This coming Friday, February 16, the de Appel arts centre in Amsterdam, Holland will open two exhibitions that could be of interest to the lovers of heavy metal, black metal, and grindcore: "Steven Shearer - Steven Shearer" and "Erik Smith - The Ghost of James Lee Byars Calling", both on view from February 17 until April 15. The exhibitions are not documentary presentations about these musical styles, but presentations by artists who are themselves fascinated by this music and its subculture.
Steven Shearer (New Westminster, 1968) is a product of the leading, internationally renowned art scene that flourishes in the West-Canadian harbour town of Vancouver that since the middle of the 1980s enjoys worldwide attention as a major epicentre for contemporary photo-, film- and video art. In this context, Shearer's prevailing passionate devotion to more "traditional" practices like drawing and painting (graphic art, oil on canvas, silkscreen, lithographs etc.) is all the more extraordinary. Shearer generally derives the motifs for many of his colourful, figurative canvases from the obscure, suburban subculture of the American black- and heavy metal scene and its various (Scandinavian) offshoots, or from the innocent schmaltz of 1970s forgotten pop idols. Exhibited will be for example "poems", with lines of poetry derived from band names, album- and song titles from the twilight world of metal micro genres like black metal and goregrind. He assembles these with a fine sense for verbal drama and ditto musicality into blasphemous, often abstract sounding "poems" that are applied as white-stencilled letters on a uniform black wall. Some phrases sound unintentionally humorous ("Abandoned By Death"), others majestically obscene ("Scatophagious Downpour"). Furthermore, there will be shown a series of drawings entitled "longhairs", that includes a portrait of Euronymous, the pseudo mythic founder of the Norwegian black metal formation MAYHEM. A recent paiting in the show portrays Quorthon, the recently deceased leader of the Swedish black metal formationBATHORY. Shearer's outlook reveals a strong personal (and inevitably also autobiographical) tinted sympathy for these sub-cultures. He played guitar for long, before devoting himself to art. The result in the exhibition is a very personal portrait of this intruiging sub-culture.
Besides this show there will be a presentation by Erik Smith "The Ghost of James Lee Byars Calling". In this installation, the work of the internationally renowned performance and conceptual artist, James Lee Byars (1932-1997) is fused with the underground realm of black metal music. Byars' dramatic flair and unconditional pursuit of "the essential" in form and concept parallel the dark theatricality of black metal and its characteristic idolisation of pagan myths, Satanism, violence and destruction.
The title, "The Ghost of James Lee Byars Calling", is taken from an exhibition by Byars in Los Angeles (1969). Byars was obsessed by his own mortality, which filters through in the minimal and ephemeral quality of his performances and installations. Smith asked the Swedish black metal band BLODSRIT to recreate a sound work by Byars, "Perfect is My Death Word", during a concert in Berlin. A recording of this performance is part of the installation.
More than paying homage to Byars, the work is an invocation of cultural obsessions with blackness and the staging of death. However, Byars' fascination with his own death was always a philosophical pursuit; the absence and transcendence communicated in his work were devoid of any notion of spiritual redemption.
Preaching negation, black metal proclaims an outright rejection of Christian salvation with its celebrations of the demonic. Whereas Byars proclaims "Perfect is My Death Word", the band DARKTHRONE calls for "Total Death".
For more information, visit http://www.deappel.nl.
