Before you read any further, listen to this. That was Argh! by Folke Rabe. As its title suggests, it is an onomatopoeic collage of radio station jingles and aural detritus that scats between everything from the verbose ramblings of a radio DJ to local weather reports and the sampling of pop songs of the day. Invited to San Francisco’s Tape Music Center in 1965, Rabe became fascinated by the abstract and jazz like musical quality of American commercial radio DJ’s verbal lead in to a song – the way that they could continue talking through the introduction and right up until the very beginning of the vocal. This voice, Rabe thought, became an instrument in itself and the blurring of the edges between the DJ and the song became an interesting aural collage. Like an early kind of mixing. And that is one of the fascinating things for me about this piece: the way that it is an exact musical answer to Pop Art (it’s easy to think of it as the equivalent of a sonic Rauschenberg) and the way that it really preempted the cut and paste sampling of hip-hop. Jim O’Rourke – a big fan of Rabe, going so far as to even release several recordings on his own label – on the liner notes to the CD publication of Argh! in 2006 makes a similar point: “[Rabe] exposes the path that had been obscured: great composers everywhere, existing in a land before unknown to homebound experimental enthusiasts”. It was another 10 or 12 years before Grand Master Flash started giving his record collection a similar treatment.
What is also interesting is that this was a work that was produced on and for tape which gives it a wonderful, although perhaps hindsight adjusted, sense of intimacy. Rabe is doing for reel to reel magnetic tape what Grand Master Flash later did for two turntables and a cross-fader, but it is still hard to shake the analogy of the carefully crafted mixtape. Something similar to the teenage ritual of hovering over the the record and stop buttons trying to synchronize perfectly the fade between one song and the next. Only on this occasion, rather than trying to build a playlist of what you can’t quite or don’t dare put into words to the girl you are trying to impress (or even get notice you), Rabe behaves like the weird boyfriend who is into a bunch a freaky stuff and is more interested in trying to imitate the parlance of the DJ than relay the message at the heart of Petula Clarke’s Downtown. It is in explanation to his electronic drone piece What??, perhaps his most famous work, that this behaviour is explained:
I decided to make a continuous music, completely without breaks. This was a way to escape the tape noise that, with the technique of the 1960s, inevitably turns intermissions into noise instead of silence. Simultaneously I found that this was an expression of the electronic media’s untiring persistence. (NB: This was the time of Marshall McLuhan and his theories on “Understanding Media”!) Electronics have no muscles; electronics do not have to breathe. It can be switched on for ever, or at least as long as some volts remain in the wall socket. I was also striving for a measure of ambiguity and illusion and thus I decided to limit myself to harmonic tone combinations only.
Argh! itself, like the DJ it samples and the dead air the profession fears and the awkwardness of the enamored teen, seems to be as much as anything else about covering the illusion of silence and the awkwardness therein, or rather, the futility in trying mechanically achieve it.
In 1968 Sture Johannesson’s poster for a planned exhibition at Lunds Konsthall upset the Board of Directors so much they ordered all copies to be confiscated and destroyed. The show was cancelled. Johanesson was exiled from the Swedish artworld for 36 years. In the mean time, the Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness or, as it is sometimes known Hashflicka poster, no doubt as a result of this controversy, began to take on a life of its own and forge itself into the popular consciousness. As a poster celebrating marijauana produced in the sixties is wont to do, it became an emblem of those in the midst of turning on tuning in and dropping out before finally making a cameo in amongst others Lukas Moodysson’s film Together, the Ikea catalogue (naturally) and as a T-shirt design for Top Shop before finally in 2004 Johanesson reemerged with the postponed show at a more accepting and liberal Lunds Konstall.
In the mean time Johannesson experimented. He experimented with the everything from the technological to the chemical, at times simultaneously. He founded the Digital Theater, an art collective powered by a DIY network of first-generation Apple computers and in 1973, working with programmer Sten Kallin, he attempted to find the equation whose graphical solution was the outline of a cannabis leaf. Despite the psychedelic aesthetic going mainstream during his exile, the objectives of his work always remained constant. His practice continued to be enabled by the discourse of radical social politics of the 1960’s, however the Hashflicka poster probably remains the most concise example. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Swedish establishment allegedly trying to stop Johannesson by getting him declared mentally ill and harassing his friends and family, never again did he court quite the same controversy.
The Hashflicka poster forms part of the “Danish Collection”, a series of works printed in Copenhagen between 1967 and 1969 – a body of work that combined both typography and collage and was inspired by the likes of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch. It was meant as an interpretation of the Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People that appears in the top right of the poster. Instead of a woman showing her breast holding a gun and a banner, on the poster there is a naked woman holding a peace pipe and a sun flower with the text “Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness” – you can just see the small bubbles that rise from the pipe she holds are in fact not bubbles but small cut-outs of Che Guevara’s head. The poster was attempting to indicate a pacifist alternative to the romance of violence surrounding the armed struggle demanded by the revolution. Needless to say, this also upset the “serious” left wing with it’s “delerious drug politics“. A no win situation.
