Sorcha Dallas

‘Double A-Side’ started out as an exhibition and performance project that opened simultaneously at three institutions in the summer of 2007. Taking place at ARTIS, the Centre for Fine Art and the Stedelijk Museum in the city of s’Hertogenbosch – most famously known as the birthplace of Hieronymus Bosch – ‘Double A-Side’ was a project concerned with artists who have dual identities as visual artists and musicians.

Its gaze operated from the very clear premise that ever since the Industrial Revolution, there has been a trend for ever-increasing specialization in both production and social identity. This has seen a consistent shift away from the Renaissance ideal in which an artist should be accomplished in more than one discipline, including those currently formulated as science. The notion that a contemporary visual artist could also validly claim to be a professional musician is now problematic, perhaps smelling a little of naiveté in relation to how we socially arrive at consensus as to who can (and cannot) validly claim to be both a ‘visual artist’ and a ‘musician’.

Using a crypto-scientific set of criteria – such as recording contracts or a track record of showing art in institutional spaces- ‘Double A-Side’ identified an unusual cohort. It sought to reflect on the artistic output of those who earned the ‘right’ to claim to be both visual artists and musicians, based on the series of generally accepted criteria denoting professional status in either the worlds of visual art and music. Did their visual art or music, for example, have any particular preoccupations or commonalties? The resulting research arranged the work according to various dominant thematics – such as ‘Pop’, Diptychs & Triptychs’ or ‘Modernism’- at each of the spaces in different parts of the city. A one-off music performance event also took place on a specially constructed stage within the Centre for Fine Arts, coinciding with the opening of a large annual theatre festival with which the city is also strongly associated in the Lowlands.

‘Double A-Side: The Bootleg’, transposes the same baseline concept to the project space of an established London gallery; a salon version with the same starting point. However, this time the line-up has been tweaked: some new faces appear and a few of the old familiar ones simply cannot be squeezed into the salon-scale presentation. Furthermore, the relationships between the works themselves have been reconsidered for presentation within a single space and an interesting new set of relationships emerge, not least of all since almost all of the original participants have naturally evolved new bodies of work. In some cases, these are radical departures; in others less so.

The artists included in ‘Double A-Side: The Bootleg’ are Rob Churm, Caron Geary, Rufus Ketting & Gyz La Riviere, Kate Mayne, Angie Reed, Janine Rostron, Catriona Shaw, Tai Shani and Martin C. de Waal.

Photography, drawings, installation, painting, animation and video works – sometimes in unexpected multimedia configurations responding to the unique space- offer the audience a range of discourses. Works that use a light and wry touch to allude to the worlds of pop music and glamour; works with a throwaway punky quality or works that use music are perhaps expected from artists who also operate as musicians on the pop circuit. However, other works, such as the immaculately achieved performative photography of Caron Geary, the conceptual works of Rufus Ketting and Gyz La Riviere or the precise relationships between the paintings and installed objects of Kate Mayne –directly referencing Vermeer- are much more opaque.

If we look at certain art works and too easily conclude that they have been made by someone who is also a musician, then much of what ‘Double A-Side: The Bootleg’ reveals is that the visual art work of these ‘double talents’ may well have a connection with ideation and preoccupations of their individual musical outputs, but that it is seldom as straightforward as it seems. The way the individual artists engage in their respective music and visual arts practice is not formulaic and the disparity between the aesthetics of their performance personas or music itself and those of their art works is often more evident than any predicted similarity.

Fuller details of both the musical and visual arts output of the invited artists is available on the Double A-Side Myspace at www.myspace.com/doubleaside

This Myspace site maintains the history of the earlier project and will be updated to document ‘Double A-side: The Bootleg’.

‘Double A-side: The Bootleg’ will open at the project space of Fred – London in Vyner Street on 2 July 2009, coinciding with the busy ‘First Thursdays’ initiative supported by the Arts Council for England.