The Art of Noise

(Originally published on MOLI 6/5/8)

The Down Home Southernaires were playing their hearts out in the middle of the exhibit room at North Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Hipsters and swells, there for the opening of Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock n Roll Since 1967, walked around the group, staring and smiling. To actually hear the Southernaires’ psychedelic indie swamp boogie, you had to don one of the headphones hanging on the soundproof plexiglass box inside which the band was playing. The musicians were pictures at an exhibition, a natural-history museum diorama sprung to silent life, Art Rock Exhibit A of a show that seemed to ask, What is the connection, or disconnect, between visual and audio stimulation?

Untitled 1996 (Rehearsal Studio No. 6 Silent Version), by Rirkrit Tiravanija, is the attention-getting centerpiece of this remarkably cool gathering of album art (Funkadelic head case Pedro Bell), photographs (uber-underground Richard Kern), videos (Robert Longo, Red Krayola), photomontages (punk feminist pioneer Linder – how f-ing cool is that?!), artifacts (lots of Throbbing Gristle; cool factor to the infinity degree), drawings (Rita Ackerman, Yoshitomo Nara), sculptures, and whatnot. The show originated at MOCA in Chicago, whose Dominic Molon curated it; it opened in Miami on May 29 and runs through September 7. Did I mention it’s really, really cool?

The exhibit title is misleading: Sympathy digs a lot deeper than anything as obvious as a giant lips logo. The array of film, art, and video taps into more of a Gen X demo than a boomer one. The Andy Warhol-assembled Velvet Underground is the aesthetic jumping-off point for what is essentially a survey of three decades of subcultural pioneers, with lots of contemporary pieces. As the Throbbing Gristle flyers and Christian Marclay installations show, sound and vision have a history of feeding each other – these are people who see industrial refuse as musical instruments and vinyl records as found artwork.

A lot of attention has been paid of late to Miami’s vibrant visual arts scene. But as Sympathy for the Devil proves, where there’s art, there’s usually noise – the Down Home Southernaires are the tip of a growing musical iceberg providing a soundtrack for Hernan Bas, Naomi Fischer, Jose Bedia, etc. Perhaps, the MOCA show will serve as a sort of inspirational mecca for cross-disciplinary creative types in what DHS calls the Black Magic City. Any artist can book time in Tiravanija’s Petri-dish rehearsal studio, and the museum is hosting a battle of the band series beginning June 24.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami is located at 770 NE 125th Street, North Miami, FL. For information, please call 305.893.6211 or visit www.mocanomi.org. Museum hours are Tuesday – Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm; Sunday noon – 5 pm, and last Friday of each month from 7 – 10 pm. Admission is free for MOCA members, North Miami residents/City employees, and children under 12; $5 non-members; $3 seniors and students with ID.

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