Post Gods
[published in Revue Fusées, 2008]
DMC : vocals, Emmanuel Hubaut : bass, Sylvain Beorchia : guitar, Cdrc Lchrz : drums. Concert 26 May 2007 20h30, Wharf, Centre for Contemporary Art for Basse-Normandie, Hérouville St. Clair.
Part 1 : 20 May 2007
At the beginning, David Michael Clarke [DMC] sauntered around the backstreets of Stockholm, Sweden, looking out for an image that the city might throw up, and maybe prove to be the starting point for a conceptual and romantic work of art – in the same manner as the series of photographs : pairs of pairs [people and things] 2006. Eventually he stumbled upon the Ericsson factory. Round the back he found a door, above which a sign read « ERICSSON. Post Gods ». Stuck to the window, another announcement repeated the words GODS and POST. Evidently, for this english-speaking conceptual artist, the words seemed heaven sent. Post like post-modernism. Gods like the great bearded one etc. Even better, Post Gods like « once the gods have gone », and here we are knocking on the door of Nietzsche!
Language, here, plays a beautiful part. Words transform as they circulate between us. These words that in swedish simply signify « goods office », are swallowed up not only by the english language, but also by artistic vocabulary and philosophical concepts. DMC instigates a linguistic displacement in the same vein as the project On Translation by Antonio Muntadas, in which he follows a phrase from one language to another, through multiple translations, until eventually, it's signification is rolled over. Further still, unsatisfied by the idea of a conceptual and philosophical approach to the words Post Gods, the sound and the looks of the words took DMC off to yet another universe, that of music, of rock, of post-punk.
Back in France, he started writing songs and went looking for some musicians with the view of creating a group : Post Gods were born. To constitute a rock group as a representation, as an image, as a sign, like the one he found at the Ericsson factory. To create the group like a bait, an idea, an icon, the trace of disparition to come. A groupe that includes it's very death. Set off from an image, from what it says and evokes as a symbol. Displace it and re-contextualise it in another space-time. Make this rock group as conceptual sculpture. To do all this DMC surrounded himself with some atypical musicians :
Emmanuelle Hubaut from LTNO, Dead Sexy Inc., Les Tétines Noires, vocalist and rather unusual rock musician. Off-beat [not musically, but culturally], his work mixes music with contemporary art. Recent projects have included a series of photographs of feet, and a trans-american road-movie, to which he and his collaborators add a live set. Cdrc Lchrz is the founder-member of CRSSS [Centre of Research for the Sign, Sound and Sense] which challenges existing strategies between emitters and receivers, before creating alternatives. He is also co-founder of the musical improvisation group TCHXX, in which he is the drummer. With a sound that approaches free jazz, here again there is a coming and going between art and sound, a refusal to acknowledge whatever frontier, sound becomes matter, meta-language. At the guitar for Post Gods is Sylvain Beorchia, who more is usually in the duo 2tokiislands. Electro-ambient and repetitive, they too approach a conceptual universe.
Invited in 'residence' at Wharf Contemporary Art Centre for Basse-Normandie, Post Gods put together a playlist in only a couple of sessions – the first in December 2006, the second in April 2007, before the live concert at Wharf on the 26 May 2007. Even if, having written most of the songs, DMC is master of the game and leader of the group, he's certainly no enforcer. The group, founded on the impropable meeting of it's four members, produces it's own sound. Improbable, because the members didn't simply have to accept to play together, they also had to adhere to DMC's artistic project : a rock group as a work of art, in fact conceptual, but romantic as it lets off it's symbolic charge. A fictional group, a game of role play for everyone, or everybody plays themselves. DMC's romantic profile seems to fit the bill rather well as the lead-singer.
Of course one can think of The Doors, or The Velvet Underground, with their affiliation to the art world, their close ties to Andy Warhol. Like the man said, « In the future, everyone will be a star for fifteen minutes ». Rhythm, echos of velvet, ballads and other rock'n'roll clichés punctuate the Post Gods' songs. As for the contents : love, sex, money, cars, first orgasm, first sufferance, biographical elements ... to sum it up, an anthology of life, recurrent in the history of rock. The project wouldn't be complete if Post Gods didn't feature on www.myspace.com – the incontrovertible contemporary home for independent groups who want to get their music known without kissing the ass of a major label – a home for now at least, although one can already smell change in the air – money talks. But all this is by the by for DMC ...
