fans in Berlin. While each fan mimics the style of their idol in their dress, posture and paraphernalia, the composition of each group portrait emphasizes the diversity within. What becomes apparent are the acts of performance we go through often with unabashed enjoyment, as modes of expressions of time and taste.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File Under Sacred Music, 2003. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artist and Kate MacGarry, London.

British duo Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard are masterminds of re-enactment as an art form. Their current exhibition at the South London Gallery opens onto one of the best examples of this with the seminal work, File Under Sacred Music. This painstakingly detailed and dead-on remake of the infamous bootleg video of The Cramps’ live performance at the Napa State Mental Institution in California in 1978, was meticulously re-staged by Forsyth & Pollard at the ICA in 2003. With grainy, damaged images, delays, jumps, gaps and feedback, there is nothing about this footage that would distinguish it from an original, straight from the 70s, carelessly-shot home video.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File under Sacred Music, 2003. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

Music has always permeated the work of Forsyth & Pollard, and it extends through explicitly here not only in subject matter but choice of collaborators as well. Their nod to Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up (1967-68) features the world’s longest running Kiss tribute band, Dressed To Kill.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Kiss My Nauman, 2007. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

The work, cheekily titled Kiss My Nauman, is a forty-seven minute video installation that follows the members of the band as the carefully apply their stage make-up, allowing us to witness their transformation into their alter-egos. Nauman’s singular performance where he successively paints his face white, pink, green and finally black, is fractured into four screens, four bodies and four identities that are culturally specific and locatable. It is a re-enactment of Nauman’s work by a band whose have made a livelihood of nightly re-performance. Everything here has a reference in the past.

Forsyth & Pollard’s work continually re-performs history, and by doing so, attempts to transfer the past into the present, collapsing the linearity of time. The past is relocated into the present and the present indistinguishable from the past, creating a sense of displacement that runs through the work.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Silent Sound, 2006. Installation shot. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

Silent Sound is the only work in the exhibition that does not use video as a medium to perform re-enactment. Instead it is primarily an audio installation (although there is always a visual accompaniment of some sorts…) based on a 2006 work originally performed live in Liverpool.

As we are warned upon entry:

‘You are about to enter Silent Sound, an ambisonic installation with a subliminal message.’

The work was inspired by a public seance presented by Victorian entertainers Ira and William Davenport in 1865 and the ongoing interest of the artists in methods of silent, non-verbal communication. During the original live performance Forsyth & Pollard repeated a secret phrase into a microphone which was embedded within the ambient music that filled a concert hall and now fills a black box in the South London gallery.

In an attempt to get inside your mind, Forsyth & Pollard worked closely with a former employee of the American Ministry of Defence’s ‘non-lethal weapons’ programme which allegedly exploited the power of subconscious messaging as a military strategy. Immersion is the key here, not only in the subliminal sense, but also in a time past. While based on parapsychology, these voices are not speaking to you from beyond the grave, but they are speaking to you from the past, a inaudible message replayed here in the present. A presence that cannot be heard, or seen, but as the artists argue, will affect you and be taken forth into the future.

What is the message the artists are trying to spread? We don’t know – all we are told is the following:

‘The signal needs to be carried. The truth doesn’t matter.’

What does music meant to manipulate your mind sound like? A soothing, yet emotionally charged classical composition – calm, beautiful, haunting, electrifying….