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BRIAN WILSON: music, but more abstract works
AN ART EXHIBITION that echo his shift into
abstract psychedelia (which
Where better for an exhibition might explain Bridget Riley’s
consecrated to Brian Wilson, presence), and others that
maverick songwriting genius analogise the psychological
of the Beach Boys, than a fallout and druggy lost
gallery like Tate St Ives, years after his extended
overlooking the rolling surf? failure to complete his
When better than summer? Aside proposed masterwork, Smile.
from that, If Everybody Had
an Ocean: Brian Wilson: An So expect West Coast finish-
Art Exhibition, which opens fetish artists like Billy Al
at the end of May, is likely Bengston and John McCracken
to resist most of the clichés here, but also darker and
applicable to Wilson’s life more oblique stylings by the
and work. An expansion of likes of Jim Shaw and Raymond
curator Alex Farquharson’s Pettibon, Brian Calvin and
Still from El Topo, 1970, 124 min, starring Alejandro intriguing exhibition-in-a- Ed Ruscha. Add in works by a
Jodorowsky (pictured). Courtesy Tartan Video. book, Brian Wilson: An Art number of non-Californian wild
Book (2005) – which featured cards and unlikely fans, from
JUJU MAN: ALEJANDRO essayistic ruminations on Liam Gillick to Isa Genzken
JODOROWSKY Wilson by artists and writers, and Roger Hiorns, and the
and reproduced artworks with potentially berserk spectacle
The cult director turned graphic novelist various degrees of connection of a catalogue interview
Alejandro Jodorowsky was a midnight- to the author of Surfin’ USA with Wilson by Hans Ulrich
movie favourite in the 1970s, (1963) – this exhibition Obrist, and visitors to St
intoxicating young cineaste hipsters features some 31 artists’ Ives this summer look likely
with hallucinogenic offerings like Fando work. The contingent of to be picking up, if not
y Lis (1968), El Topo (1970) and The Holy Californian practitioners necessarily continuously good
Mountain (1973), three films finally is predictably strong. vibrations, at least some kind
being released on DVD in the UK this But Farquharson triangulates of excitations. Martin Herbert
month. John and Yoko entirely financed Wilson’s work thematically,
The Holy Mountain, and Jodorowsky’s finding not only artworks IF EVERYBODY HAD AN
moviemaking is certainly indelibly bound that reflect the sun-kissed OCEAN: BRIAN WILSON:
to their era. Yet it operates far, far utopia proposed by his early AN ART EXHIBITION, 26 MAY – 23 SEPTEMBER,
beyond the hippy clichés now ascribed TATE ST IVES.
to that time. Mythic images and ideas WWW.TATE.ORG.UK
were conjured up by the director to
induce mind expansion, and thus spiritual
revolution and enlightenment, and are at
their most baroque in The Holy Mountain.
These include a Christ figure having his
anus lavishly soaped by a Cleopatra-esque
high priestess, a white-suited magus
attended by regal goats and a factory for
creating a new form of art every week,
such as bottom paintings. For Jodorowsky,
rock music, porn and comic books were as
valid as high-art Surrealism, and his
films mix the prurient with the profound.
Before turning to filmmaking he had been
an active figure in the 1960s artworld,
founding the Panic Movement (something of
a private joke) and directing happenings,
one of which reportedly involved topless
women, the beheading of geese, the
symbolic castration of a rabbi and a
chicken nailed to a phallic cross: a
spectacle of mystical semantics much like
the action in his movies. Jodorowsky may breglass and plywood, 234 x 36 x 18 cm.
never have reached the wider audience
that peers Godard or Buñuel achieved, but
he certainly has the market for T-shirt
slogans wrapped up. ‘I ask of cinema what
most North Americans ask of psychedelic , 2002, resin, fi
drugs,’ he has declared. We couldn’t put
it better. Skye Sherwin Dream
ALL TITLES RELEASED 14 MAY
WWW.TARTANVIDEO.COM
ARTREVIEW three.linsix.lin John McCracken, © the artist. Courtesy Nicholas Logsdail/Lisson Gallery, London
p 31-40 Dispatches AR May07.indd36 36 30/3/07 01:06:55
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