(visual) artists making music

Goldie, most definitely. A very interesting graff artist from what I work I've seen and he was doing that years before he even started working with reinforced etc.

He has spoken about how he approaches music making like he approached his art, 'painting with sound' or something along those lines. Should be enough interviews floating around on the web to give you an idea about this.

Matt Brinkman is a comic artist who is also involved in musical projects such as Mindflayer (w/ a member of Lightning Bolt) and Forcefield, who performed at the Whitney Biennial in 2002.

Throbbing Gristle (or TG's precursor, Coum Transmissions) is probably a good example of what you're looking for as well.

simon silverdollar said:

i particularly want to find out about comic book artists making music, although i'm not sure why. it just seems right...

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daniel johnston immediately springs to mind.

ryoji ikeda, video at there..
lemon jelly concept and art
meam on skam (check the bola artwork )
kid acne - graff artist
massive attack mushroom
boards of canada
alan oldham http://www.alanoldham.com/
jarvis cocker
russell haswell

ascoltare said:

daniel johnston immediately springs to mind.

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Yes, exactly. There is a documentary about him called "The Devil and Daniel Johnston" that is well worth watching, its a moving film. Johnston's work was featured in this year's Whitney Biennial - there was a whole wall devoted to him, I noticed.

Also at this year's Biennial there was an installation by Jim O'Rourke, though that's going the other way around, from musician to visual artist. Would guess that there are innumerable examples of that.

As is well known, Don Van Vliet gave up Captian Beefheart to focus on visual art - though perhaps he considered himself an artist all along? Dunno. Kim Gordon was an artist before becoming a musician, and she still exhibits.

Rick Froberg, singer and guitarist for now deceased San Diego giants Drive Like Jehu, Hot Snakes, and Pitchfork, considers himself a visual artist first and musician second, I believe.

Japanese artist Cornelius is also a fashion designer, for what it's worth, though he was already a well known guitarist in Japan while still in high school. So probably not an example for you.

Philip Glass, when he was just an unknown guy working in NYC, was an assistant to sculptor Richard Serra, which is not widely known but explains why they collaborate now. Taylor Dupree and some of the people behind 12K and Line records are pretty much devoted to pursuing similar conceptions of design, visual art, and music - could be worth checking; they definitely have an identifiable aesthetic (are any of the raster-noton people visual artists? what about the people on Touch? etc). Ryoji Ikeda's C4I, which I had the pleasure of seeing two years ago in NYC, is a stunning piece of video, computer, and sound art. He's another one to check, if you are interested in people who apply similar aesthetic conceptions across different media.

No Wave is full of examples. Vincent Gallo. Walter Stedding. Lydia Lunch. All considered themselves artists and musicians. Jim Jarmusch was a musician as well as a filmmaker, though again that's the other way around, musician>artist. Jarmusch's early films are filled with artists from the early 80s nyc music scene (e.g., John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards, Richard Edson, who was Sonic Youth's first drummer, etc). DNA's organist Robin Crutchfield was a performance artist. Mars, one of the best no wave bands, consisted of two painters, Sumner Crane and Nancy Arlen, and two actors, China Burg and Mark Cunningham.

Not sure if any of this will help but it's something, perhaps. Massive topic, and an interesting one.

steve roden shows regularly. makes these system based (atleast looks like) modular paintings and sculptures. some of it really nice.

pan sonic boys do installations and vids... coolest live visual I've ever seen was one of their shows - large black cube projected on screen - distorts with sound - highs, mids, and lows all have distinctive visual patterns. WICKED.

more later...

the only one that springs to mind right now is rob mazurek from the chicago underground duo. he does the abstract expressionist-ish paintings that are on the covers of their albums. this is his website - the navigation is dumb but just click on the bands of colour.

oh and rammellzee who's worked with basquiat and then gone on to do his whole gothic futurist thing. there was a good wire interview with him a year or two ago by greg tate. polystyle desu could give you more details on him.

@ Tate - I didn't know that about Rick Froberg. Did he do the Jehu covers?

Christian Marclay is another one who does both sound art and visual art. He's primarily known in music circles for turntablism, but this is somewhat deceptive, as he is highly active in the visual art world as well.

Marclay reminds me of Jonah Bokaer, a young ballet dancer (the youngest ever in Merce Cunningham's dance company) who composes multimedia pieces combining modern dance, sound art, video technology, and digital representations of the human body. In particular, Bokaer uses "motion-capture" technology, which is software used for modeling human movements (in this case modern dance movements), by way of tens of nodes that are connected to the body in a studio and later modelled visually in order to generate new movements, which are then recomposed and attempted by the dancers.

Bokaer writes music for the pieces too, which is why I mention him, and, in the case of the work I saw this summer, he hires a group of classically trained avant singers to provide acapella music while they, the singers, also dance on the stage during the performance. Stunning. Definitely a case of an artist applying his aesthetic conceptions to the production of music. Marclay let Bokaer use one of his music pieces and cut it up as much as he liked, fwiw. (Pokinatcha, a fellow dissensian, interviewed Bokaer this summer and can probably say a lot more about this stuff than me.)

@ autonomic: yep, Froberg did the covers for Jehu and for the Hot Snakes (the earliest Froberg-Reis band, Pitchfork, I only have on cassette tape lol, so I'm not sure about those covers).

So much comes to mind on this topic! Was just thinking about some of the nyc art stars of the 1980s. Robert Longo, a very successful painter who also dabbled in music videos and film, was part of the no wave/nyc thing in the late 1970s. He had a band, if I remember correctly (can't remember the name), and I know that he used to play with Rhys Chatham. This was quite a bit before he became a successful visual artist

Julian Schnabel, another successful painter during the 1980s painting boom, made a record on Island in the mid-1990s, though I didn't hear it and have no idea what it sounded like. Would be curious to know, however. Confucius probably knows more about this stuff than I do. (Btw, Confucius, while we are on the subject of boundary crossings, did you ever pick up the album on sirr devoted to Blanchot's writings?) And as Autonomic mentioned above, Basquiat played in a band.

Shinro Ohtake

Laurie Anderson
Req (did a lot of covers for Mo Wax)

3d (massive attack)
rammellzee

Sonic Youth?

An example of someone going the other way - Woebot did that piece about Dave Nodz and his Sub Base artwork. He ended up making music as Noise of Art (though not a lot of it).

Part2ism ?

3 off the top...

Taylor Duepree (12k) graphic design/photography

Dan Abrams (Shuttle 358) product design

Chuck D studied graphic design - he did the PE logo IIRC

Jason Forrest/Donna Summer, the breakcore producer, running cockrockdisco records. He was originally a visual artist.

the lead singer of my chemical romance did comic books and maybe even worked at the cartoon netwrok for a while.

bleep said:

Dan Abrams (Shuttle 358) product design

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last I spoke with him his day job is 3-D animation and effects for the movies