And so to the concert : to get under the skin and into the spirit of a rocker, singer and leader of a group. How will the experiment be received? It's a beautiful, even exciting idea, but almost absurd to go through with it. For who ? For what ? It's not an art performance. Nor is it a concert. So where lies the art function ? In the concept or in the materiality [songs, group, rehearsals, concert in an art centre etc.] ? How can one define this object, and indeed it's objectives ? Maybe this is where the stakes lie, the loss, a return to anti-art punk, but nonetheless framed in an age, said and re-said without end to be post-modern, post-historic, post, post, post, Post Gods !
The hybrid identity of Post Gods as a work of art feeds directly into DMC's art process : a decendant of conceptual art insufflated with a breath of life, a whistle of romanticism and a whisper of intimity. To play with the clichés of an art, keeping subjectivity, emotion, and real life at a distance, especially when it comes to love. [“ Art is art as art ”, Ad Reinhardt, 1962 ; “ Love is Love as Love ”, David Michael Clarke, 2006]. With Post Gods, he joins in and takes-out, all those artists who have explored the relations between art and rock - Dan Graham, Tony Oursler, Laurence Weiner et al – in a very real and plastic manner. Finally, with Post Gods, DMC envisages rock as a myth, an icon, an instant as a sign, a cliché to activate, but just how far will he go?
So the final touch will be the concert at Wharf, Centre for Contemporary Art for Basse-Normandie, Hérouville St. Clair, a establishment hardly conceived for a concert, highlighting all the ambiguity of the statut of this rock group as a work of art. At this precise moment the artist will go beyond the concept. He will enter into his own representation. He wont just pose an idea, he will incarnate it – an incarnation worthy of the religious approach to rock seen in Rock My Religion by Dan Graham.
Will DMC allow himself to be overtaken by this incarnation of Post Gods ?
Part 2 : 26 May 2007
And so it came to be, Post Gods took to the stage at Wharf, Centre for Contemporary Art for Basse-Normandie. Their first concert. Their first and last, if we are to believe the 'declaration' of this group as a conceptual sculpture. In the same manner as the rehearsal sessions, the concert is simply a productive element of the work, to the servive of the conceptual idea of creating a rock group. But, we'll see ... we just don't know if DMC, the leader of the group and the conceiver of the work, will allow himself to get carried away in the incarnation of the group to the detriment of his idea, and if so, how would this affect the other members of the group and their desire to continue.
The concert is here. The spectators fall into two categories. Either they are blissfully ignorant of DMC's artistic activities, and thus find themselves before a work that they know neither the context, nor the object, apart from the fact that the concert is taking place in a contemporary art centre, a detail that can't be overlooked, more a detail sure to influence one's perception. The other category [to which I belong] already know about the group and it's history, and wait for the concert as a supplementary element of the Post Gods experiment. However this last supposition seems to be contradicted by the event itself. The moment of the concert was precisely that, the moment of a concert : the wait, the excitation, the observation, the listening. A wave of subjectivity, obliterating all objective distance came over the hall, blurring our visionas to the destiny of the group as a conceptual sculpture. And for a moment that even nudged the hypothesis that I had already established in my mind of the concert being the last constitutive element of the art work. Only a moment though, because once the concert was through, it's achievement signified the existance of Post Gods as a work of art.
