This week in art history: Kraftwerk — Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
For the second entry of ‘This week in art history’, I look to a 2012 exhibition celebrating the electronica pioneers Kraftwerk. Click here for the series’ first entry on 2007’s ‘WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution’.
In 2012, Kraftwerk — Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 ran at MoMA in New York from April 10th to 17th. On each consecutive night, a complete studio album was performed by the group in the order of its original release, from 1974's seminal Autobahn all the way to 2003’s Tour de France, alongside 3D visualisations and unique musical compositions.
Although Kraftwerk had previously appeared in art settings —for example, the Venice Biennale in 2005 and Munich’s Lenbachhaus Kunstbau in 2011 — MoMA’s retrospective attempted to go beyond these concert-style stagings and elevate the entirety of the group’s output, aesthetics and live experience— including the members themselves — as a “total work of art”.
This might sound a tad pretentious. If any musical act is worth such treatment though, Kraftwerk is it; they’ve had an inseparable, symbiotic relationship with art since their inception.
Man, machine and the art in between
The group was formed in Düsseldorf in 1970, within the electric atmosphere of the ‘krautrock’ scene and legacy of Bauhaus. A period of avante-garde experimentation drove their first three albums (Kraftwerk, Kraftwerk 2 and Ralf und Florian), which then gave way to a greater pop sensibility with Autobahn. Yet even at their most catchy and commercially successful, Kraftwerk remained perpetual innovators when it came to fusing technology with art.
This fascination is of course clear in the lyrics and concepts of their songs (track titles include The Man-Machine, The Robots and Computer World) and otherworldly, self-designed electronica equipment, but it also defined the group’s visual identity. For example, Kraftwerk’s album artwork embraced the Constructivist and Suprematist movements of the 1920s and 30s, and artists such as Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky.
Beyond the eye-catching, graphic style, it’s easy to understand Kraftwerk’s draw towards these movements, and Constructivism in particular: this repositions art as an act of ‘construction’, and is most effective when it serves a material, utilitarian and socially organizing purpose — exactly like, say, the high-speed autobahn of their eponymous title track.
So in this sense, Kraftwerk gave ‘sonic’ life to an art movement previously expressed in largely conceptual and visual terms (and should remove any doubt about the legitimacy of having an art retrospective).
The art-music symbiosis
Kraftwerk — Retrospective 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 begs the question of why there are so few examples of exhibitions of musicians’ output in art galleries.
I think the main reason is that this unique straddling of music and art requires a sustained pioneering spirit, one resulting in works of such startling novelty, quality and longevity that the impact is felt throughout culture; a rare occurrence. Although many musicians have created incredible videos and album artwork, the industry is still a predominantly commercial — and therefore often limiting — enterprise. The musical content itself remains comparatively ‘by the numbers’.
The exceptions are a further case in point: David Bowie is opened at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in 2013 (and is currently being repeated at the Brooklyn Museum), and Björk also had a retrospective at MoMA in 2015. Both of these artists consistently pushed the boundaries across all modes of their expression: music, aesthetics, performance and even lifestyle (tellingly, both have also cited Kraftwerk as a major influence).
It’s intriguing to wonder what contemporary and recent musical acts might be worthy of an art retrospective in future; my money is on Beyoncé, Jay-Z and Grimes.
What do you think?
