Two works concerned with time travel both making their debut here are Sean Lynch’s DeLorean Progress Report (2010), and Jeremy Millar’s The Man who Looked Back (2010). Lynch’s project traces the DeLorean car to the bottom of the Irish Sea, combining photographs of the rusty material on the sea bed with hand pressed stainless steel models of the DeLorean roof and wing panels. These models are instantly recognisable as an icon of time travel from the 1980s, made famous by Spielberg’s Back to the Future trilogy. Millar’s archival work The Man Who Looked Back continues the artist’s preoccupation with German art historian Aby Warburg. Photographic reproductions of images taken from art history (all relating to the myth of Orpheus, for whom ‘looking back’ had tragic consequences) are posted onto hessian covered free-standing boards, giving the project the aged look of an historical museum display. Among these older images are a number of stills taken from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), one of the most convincing expressions of time-travel in film.

 
As Starling anticipates CAC’s future programme with works by Lynch and Millar, Graham Gussin’s Fall (7200-1) (1998) exploits an agitated sense of expectation concerning a future event. Fall dominates the main gallery space and consists of a large projection of a lake coupled with a hard drive and computer that houses generating software randomly triggering an event in which we see something fall out of the sky, dramatically disturbing the surface of the lake. This event occurs so infrequently that the work becomes not so much about the disturbance but about the possibility of witnessing it, the state of anticipation holding the viewer in front of the tranquil scene for long periods of time, often with no reward.
 
Starling’s show works coherently on many levels, engaging the viewer’s collective and social memory whilst also engaging with the memories and objects that haunt CAC’s history. Starling himself is one such ghostly figure, now returning to the centre after a residency in 1999 and a solo show in 2000. For his solo show Starling had installed a roughly-built stove entitled Burn-Time in Gallery 3. When CAC was refurbished soon after, the architects, without realising the stove to be a temporary edition, included it in their plans. Starling’s own work is now an integral part of CAC’s structure, a strange coincidence because his great-great-uncle was the architect of the original building. Starling’s project is inspired by this meeting across time, between the architect who designed the Centre’s outer space and his future nephew, who time and again has transformed its inner space.
 
 
Simon Starling: Never the Same River was on view 16 December 2010 – 20 February 2011.

Rock’s creed is fun. Fun forms the basis of its apocalyptic protest.
Dan Graham, Rock My Religion

Walking up the stairs of Cork’s architecturally stunning but certainly not rock and roll Lewis Glucksman Gallery, you are met by Marc Bijl’s Teenage Kicks (2003), a gloriously aestheticised drum kit that is adorned with deep red and black artificial roses, candle light bulbs surrounded by dripped wax, a plaster cast skull, and spray painted text saying ‘Live Fast Die Young’ spewed onto the wall behind it. This play with the visual clichés of rock music provides the perfect frame to this extensive consideration of the relationship between the visual arts and pop music. The artists whose work is represented in the Mixtapes exhibition explore the relationship of pop music to its fans not by examining the music, but instead by exploring the varied accessories and associations that surround that spectacular industry. Music is at best a sideline, to paraphrase Matt Packer, the co-curator of the show, for an exhibition about music; it’s quite a quiet experience.
 

There are various strands that run throughout the exhibition. Certain artists included explore the sociocultural aspects of pop music’s relationship to society. Dan Graham’s video essay Rock My Religion (1982-4) explores the spiritual connections between the early use of music by religious groups, most notably the Shakers, and the later explosion of the rock, hippy and punk music scenes. The moment where footage of religious frenzy is combined with Sonic Youth’s Shaking Hell creates a persuasive image of a spiritual experience through music. Alejandro Cesarco’s The Ramones (an autobiography) (2008) consists of a black background with the titles of every Ramones song that begins with the word ‘I’ printed on it in white. The piece creates an odd conversation with the viewer; the repetition of the word ‘you’ making the listener-turned-viewer into a confidant, the object of both affection and repulsion. In focusing attention on the turgid phrases that are used in naming songs, Cesarco highlights the overwrought emotions that are so often assumed by the rock industry. Mika Tajima/ New Human’s 2008 collaboration, Holding Your Breath (Taking the Long Way), references Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil by using a similar recording studio environment in which performers Tajima, C. Spencer Yeh, and Vito Acconci improvise a distorted and affecting soundscape. This video serves as a sort of hybrid music video, both a consideration of how the music is viewed and as documentation of an original performance. It raises questions about the relationship between performance and documentation, particularly through the direct reference to the Rolling Stones in the context of the mass media and the glorification of music and musicians.

 
This exploration of the way in which music is venerated is another theme that runs throughout the exhibition. Bettina Pouttschi’s Fans (2002) examines the collective experience of the ‘event’ of pop music, with faceless fans gathering in anticipation of a Robbie Williams concert, football style shirts showing their support for just another spectacle. Anne Collier’s Anything You Want (Black) (2006) and Crying (2005) encourage sustained looking at the visual adornment of music, the close-up images of a tearful eye in the former and a beautiful tear-stained face in the latter are both visually arresting and ostentatious. Fergus Feehily’s Lilac (for Grant Hart) and Lilac #2 (both 2007) are a more personal take on fandom that represents a third thread in the exhibition. His carefully paper-wrapped Hüsker Dü album covers are illustrated with delicate flowers and then carefully encased in glass and wood, changing them from mass cultural items into precious objects reflecting their importance to the dedicated fan. However, it is perhaps David Lamelas’s Rock Star (character appropriation) series that informs most compellingly on this exhibition. The photographs comprising the first part, created in 1974 and shown on the lower floor of the gallery, were shot in black and white; light, movement and pose all reflecting the image of a genuine rock star in concert, implying virility, excitement and passion. The second series on the upper floor from 2008 were shot in colour; instead of the young, virile poses of the first set of photographs, they show an aging rocker who has slipped into cliché, no longer idiolized, but instead outmoded and ridiculous.
 
It is the absence of the presentness of music that figures most strongly in this exhibition. Despite the distinctive approaches taken by the artists to representing and responding to the world of pop music, they are linked by a sense of failure: the vibrancy of the pop scenes that they attempt to pin down is transient, and the objects that endeavour to preserve it sadly echo this loss. Viewing Mixtapes is both an entertaining and a pensive experience, the stillness of the objects and the gallery never match the vibrancy of the subject that they are exploring. Most prominent is the mismatch between the sought after spiritual experience that Graham describes and the attempt to control, document and represent it; the impossibility of adequate response to something felt so deeply by its fans is made sorely apparent. The exhibition questions both the way in which we are asked to exalt popular music and the hyperbolic claims that are made for the industry. The quietness of the exhibition, therefore, is poignant and apt; what we are examining here is not music, but instead our inevitable separation from the apocalyptic fun that Graham describes.
 
 
Mixtapes was on view at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, 8 June-24 October 2010.