The mashup of cultural elements to create art (or something lesser, perhaps with your phone) is so ubiquitous today, it barely demands notice. But 100 years ago it was a radical concept and, so proposes an ambitious new exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, a transformative practice that changed the way we think about and interact with art.
MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture is the most ambitious show in the VAG's history, taking over the entire gallery, spread out over four floors, with 371 works by 156 artists, filmmakers, musicians, architects and designers – including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jeff Koons, Bruce Mau, Geoffrey Farmer, John Cage, Brian Eno, Quentin Tarantino and Stan Douglas. With loans from 75 collections, the exhibition (which is accompanied by a massive catalogue) is curated by a core group of three – the VAG's Bruce Grenville, Daina Augaitis and Stephanie Rebick – with 27 additional contributors.
It is a colossal undertaking. So where to begin?
Not at the beginning, if you're visiting. The exhibition, which opened Feb. 20, is meant to be explored in reverse, starting with the contemporary works on the first floor.
But here, momentarily, let's start with the beginning, as the show describes it.
During a period of intense experimentation between 1912 and 1914, Picasso and Georges Braque began to incorporate non-traditional materials in their compositions – wallpaper, newspapers, musical scores and other found materials – essentially inventing collage. This launches an entirely new mode of representation, something that will take on many forms and terms – assemblage, collage, détournement, appropriation, sampling, ripping and hacking (to name a few).
Rachel Topham/Vancouver Art Gallery
The impact of this radical move was tremendous and the VAG show demonstrates that it has reached far beyond visual art. You see it in architecture and design, in film; you hear it in music – an interconnectedness that links artists, eras, genres and mediums.
"Everything you see around you is really based in a kind of mashup, remix, sampling kind of sensibility," says Grenville, who conceived the exhibition.
"We do like to encompass the historical but to see it from the contemporary perspective. And so trying to make sense out of mashup culture, we had to go back in time to see it and to understand: Where does this originate? How is it connected?"
The exhibition is organized chronologically in four sections, each with its own floor. On the first floor, the contemporary – the digital age. Here you can lie back on blue pillows in German filmmaker Hito Steyerl's video installation Liquidity Inc. (2014) and let the story of economic loss, mixed martial arts – and water – wash over you; blue judo mats act as sound buffers, also part of the installation.
You can watch an armed Ronald McDonald take Big Boy hostage in French graphics and animation studio H5's animated short Logorama (2009) – which uses more than 2,500 logos.
Ellen Gallagher's large yellow grid collages Pomp-Bang (2003) and Afrylic (2004) reproduce historical beauty ads from magazines that targeted an African American demographic – ads for hair straighteners, "bleach and glow" creams – and embellish them with plasticine to create fantastical re-interpretations.
Rachel Topham photos/Vancouver Art Gallery
Hong Kong-based artist Stanley Wong (also known as anothermountainman) has installed an entire gallery with the material used for the red, white and blue striped plastic bags that are ubiquitous in Asia. The material covers the walls, the floor, some chairs, hangs from lamps.
On the second floor, dealing with the late 20th century, Jeff Koons's Pink Panther (1988) pairs the cartoon character with 1950s and 60s sex symbol movie actress Jayne Mansfield in a provocative pose.
Sherrie Levine's golden urinal Fountain (After Marcel Duchamp) (1991) appropriates one of the most disruptive works in this show – Duchamp's Fountain. Duchamp's radical work is a quintessential example of the readymade: An ordinary, commercially available object designated as a work of art – in this case through the artistic intervention of a signature. Levine adds another element to the readymade by casting hers in bronze. (Duchamp's work is found two floors up.)
The influence of street culture is illustrated in work that includes three Keith Haring subway drawings and a Jean-Michel Basquiat painting – very New York. The Los Angeles scene is represented by John Baldessari and others.
Nearby, five Air Jordan masks from Brian Jungen's Prototype for New Understanding series also speak to urban street culture – but in what became a celebrated mashup with Northwest Coast First Nations culture.
This section of the exhibition also includes an important early example of Net Art, Russian artist Olia Lialina's My Boyfriend Came Back From The War (1996) accessed on a clunky computer of that era.
On the third floor, dealing with the post-war period, a big chunk of real estate is devoted to Andy Warhol. In addition to a number of his works featuring the likes of Jackie Kennedy and Mao Zedong, a large 1964 photograph depicts Warhol working on Flowers. This speaks to a key theme of the show: Art's mashups are inextricably linked with technology; as new technologies emerge, they allow for new mashup methodologies – whether it's Warhol employing industrial methods in the Factory or DJ Spooky using digital technologies in his mixes.
The music board used by Jamaican sound engineer King Tubby – hugely important in the development of dub and thus profoundly influential on hip hop – is installed in a music-filled gallery that has the feel of a sound studio.
For his Santa Monica, Calif., residence, architect Frank Gehry built around an existing house using corrugated steel and chain-link fencing. In the show, photos of the pioneering project are viewed through an installation built with the same materials.
On the fourth floor – the early 20th century – finally you get to the Picasso, the Braque, the Duchamp – the roots of this movement and the final rewards of the tour. They include versions of Duchamp's 1917 Fountain and 1913 Bicycle Wheel.
Rachel Topham/Vancouver Art Gallery
Duchamp, once a successful painter, ultimately rejected what he called "retinal art" – work intended to please the eye – in favour of more conceptual art. "I was interested in ideas – not merely in visual products," he explained.
The central "wow" element of MashUp is the site-specific installation created for the VAG's rotunda by the U.S. collage artist Barbara Kruger. Her bold black and white all-caps text interspersed with enormous emojis completely transforms the space into what she calls "a container of meanings and ideas," demanding a slow walk up the circular staircase.
"I wanted to combine texts that I felt were really meaningful for the particular moment we're in and tie that to certain ways of recording and broadcasting emotion – which is what the emojis are, for good and bad and everything in between," she told The Globe and Mail during a break in installation last month.
Philosophical quotes run above and below the staircase; there's one splashed across the floor as well, from the influential Francophone Caribbean poet and writer Aimé Césaire: "And above all … beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator. For life is not a spectacle. For a sea of miseries is not a proscenium. A man screaming is not a dancing bear," it reads.
"Intense," Kruger says. "This quote to me sings and screams so much of today."
The exhibition requires a longish visit but it's a colourful trip – energized by the range of works, the sometimes thumping soundtrack featuring the likes of Madonna and Grandmaster Flash, the opportunities to stop and take in a video, or even a full-length Jean-Luc Godard film in a darkened screening room. There are surprises and revelations around every corner. And, visible from every floor, Kruger's installation – combining emoji, text, literature and existing architecture – is a mashup for visitors to consider again and again, sometimes by way of selfie – organically adding yet another layer of appropriation and reflection to the whole.
MashUp: The Birth of Modern Culture is at the Vancouver Art Gallery until June 12.