Image and Music

by Gregg Chadwick

In response to Spring for Music's Round Two query in the 2012 Great Blogger

Challenge:

We live in an aggressively visual age; images dominate the popular culture. 
But which art form has the most to say about contemporary culture, and why?

Tokyo Streets
photo by Gregg Chadwick 

The dense visual language of the Tokyo cityscape immediately came to mind when I considered Spring for Music's second query in the 2012 Great Blogger Challenge.

The visual cacophony of signs and images that line the streets of the city's shopping districts provide a visual metaphor for the images that threaten to overload us each day as we turn on our computers and televisions. But do images themselves say more than other art forms about contemporary culture? The uncertainty and ambiguity often found in our 21st century lives calls for a rich cultural exploration that images may only hint at.   

When presented with an image, most people begin a process, which is often involuntary, of decoding. The mystery of the moment is often disregarded as we search for meaning as we engage in a kind of mental translation. Who or what is depicted? Should the viewer smile or cry? Would I like to possess this thing, person, moment? 

Perhaps if we look through a few photographs we can get a sense of  the problem at hand. The photo below is often confusing to individual viewers. What is happening here? Is it a sort of photoshopped collage? Without text or a caption it is difficult to pull meaning from the image.  

Context helps in the understanding of the image. I took the photo at the Ghibli Museum outside Tokyo, where the life and work of the amazing Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki is celebrated. 

It is true that we are bombarded daily by imagery. What is often missed is that this phenomenon is nothing new. For example, Lucas Cranach's copy of Hieronymous Bosch's Altarpiece with the Last Judgement provides a cornucopia of beatific and horrific imagery all at once.

Lucas Cranach

Altarpiece with the Last Judgement 

(copy of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych)

  c.1524

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin 

photo by Gregg Chadwick

A closer look at a detail of Cranach's painting presents symbolic messages that simultaneously dazzle the eye and imply a sonic landscape for the ear.

Lucas Cranach

Altarpiece with the Last Judgement (detail) 

(copy of Hieronymus Bosch's triptych)

  c.1524

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin 

photo by Gregg Chadwick

While images tend to be viewed individually or with a small group, the experience of music may be more communal. Composing is often a solitary process, but performance usually involves a give and take between musician and audience.  

Image and Music in Venice, Italy
photo by Gregg Chadwick

In this communal aspect, music has a lot to say about contemporary culture. 

Music has the ability to move us to a communal expression of hope in the face of trouble and, for at least a moment, a rush of joy. This musical rush is akin to the shared glory that spectators feel as their team triumphs on the sporting field. The philosophers Hubert Dreyfus, from UC Berkeley, and Sean Kelly, from Harvard, speak of this Homeric feeling of wonder and gratitude in their marvelous book, All Things Shining:

'There are moments in sport - either in the playing of them or in the witnessing of them - during which something so overpowering happens that it wells up before you as a palpable presence and carries you along as on a powerful wave. At that moment there is no question of ironic distance from the event. That is the moment when the sacred shines."

Like the fans at a Giants football game, the crowd at a concert also gets swept up in a joyous, sacred expression of shared hopes and dreams that hard times cannot defeat.

U2 has used their music to reflect upon contemporary global events. Drawing on the troubles in Northern Ireland, they addressed the contemporary issues in Iran. Audiences responded.

U2 performing Sunday Bloody Sunday during their 360 degrees world tour at the Rose Bowl on October 25th, 2009.

As the song Sunday Bloody Sunday opens, U2 scrolls the lyrics from the Rumi poem Azadi. The word Azadi itself simply means Freedom. U2 supported Artists 4 Freedom by using the Rumi poem which provides the lyrics to Dj Spooky and Sussan Deyhim's track, Azadi (The New Complexity). U2's multimedia screens mash together the lyrics to Azadi along with photos of the protestors in Iran and artworks by Shirin Neshat. I too was inspired and painted Neda the day after her murder in Iran.

Gregg Chadwick
The Call - ندا -Neda
36"x48" oil on linen 2009

Bruce Springsteen's most recent album Wrecking Ball is a scathing indictment of the current state of American society. This album weaves together history, politics, and contemporary societal issues to create a powerful musical expression that challenges and then ultimately unites and ignites his audience. The powerful songs on this album have inspired me in relation to image and meaning.