So what was the concert like ? A scenic composition, a sort of living tableau : DMC, vocals, up front ; behind him, Cdrc Lchrz, drums ; to his left, Sylvain Beorchia, guitar, and finally to his right, Emmanuelle Hubaut, bass. Up on the back wall, slightly to the left, a video animation played with the name of the group : Post Gods, a visual sign conceived by Cdrc Lchrz [crsss]. The letters danced as if they were the fifth member of the group. The six songs followed one after another, the public played the game, they were conquered, they whistled, they clapped this group that seemed to possess a pop zen experimental allure. The drummer improvised, made variations, moved around the stage. The guitarist was focussed in upon himself – he barely moved an inch during the whole concert. The bassist was ready to fly, but held himself back to the rhythm of the music. DMC, the lead-singer, affirmed himself with every track and sublimed his rôle with the cry 'God is Dead'! The end. Clapping. No encore. Differing reactions from the audience : the pop-rock connoisseurs argued over the musical validity, « very interesting ... ». Others talked about the conceptual aspect of the project, and thus ignored the quality of the songs, « we are before a work of art in a centre for contemporary art ». In the days after the concert, comes the distance and the necessary re-contextualisation of the event. Everything here is nothing but a game, representation, composition, « the fruit of a long experiment » to quote the title of a rather cynical work by Max Ernst – and there as welll – a tableau!
With this work, DMC continues art and it's tautological systems – in this case, Post Gods as an object, and it's system of representation. Following on from Joseph Kosuth, who explored the relation an object can have with it's representation in images and words [One and Three Chairs, 1965], DMC poses here the question of the rock group Post Gods. What defines it? How can one identify it? The name of the group, it's image [photo, album cover etc.], all in all, it's representation. So the object and it's representation, the work in it's constitution and representation. But also to be in representation, to give a representation. Thus with this work, DMC brings into question current modes of communication, the artificial that mixes with the real, to the point where the all media [TV, radio, record-industry, internet...] implants itself in our lives, and inevitably creates an endless coming and going between fiction and reality. Representation is a sort of interstice between fiction and reality. Who in their daily lives isn't asked to perform a rôle, to incarnate a rôle, as part of their 'job'? In today's world, surrounded by images, sounds, tv series to which we become addicted, or even the books that nourrish us, at what moment can someone pretend to enter 'veritable' space of his/her own? « We don't see […] “ reality” as it is, but as our languages explain it. And our languages are our medias. Our medias are our metaphors. And our metaphors are the content of our reality. » -1
How can we make sens of things in this representation that vacillates from reality to fiction in the blink of an eyelid, the media as a new space for reality. Another language, another media included in the sphere of Post Gods, it's existence on the site Myspace.com. A few photos, a text, some so called 'friends', this internet page is the only thing that keeps the group 'alive'. One can question the legitimacy of keeping this page going after the concert. It's maintenance surely signifies a displacement of the work into the active field of a rock group, and in this case no longer pose the reflexion of the representation of this object as a sign that was achieved at the moment of the concert. Has the groupe incarnated it's own fiction?
The field of action called Myspace.com, originally destined for musical groups, has itself muted in recent times, become a real crossroads on the internet where many different individuals and activities mix – including visual artists. DMC plays kiss-chase with genres, and left the page www.myspace.com/postgods in a vegetative state, as a hybrid sculpture, breathing some more ambiguity into the very object of Post Gods. Don't loose sight of that which founded the group, not so much a less than fever-pitch musical experiment, but more a game of words, « Post Gods » becoming a rock-group by means of a simple polysemic pirouette.
DMC has placed the group and it's image on a crest, flirted with the marketing techniques of the cultural industry, imposed an ambiguity that pushed things so far that an argument started within the group ... perhaps an inevitability within a rock group! DMC has even moved on to represent Post Gods beyond the concert : as an exhibition in a contemporary art gallery in Edinburgh. Memorabilia of the group, tee-shirts, posters, and pin-badges that, in ripping-off with the parental guidance cinema logo, seemed to warn us of the danger in believing in Post Gods as a real group. In the end the internet site www.postgods.net brings this rather short-lived chapter in the history of rock'n'roll to a close. Apart from the diaspora merchandising objects, the website records the history of the group, the consituant parts of the achieved artwork.
From a simple sign on the side of a building, DMC constructed a group as a sculpture, piece by piece, he added the elements that one finds in most generic groups, maintaining the fragile frontier between art and it's representation. Post Gods reunited the reality of a sculpture of a group with the illusion of an instant that became incarnate ... In that, Post Gods seems more romantic than ever!
Anne Cartel, 11 août 2007.
[1] Neil Postman cité par Anne Sauvageot, Sophie Calle. L’art caméléon, Paris, PUF, 2007, pp. 159-160.