The story behind Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix is a story of friendships. Born last spring, the project dates back to a pivotal meeting between singer and bassist Kim Gordon and independent curator Roland Groenenboom in 1995, when the two collaborate on traveling exhibition Kim’s Bedroom. Roland Groenenboom becomes better acquainted with the group over the years and increasingly interested in its interdisciplinary activities. Soon enough, an idea begins to take shape, one for an exhibition exploring Sonic Youth’s relationships with a constellation of artists, filmmakers and performers.

Kicking off at the LiFE in Saint-Nazaire (FR), a WWII-submarine-base- turned-contemporary-arts-space, Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix is the fruit of a one year collaboration between Sonic Youth, Roland Groenenboom, Christophe Wavelet (the LiFE’s artistic director) and Corinne Diserens (director of the Museïon de Bolzano, IT). Multimedia documentation of the group’s musical career features prominently among the selected works, but it less the central focus of the show than its uniting thread. Alongside music videos, concert posters, original album artwork and the musicians’ own world-weary guitars, the spectator discovers traces of a second, parallel current in the group’s activity ; for a group that counts 3 visual artists and one professional critic and curator (Kim Gordon) among its constituents, 28 years of music also means 28 years of tireless artistic production, collaboration and discovery.

“Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix” returns to the old in search of the new.

For Sonic Youth fans privy to the band’s extra-musical activities, the imperative for such an exhibition would seem to be a no-brainer. But why now, a whopping 27 years into the group’s career ? For Roland Groenenboom, this question is best directed at the contemporary art world, chronically cold-footed whenever popular and alternative culture comes knocking at its door. For the visitor exploring the 1600 square meters of the exhibition, another response comes to mind : 30 years deep into their career, the members of Sonic Youth are finally in a position to look back over their past without wallowing in it. With characteristic punk defiance, Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix overturns its own role as a retrospective. The selection and arrangement of works aim first and foremost to set them into dialogue, to enable us to go hunting for fresh meanings in a cultural universe seen anew. That our path through the exhibition ends with Kim Gordon and Jutta Koether’s inside-out karaoke room—perhaps the perfect expression of the DIY attitude—is revealing ; Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix returns to the old in search of the new.

A history of popular and alternative culture

Entering the exhibition, the visitor confronts a carpet of 33 1/3 vinyl records, each scrupulously removed from its sleeve as though to maximize the possibility of a fatal encounter between unscratched vinyl and shoe sole. Vinyl-collector or no, the prospect of traversing the 5,000 vinyl LPs of Christian Marclay’s Untitled 1987 installation is enough to set our teeth on edge. How do we respond to an exhibition that physically constrains us to trample all over our musical idols ? Marclay’s installation transforms our most cherished records into what they really are : overpriced, mass-produced plastic discs, manufactured by record companies who profit from the illusion that these objects will somehow bring us closer to the men and woman on their sleeves. In its union of music and visual art, Marclay’s installation sets the tone for a show that attempts to carve out a kind of second history of contemporary culture, an alternative to the “official” story recounted by record company sales statistics, museum catalogues and high school art history textbooks. If we can expect to glean any real history lesson from Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix, it is one that, figuratively speaking, would seem to elaborate itself beneath the towering pile of old LPs that clutters our cultural consciousness.

“Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix” presents a distinctly non-hierarchical approach to the curatorial art.

Anti-didactic, Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix leaves a good deal of this story’s reconstruction up its visitors. Like Sonic Youth’s music itself, the show’s organization contrasts structure and anarchy, harmony and dissonance. The exhibition is divided into a central section (documentation of the group’s musical career) and six satellites, each representing a chapter in Sonic Youth’s career : the 1980s New York art scene, life “on the road” in suburban and rural America, Los Angeles and the West Coast, the group’s travels abroad, music and live performance. Ultimately, this schema exists only to the extent that the spectator chooses to look for it. The show’s ostensible organization functions less as a means of structuring our itinerary through the space than as a means of drawing attention to the affinities linking one work to the next.

It is not difficult to get lost in Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix. The angling of the walls quickly robs us of our sense of direction, and the spatial arrangement of the artworks makes it nearly impossible to observe any single work in isolation. In this way, Vito Acconci’s Conversions might find itself in the same field of vision as an offset by Jenny Holtzer, photographs by Patti Smith within eye-shot of poems by Allen Ginsberg, a cartoon by Matt Groening along the same itinerary the drawings of Raymond Pettibon. Perpetually leading our eye away from the work it has chosen to settle on, Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix impels us to construct our own itinerary through the slice of cultural history Sonic Youth has chosen to share with us—our only restriction being the impossibility privileging one work over the next. In a configuration that sets the most ubiquitous household names in art and music alongside gallery-shy underground noise musicians and world class fashion designers, Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix presents a distinctly non-hierarchical approach to the curatorial art—a choice perhaps best exemplified by the work situated at the show’s geometric center, a perfectly transparent glass pavilion designed specifically for the exhibition by Dan Graham, invisible except for the thin metal beams that hold it erect, the music-listening station it houses and the spectators that come and go inside it.

Social and political implications

The exhibition’s inauguration in Saint Nazaire is the product of several partnerships, most notably with contemporary arts space Le Grand Café and new music festival Les Escales, which welcomes the group back to Saint-Nazaire on April 9th for a concert. “It made no sense to imagine an enormous exhibition emphasizing 30 years of friendship and collaboration without a concert to go along with it,” explains Christophe Wavelet.

Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix is big news for its host city. Even a few years ago, it would have been Impossible to imagine Saint-Nazaire, more renowned for its naval yards than for its cultural life, as the destination for an exhibition of such amplitude. In this light, Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix is “the expression of an extremely powerful public desire.” “Very few cities as small as Saint-Nazaire, Christophe Wavelet reminds us, can boast such an ambitious cultural politics.”

“Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix” transforms the port city into the epicenter of a global event.

Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix transforms the port city into the epicenter of a global event, “opening the way for a new perception of the city” and attracting a large and diverse public—several publics, many of “whom don’t normally gravitate towards the contemporary art world.” Sonic Youth fans, to be sure, as well as people in the habit of frequenting big art openings. But also, and most importantly, “a public with a broader interest in radical forms of experimentation, in artistic practices manifesting great freedom in their relation to society, to history, to the world. In short, an entire public interested in the question of invention, not simply in artistic invention but, more generally in the question of invention as a stance towards the world.”

Invention. What Sonic Youth has been up to from the very start.

Retrouvez cet article en version française.

Emilie Friedlander and Sophie Pécaud

Photos : Valérie Pinard

  The exhibition Sonic Youth etc. : Sensational Fix is presented at the LiFE in Saint-Nazaire (FR) from June 18th to September 7th, 2008. Free entry. See the LiFE website for practical information.

  Sonic Youth return to Saint-Nazaire on August 9th for the occasion of a concert coordinated by the LiFE and the Les Escales festival. For more information, visit the Les Escales website.