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Meet the Beatles (Again) - The Beatles' Impact on Art

Posted at 2:17 AM on September 9, 2009 by The Current (1 Comments)
Filed under: Meet the Beatles (Again)

The Beatles' Impact on Art
By Jay Gabler

When asked to write about the Beatles' impact on art, my first thought was of the iconic images associated with the group. The Beatles were so hugely popular that their album covers were bound to become some of the most recognizable in the history of pop music. There's the spare semaphore of Help!, there's the Sgt. Pepper collage, and of course there's the Abbey Road cover that's caused thousands of barefoot tourists to block traffic as they attempt to recreate the cross-street saunter in front of the London studio where the album was recorded. All of those images have been republished, repurposed, and reimagined ad infinitum.

The Beatles also had a direct impact on visual culture through their films and posters. A Hard Day's Night is one of the definitive music videos, and Yellow Submarine taught a generation of aspiring animators that doing things on the cheap can be made to look like a deliberate effect. Posters made from that film and from Richard Avedon's color-washed photographic portraits helped land psychedelic pop art in suburban rec rooms around the world.

But Avedon probably didn't need the Beatles' help, and neither did seminal psychedelic artist Peter Max - who had nothing to do with Yellow Submarine, though it ripped off his style. John Lennon's drawings are telling glimpses into his inner life, but they didn't much influence art history; nor have Paul McCartney's competent paintings. The Beatles' most important effect on contemporary art wasn't something you could see, it was an idea: the breaking down of barriers between art-as-object and art-as-performance.

Consider the progression of their recordings. At the beginning of the Beatles' career, recordings were more or less documents of live performances. Studio wizards like Phil Spector had already begun to change that, but the Beatles took the recording-as-recording to unprecedented new heights of artistic accomplishment and mass popularity. After their 1966 retreat from public performance, the Beatles created exquisitely crafted albums that could never have been replicated live. Though individual parts were recorded, sometimes simultaneously, at no point even in the studio were the sounds captured on the record ever played live exactly as heard on the album - they couldn't have been. Other musicians - notably the Beach Boys in pop music and Glenn Gould in classical music - were headed down the same road, but Sgt. Pepper was the single most important turning point in the split between recordings and live performance.

Meanwhile, art was moving in the opposite direction. In the early 1960s, art was still defined almost exclusively as objects: paintings, drawings, sculptures. But at almost exactly the same time that the Beatles were popularizing the idea of the album as a standalone object only distantly derived from live performance, artists were arguing for the importance of actions as works of art detached from objects. Conceptual art was in its glory days, with artists like Bruce Nauman creating artworks that took permanent form only as instructions for actions. (A 1969 Nauman work on "display" in the current Walker Art Center exhibit The Quick and the Dead instructs enactors to curl themselves up in a ball and imagine themselves pressing down into the gallery floor; visitor services staff have been taking shifts trying their damnedest at it.)

Yoko Ono, John Lennon's wife-to-be, was at the center of this movement. Her stature as an artist has grown over the decades as the inventiveness and influence of her conceptual work has become increasingly apparent. Ono was heavily influenced by the avant-garde composer John Cage, who increasingly sought to separate the performance of a composition from its score on the page. Besides creating high-concept objects (such as the glass hammer in the Walker's permanent collection), Ono was a pioneering performance artist; in her Cut Piece, for example, audience members were invited to cut scraps of clothing off the immobile artist.

Ono's professional and personal relationship with Lennon seemed to fray the ever-thinning ties among the Beatles, and many have blamed Ono for the group's demise. Why did Lennon have to be holed up in an attic with Ono filming flies crawling over a naked body when he could have been writing another "A Day in the Life"? In retrospect, though, the marriage of Lennon and Ono looks like the symbolic marriage of art and music, of object and performance, of the thing and the thought. This is one reason why, from today's perspective, John Lennon seems the forward-thinking Beatle, the cool Beatle. (Which is not to say that McCartney should be painted as clueless just because he didn't marry a conceptual artist: by all accounts, the sweeping ambition of Sgt. Pepper and the second side of Abbey Road came from him.)

The Walker Art Center prides itself on maintaining a top-notch lineup of films, performers, and activities along with the objects in its collections - but in 2009, it has to. No self-respecting contemporary art museum can stop at collecting objects, any more than a music group with aspirations to be taken seriously can stop at live performance. In art today as in music, the line between object and performance is frequently and freely crossed - and for that we can thank, among others, the Beatles.

Jay Gabler is arts editor at the Twin Cities Daily Planet.

Comments (1)

I'm starting to weary of myself, but again I have to say that the Beatles rocked. I finally got to experience Yoko Ono's art at the Walker a few years ago and became a convert. I wonder what Lennon would have made if he had lived. He was a genius of his own right, so it would have been amazing to see what kind of mischief the two of them would have made eventually.

Posted by Michelle B | September 10, 2009 12:32 PM

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