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reviews BRIAN KENNON
BriAn Kennon:
‘thoughtless…’
(i’m with you in
rocKlAnd)
TRUDI, LOs ANgELEs
30 NOvEm BER – 5 JANUARy
‘Thoughtless… (I’m with You in
Rockland), 2007 (installation view).
Courtesy TRUDI, Los Angeles
‘Refuse’, as noun and verb, rocks out in Brian Kennon’s show closing the consciousness. Politics is located in visual representations of the aural and a
20-month run of TRUDI, the Chinatown display-window gallery project of synaesthetic immersion in noise.
artist Matthew Chambers. Working with printed images and text, Kennon’s Man Is the Bastard’s proclaimed ‘power violence’ music genre and
art repurposes and combines imagery appropriated from cultural sources the anti-authoritarian, anarchistic politics delivered by the lyrics give an
such as recent art history (Ad Reinhardt, Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley and indication of the album’s intended tenor of volatility. Cited in full, the last
Richard Hawkins) and rock ephemera and lyrics. Kennon, who also produces track, Moloch, is a verbatim adaptation of part two of Allen Ginsberg’s
artists’ books under the imprint of 2nd Cannons Publications, exhibits in chilling poem Howl (1956). Ginsberg haunts the entire show: his refrain in
the printed medium of posters and books. His exhibition, ‘Thoughtless…’ Part III of Howl – ‘I’m with you in Rockland’ – is recontextualised from its
(I’m With You in Rockland), displays a grid of 12 black-and-white printed original reference to a New York insane asylum to an evocation of rock
posters laid out in three rows, comprising mainly images and text lifted and counterculture. Drawing on his longstanding engagement with rock music,
enlarged from Man Is the Bastard’s Thoughtless… (1996) album art and Kennon roots himself in a fan’s commitment to tracking a vernacular of
lyrics. With a collagist sensibility, the arrangement of posters assembles popular dissent in the graphic aesthetics, symbolism and rhetoric of rock
and layers gripping visions of social unrest and aggression culled from rock ’n’ roll’s politics of protest, and to the critical implications of graphic design,
’n’ roll, beat poetry and the history of American counterculture. typeface, font and layout.
The sung voice, the rock voice and the poet’s lyrical voice are The political idealism presented here is born out of outrage and
represented by pictures of Johnny Cash, Black Flag and Bob Dylan. Neil voiced through negative affirmation: the paradox of life-affirming morality
Young’s voice is invoked in the anthem ‘Hey Hey, My My Rock and Roll paired with death imagery, which characterises a spirit of revolt. Purely
Will Never Die’, printed over the photo of a beaten and bloody ‘freedom relational, negation is the oppositional strategy which advocates the
rider’ whose commitment to Civil Rights activism marks him as an early possibility of a better human condition. Kennon’s cover version of rock’s
protagonist in the developing social protest movements of that era. This song of disaffected rage intends to disrupt the repressive and phoney
show figures Kennon as a listening instrument tuning into oceans of static optimism of capitalism’s historically cynical enterprise.
and volumes of dissonance, out of which emerges the contours of political Eli Langer & Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
123 Artreview
FEB_REVIEWS.indd 123 2/1/08 13:53:56
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