Gregg Chadwick
Call and Echo
24"x18" oil on linen 2011 

Living Colour's version of Springsteen's American Skin (41 Shots) is a heartbreaking song that honors the senseless death of Amadou Diallo at the hands of the NYPD as he reached for his wallet in an attempt to placate a group of undercover cop's demands. More than once, because of this event, I have told my son, "If an officer stops you - Promise me, you always be polite. And that you'll never. never run away. Promise that you'll always keep your hands in sight."

The death of Trayvon Martin has obviously weighed on Bruce Springsteen and his audiences this past week in Tampa, Boston, and Philadelphia. During three consecutive shows, the band played American Skin (41 Shots) and Springsteen released the professionally shot video on his website along with the lyrics to the song. On Wednesday night in Philadelphia, Springsteen dedicated the song with the words, "This is for Trayvon."

Clearly, music creates a dynamic interaction with a live audience that speaks to and of contemporary culture in powerful and life affirming ways.

City of Dreams

by Gregg Chadwick

In response to Spring for Music's query:

New York has long been considered the cultural capital of America. 

Is it still? If not, where?

Yeah, I'm out that Brooklyn
Now I'm down in Tribeca
Right next to De Niro
But I’ll be hood forever
I’m the new Sinatra
And since I made it here
I can make it anywhere
Yeah, they love me everywhere

- from Empire State of Mind - recorded by Jay Z and Alicia Keys

 Lyrics by Angela Hunte and Jane't "Jnay" Sewell-Ulepic

Vermeer in New York
Metropolitan Museum, New York
photo by Gregg Chadwick

 Like Florence in the 15th century, Amsterdam in the 17th century and Paris in the 19th century - post World War II  New York City seemed to embody the dreams and cultural aspirations of the age. Does New York still claim that distinction? And does it matter?

J.F. Kennedy Jr. would often say that New York City was a verb - not a noun. In that sense the city remains a global source of action and inspiration rather than a place to physically aspire to. In our floating 21st century world, communication via Skype, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr connects us almost instantaneously.  Translations via Google allow us to speak across borders. And in an age of Wikileaks, international secrets are revealed to an audience of millions with the flick of a key. Family, pilgrimage and career sends many on journeys crisscrossing the globe. 

Conductor Gustavo Dudamel
photo courtesy Opera Chic, Milano 

For me, the conductor Gustavo Dudamel perfectly embodies our new reality. By serving as Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, Dudamel's passionate music and teaching impacts three continents simultaneously. 


Dudamel's artistic path seems to make the question, "Is New York the cultural capital of America?" superfluous while at the same time pointing out the inherent flaw in the question itself. Of course America refers not just to the United States but to the connected countries of North, Central and and South America. 

Gregg Chadwick
Brecht's Song
30"x22" monotype on paper 2011

There is no one cultural center in the Americas. But there is the city of dreams that drew Federico Garcia Lorca to study and write Poet in New York at Columbia, Diego Rivera to paint Man at the Crossroads at Rockefeller Center, Patti Smith to write and sing and fall in love and life with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe at the Chelsea Hotel. This city of dreams is not the clean and tidy Giuliani/Bloomberg New York that suggests a Big Apple theme park but instead the New York City of cultural myth and memory.

Students and Pollock
Metropolitan Museum, New York
photo by Gregg Chadwick

Like Smith and Mapplethorpe, I jumpstarted my life with the inspiration of New York City. For many years, like a talisman, planted flag, or a beacon, a massive painting from my graduate exhibition at NYU hung in the front window of a brownstone on Washington Square. Over the years, each time I visited the Village, I would return to see if my painting still hung on the square. If it did, I knew a physical part of me remained in New York and that my dream still lived. 

Metropolitan Museum, New York
photo by Gregg Chadwick

In the past few years like Gustavo Dudamel, I've carried my cultural capital with me as I traveled, studied, created and exhibited in Los Angeles, Tokyo, and the Netherlands.

In this transient, changing, yet ever connected world, I came face to face with humanity's fragility and celebrated its tensile strength.

The pulse, blur and vibrancy of our human experience reveals vital traces of who we are in a time that is simultaneously past and present, here and there, personal and global. Through our shared cultural exploits we learn that perhaps the relevant question is not where is the capital, but instead how do I create my own?

Clouds Over Manhattan
photo by Gregg Chadwick