arChiteCture, DISPATCHES art, musiC, arChiteCture, Film, shoppinG, news and thinGs to make and do… art, musiC, arChiteCture, Film, shoppinG, news and thinGs to make and do…
under the inFluenCe
GeorGe Condo on traditional
musiCal instruments
portrait sara Fuller
I want to talk about musIc because two days ago i
went to see Jordi savall, a musician who, along with
hopkinson smith, formed the hespèrion group: they
are the two leading proponents of baroque music, who
get something so new out of bach and other
eighteenth-century composers, such as marin marais
and Charles mouton. as a painter, it came into focus
for me as a topic of discussion i’m interested in.
during the 1930s, all music from the seventeenth and
eighteenth century was played on modern instruments.
by the mid-twentieth century you could say most of
the recordings were done this way, meaning you would
only hear bach played on the piano, not the
harpsichord, and you would hear things that were
written for a string consort of viols played with
violins and cellos. parallel to this you have a use
of ‘modern instruments’ in painting, exemplified by
Jackson pollock, who uses drips and enamel, and the
destruction of the figurative, old master paintings
that from Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) evolved
into a radical use of materials. around 1950 or so
you have a John Cage/robert rauschenberg parallel,
and you have the electronic music of mario
davidovsky developing to the point where Jimi
hendrix plays The Star Spangled Banner (1968) on the
electric guitar, which runs parallel to the movement
of pop art. parallel to pop, you also have musicians
starting to go back and use the original instruments
to create incredible recordings of bach’s lute
suites on the baroque lute, and you have recordings
of baroque and renaissance music being played on the
harpsichord and viola da gamba, yet something
incredibly modern is being drawn by the use of older
instruments, thereby restoring the interest in music
pre-Cage, on levels that were never really felt
before. hearing the sound of that music for the
first time is like looking at the pure vision of a
piero della Francesca painting.
For myself, in the early 1980s i started to paint
using traditional methods, using oil paints and
consciously simulating old masters. i thought this
would be a change from keith haring and Julian
schnabel, who were using modern instruments (felt-
tip markers, spray paint, broken plates), as it
were, to create modern art. my paintings looked
extremely old, yet there was something new about it.
i called it artificial realism, because i felt you
needed traditional methods to represent
artificiality and today’s world. let’s not call it
modern, and i hate the word ‘contemporary’; let’s
say there is something relevant or necessary in
painting for artists who have started to paint this
way. we started to see it evolve in the paintings
of younger artists in the 1990s whose work i like,
such as Glenn brown and martin eder, as well as in a
number of younger painters like lisa Yuskavage or
John Currin, who have very traditional ways of
painting, and it’s like they’re getting something
GeorGe Condo is an artist livinG and workinG
modern out of ancient instruments. i think there is
in new York. in the past Year he has had solo
an interesting parallel with those musicians using
exhibitions at simon lee GallerY, london, and
traditional instruments, going back in time and
Galerie andrea CaratsCh, ZuriCh coming up with something new.
ArTrEvIEw 28
Dispatches_Condo.indd 28 27/11/07 12:01:16
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