Although CDs and MP3 playlists have made listening to music an uninterrupted
touch-of-the-button pleasure, vinyl still has an unbeatable allure. A CD collection is just a pile of
plastic compared to the rich designs of foldout album covers. There is something refreshingly physical
about the large black disks, the gentle handling they require and even the scratchy “authentic” sound
of the needle.
Los Angeles based artist Sean Duffy
takes vinyl nostalgia to a whole new level. Duffy rebuilds old record players so that they have not
one but two or three or four needle arms, which all play the record at the same time. In The
Good, the Bad and the Ugly Ennio Morricone’s film tracks echo in triplicate throughout the room.
Each arm plays slightly out of sync with the next, and the staggered sound fills the air with a haunting
yet humorous polyphony. Duffy’s record players never play contemporary club hits or special new vinyl
releases. Like the machines, the music is from another decade. For example, in Kraftwerk
the once state-of-the-art record players are in keeping with the era of early electronic music - metallic
grey, robotic and minimal. The sounds and machines together seem to function like a strange time machine
that folds old familiar tunes into a dense weave of multiple repetitions.
Retro
pop and retro aesthetics are at the core of much of Duffy’s work - for example, the installation in
Group Show Part Two at the Susanne Vielmetter gallery last spring. A display shelf of albums, Group
Show looks like it has been cut and pasted from a small independent record shop. The album covers have
appropriately obscure titles, especially because they have been designed by the artist himself. Some
are even personalized with images of his own work. Together with this highly individualized selection
of albums, Tunix of My Apathy I functions as a listening lounge chair. It is a
plywood bin constructed from geodesic components and filled with pillows, which are made from the artist’s
old T-shirts. The entire installation recalls images of a 1970s teenage den, the mini cosmos of the
young music fan. Although the work visually evokes fandom as a rite of passage - as a process of defining
one’s identity through taste - Duffy also inserts an undertone of disengagement. For all the cool that
comes with being a connoisseur of pop, listening is a passive stance. Wearing the “right” T-shirt or
listening to the “right” music is, for most, simply a pose. While the layered sounds of his revamped
record players create a distorted tremolo full of yearning and estrangement, the piece Hey
Jude cuts to the core of the cyclical nature of culture’s trends. A video of a record player playing
covers of famous hits is shown as a split image on two monitors. This is not one of Duffy’s constructed
machines, but the sound from each monitor is staggered to give the same effect. The white, rounded-off
frame of the monitors immediately gives the quirky image a slick, contemporary feel. The oldies are
back again - and again and again - but this time as video framed to appeal in the iPod age.
Link:
vielmetter.com/artists/Duffy/sean_duffy.htm
