Recordings on vinyl still thrive on independent labels and in club culture; the DJ’s image as manipulator of multiple discs on the shimmering ‘wheels of steel’ is as iconic an image as Elvis’s silhouette working the microphone stand. As art object, the LP’s value is dependant upon it never being slit open from its sleeve and played. An acquaintance obsessed with early 70’s British pub-rock once advised “buy it-shelve it” as the key to serious album collecting. Two artists working on opposite American coasts have recently produced recordings available on vinyl in limited editions. Corinne Jones in collaboration with Liam Gillick has released a LP and print; the disk itself features the woodcut image of a cobbler in a reformation-era market. Jones herself deserves closer attention. A painter who studied at the New York School of Visual Arts and Columbia University Jones made images of grand inertia, often of things drained of their contents like aquariums, water tanks, and of exotic ‘clearings’ where organic marginalia vignetted expanses of luxurious absence. In recent work, canvas covered in paint are again ‘drained’ of content, setting an empty stage for?-‘Effie Briest’ perhaps, a band in which Jones plays drums and serves as core member. In Junior High School ‘Candy’ a bawdy novel satirizing Voltaire’s ‘Candide’, was passed around my social set. I never read it, but I did peruse the reviews (interestingly) on the back cover. One blurb by Paul Krassner read “Terry Southern is a groove and a gas- people should send him money and other cool things”. Still impressed with this circa ’65 sentiment I wish it for both Corinne Jones and Brooke Eberle. Eberle currently works in Los Angeles having studied at New York University. Still in promising development she has been constructing, through her collages, installations, and now recordings a persona as coping mechanism for dealing with the role of artist in this dubious time. In 2010 she published a volume of writing that read like an email fever dream: an uneasy, possibly biographical diatribe of erotic obsession. This relationship, fictive or otherwise, may, (or may not of) seeped into an installation at LA’s important Night Gallery in a show she shared with Rainer Ganahl and others. Here Eberle prepared the space for an encounter with her subject who, as you have guessed by now, may or may not have appeared. Her recording ‘If You Hear Me Making Noise I’m Just Praising The Lord Hallelu Jah’ (Edition of 40, available at brooke.eberle@gmail.com) is an incantatory rant summoning of her beloved. I regard her work as part of the new occult tendency, which in actuality is never new, tracing back to shamanism practiced by plains tribes of the artist’s native Idaho. As a student Eberle masqueraded as Beuys and wandered the hills. The turntable galvanized Marcel Duchamp in autistic rapture. Ed Ruscha’s 1971 book ‘Records’ undoubtedly influenced Jack Goldstein’s recordings of gruesome actual events, like beheadings, repeated like Warhol’s ‘Car Crashes’ until the meaning goes away leaving us with only the beat. Collectors measure the effect of time upon value-Duchamp the alchemist edges out Picasso the stylist as the artist that currently matters most. When Jeff Koons somewhat mattered he produced a series of object/liquor decanters whose value depended upon whether their seals were broken and their intoxicating contents consumed. Break the seals on Brooke’s and Corinne’s new recording and let what’s inside act on you.
Tim Maul
Jones/Gillick Picture Disk LP and print available at www.brigadecommerz.com
