Rowan Smith: HOW YOU ALL FEELING TONIGHT?
– with a composition and score by George Pritzker, A402 Feb.14th-18th 2011
“HOW YOU ALL FEELING TONIGHT?” the lead singer shouts from the front of the stage, spotlights are going around and smoke sends everything into a haze, the audience screams back in sheer ecstasy, and the show can begin. This is what rock and roll is about, the magic exchange between audience and performer.
Rowan Smith’s exhibition is not in front of thousands of people at a rock concert, but in a white room with spotlights directed at things we are to look at. The room is like a stage, transformed and oozing of rock and roll. It’s the highs and lows of a mythical trope we are all familiar with, and the stage lights tie everything together.
An old hat lies on the floor with pennies, quarters and one-dollar bills in and around it. Above it, one of the ceiling panels has been replaced by a starry sky depicting an unknown future. There is a lot going on here; does it refer to a song, the romantic myth of a struggling street musician, to Rowan himself, or is it all an illusion?
The star of the show is a wooden Marshall amplifier, taking up half the exhibition space. There is room to go around, and only from the back do I realize Rowan has made this amplifier from an upright piano. The piano strings form the front grill where the sound comes out. The electric guitar and a piano are morphed strangely together in this sculpture. It’s truly a beautiful piece.
The room is filled with sound. It comes from a small amplifier on the floor and is recorded from the pickups of a Squier Electric Guitar as Rowan meticulously destroys it, string by string. The electrical guts of the guitar are attached to what looks like an antenna. The sound has been reworked into a composition by George Pritzker. Rowan is not the musician here, he is both craftsman and patron.
A simple platform made of a plank of wood is leaned against the gallery wall. It is a replica of a section of a Neil Diamond stage - - the stage has been in storage at CalArts for years, untouched.
I begin to wonder about Rowan’s titles. Each consists of several songs. Are they simply speaking about a mystical aura of rock and roll, the lives of musicians or of Rowan’s own life? I’m not entirely sure; the lines get blurred, which is often the case when you listen to songs. You identify so strongly with what the song is about that you forget yourself. It’s a form of escapism. Rowan’s titles touch on the melancholic side.
The Thrill of it all/Little Lies/The Misunderstanding
Teenage Riots/Same Old Scene
Born under punches (the heat goes on)
Star Power/Pretending to see the Future/The midnight Hours/Only After Dark
The sound of the Crowd/the Beginning and the End
Were these songs Rowan’s escape?
That hat on the floor resembles the hat that I see Rowan wearing everyday around campus. (I realized only while writing this review that the hat was not real, but made out of wood and acrylic paint.)Does Rowan identify with the freedom and hardship of the nomadic life of a street musician? Or is he talking about creating a persona that we know just as much from the art world as from the music world.
There is no simple read of this because there is no way of knowing where the references end and the personal begins, maybe because those references might also be more personal and complicated.
Everything here is more complicated then it seems. Rowan is a gifted artist, teasing his audience with a play of illusions, neither simply sculpture nor rock and roll. But why illusions, the fake instead of the real? Are these illusions Rowan’s way of mesmerizing an audience like a performer does from the stage? Maybe, but to me it poses the question of what is real. Nothing in this space is real. Is Rowan faking a persona, or is art in its essence fake? Where is Rowan being genuine and where is he performing? This tension intrigues me.
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