Since the dawn of modernism,
visual and music production
have had a particularly intimate relationship. From Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto
L’Arte dei Rumori
(
The Art of Noise
) to Marcel Duchamp’s 1925 double-sided discs
Rotoreliefs
, the 20th century saw ever more fertile exchange between sounds and shapes, marks and melodies, and different fields of composition and performance.
In Francesco Spampinato’s
unique anthology of artists’ record covers
, we discover the rhythm of this
particular cultural history
. The book presents 450 covers and records by visual artists from the 1950s through to today, exploring how
modernism, Pop Art, Conceptual Art, postmodernism,
and various forms of
contemporary art
practice have all informed this collateral field of visual production and supported the mass distribution of music with
defining imagery that swiftly and suggestively evokes an aural encounter
.
Along the way, we find
Jean-Michel Basquiat
’s urban hieroglyphs for his own Tartown record label,
Banksy
’s stenciled graffiti for Blur, and a skewered
Salvador Dalí
butterfly on Jackie Gleason’s
Lonesome Echo
. There are insightful analyses and fact sheets alongside the covers listing the artist, performer, album name, label, year of release, and information on the original artwork. Interviews with Tauba Auerbach, Shepard Fairey, Kim Gordon, Christian Marclay, Albert Oehlen, and Raymond Pettibon add personal accounts on the collaborative relationship between artists and musicians.