Swedish Pop: 2 Swedish Artists
Before you read any further, listen to this. That was Argh! by Folke Rabe. As its title suggests, it is an onomatopoeic collage of radio station jingles and aural detritus that scats between everything from the verbose ramblings of a radio DJ to local weather reports and the sampling of pop songs of the day. Invited to San Francisco’s Tape Music Center in 1965, Rabe became fascinated by the abstract and jazz like musical quality of American commercial radio DJ’s verbal lead in to a song – the way that they could continue talking through the introduction and right up until the very beginning of the vocal. This voice, Rabe thought, became an instrument in itself and the blurring of the edges between the DJ and the song became an interesting aural collage. Like an early kind of mixing. And that is one of the fascinating things for me about this piece: the way that it is an exact musical answer to Pop Art (it’s easy to think of it as the equivalent of a sonic Rauschenberg) and the way that it really preempted the cut and paste sampling of hip-hop. Jim O’Rourke – a big fan of Rabe, going so far as to even release several recordings on his own label – on the liner notes to the CD publication of Argh! in 2006 makes a similar point: “[Rabe] exposes the path that had been obscured: great composers everywhere, existing in a land before unknown to homebound experimental enthusiasts”. It was another 10 or 12 years before Grand Master Flash started giving his record collection a similar treatment.
What is also interesting is that this was a work that was produced on and for tape which gives it a wonderful, although perhaps hindsight adjusted, sense of intimacy. Rabe is doing for reel to reel magnetic tape what Grand Master Flash later did for two turntables and a cross-fader, but it is still hard to shake the analogy of the carefully crafted mixtape. Something similar to the teenage ritual of hovering over the the record and stop buttons trying to synchronize perfectly the fade between one song and the next. Only on this occasion, rather than trying to build a playlist of what you can’t quite or don’t dare put into words to the girl you are trying to impress (or even get notice you), Rabe behaves like the weird boyfriend who is into a bunch a freaky stuff and is more interested in trying to imitate the parlance of the DJ than relay the message at the heart of Petula Clarke’s Downtown. It is in explanation to his electronic drone piece What??, perhaps his most famous work, that this behaviour is explained:
Argh! itself, like the DJ it samples and the dead air the profession fears and the awkwardness of the enamored teen, seems to be as much as anything else about covering the illusion of silence and the awkwardness therein, or rather, the futility in trying mechanically achieve it.
In 1968 Sture Johannesson’s poster for a planned exhibition at Lunds Konsthall upset the Board of Directors so much they ordered all copies to be confiscated and destroyed. The show was cancelled. Johanesson was exiled from the Swedish artworld for 36 years. In the mean time, the Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness or, as it is sometimes known Hashflicka poster, no doubt as a result of this controversy, began to take on a life of its own and forge itself into the popular consciousness. As a poster celebrating marijauana produced in the sixties is wont to do, it became an emblem of those in the midst of turning on tuning in and dropping out before finally making a cameo in amongst others Lukas Moodysson’s film Together, the Ikea catalogue (naturally) and as a T-shirt design for Top Shop before finally in 2004 Johanesson reemerged with the postponed show at a more accepting and liberal Lunds Konstall.
In the mean time Johannesson experimented. He experimented with the everything from the technological to the chemical, at times simultaneously. He founded the Digital Theater, an art collective powered by a DIY network of first-generation Apple computers and in 1973, working with programmer Sten Kallin, he attempted to find the equation whose graphical solution was the outline of a cannabis leaf. Despite the psychedelic aesthetic going mainstream during his exile, the objectives of his work always remained constant. His practice continued to be enabled by the discourse of radical social politics of the 1960’s, however the Hashflicka poster probably remains the most concise example. Despite, or perhaps because of, the Swedish establishment allegedly trying to stop Johannesson by getting him declared mentally ill and harassing his friends and family, never again did he court quite the same controversy.
The Hashflicka poster forms part of the “Danish Collection”, a series of works printed in Copenhagen between 1967 and 1969 – a body of work that combined both typography and collage and was inspired by the likes of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch. It was meant as an interpretation of the Delacroix painting Liberty Leading the People that appears in the top right of the poster. Instead of a woman showing her breast holding a gun and a banner, on the poster there is a naked woman holding a peace pipe and a sun flower with the text “Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness” – you can just see the small bubbles that rise from the pipe she holds are in fact not bubbles but small cut-outs of Che Guevara’s head. The poster was attempting to indicate a pacifist alternative to the romance of violence surrounding the armed struggle demanded by the revolution. Needless to say, this also upset the “serious” left wing with it’s “delerious drug politics“. A no win situation.