For Those About to Rock

Who likes to sit unaccompanied in the pub? And why should making art on one's own be more fun than a joyful gathering? This exhibition shows what is usually sidelined in the art world, namely the results of artistic collaborations: In For Those About to Rock, friendships, dialogues, differences and segments of mutual interests are more important than autonomous, individual or in some other way misunderstood subjectivity.

"All imagination is collective imagination", as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari noted in their Anti-Oedipus in 1972. Dave Allen, Douglas Gordon, Jonathan Monk and Ross Sinclair in their collaborations do justice to this circumstance in a dual way, firstly by relinquishing their auctorial autonomy in a process of creative togetherness in favourof a "multiple authorship", and secondly by almost always harking back in their work to found and previously shaped material - material such as film or music into which society's yearnings and emotions have already been inscribed. In this way collaborations take place here, which are marked, as it were, by a concentration of the "collective imagination" at the end of the twentieth century.

"Everyone who's played in a band (…) knows what I'm talking about. You keep jamming around some riff or song, and suddenly something indescribable and magical happens. Everything connects, it turns into something more than the sum of its parts." This is how Ross Sinclair describes his emotions about playing in a rock and roll band. It is precisely this feeling, this element of becoming more than the sum of its parts, which accounts for the fascination of the collaborations on display in For Those About to Rock. There is, for example, the nine-minute-long video film Stooges Burn-Out of 1996, which shows Gordon's interest in time, Monk's "constitutive biographical" approach and Allen's dedication to “learning” about music. In Stooges Burn-Out a particular riff by the Stooges, a rock band that was important to all three of the artists, was repeated in close-up throughout the film. Stuck to the head of the electric guitar, meanwhile, a slowly smouldering cigarette was burning away, in the usual fashion, during a solo, so quoting a visual code of rock history.

And at the same time, many other things happened, like the magic of a successfully accomplished work of art asserting itself, which curiously - in the positive sense of the word - would achieve far-ranging popularity just a few months later, in an almost identical commercial for a cigarette brand- which was, however, probably not "inspired" by it. For, to re-state our introductory remark, "all imagination is collective imagination". > Raimar Stange