Music is Food / Oliver Payne and Nick Relph

I saw this 3 minute video at Herald St Gallery – (who represent the duo Oliver Payne and Nick Relph) on the 18th July 2008. This video’s opening title reads 'Frieze Film' .

One wonders what the marketing executives of the respective sponsors thought upon seeing this work. Those who are charged with assessing the use of the corporation’s logo: that they are formatted as was agreed in the contract, at the right size, no smaller than those of other sponsors who have donated the same amount, that the text in relation to logo is correctly proportioned - and most importantly that the brand is not undermined. I imagine there might have been some hesitancy among these executives: as when one suspects being the victim of a very sophisticated and subtle slight, so subtle one hesitates to take offence for fear that there was no slight at all – and yet the doubt remains.

Usually the sponsor’s credits are sandwiched either side of a film, or just at the end; if it is a press release, or an information board, they are to one side, in a corner, marginal. Usually artworks present themselves and operate oblivious to the logos and funding creditations that accompany them.

It is commonplace for works not to recognize the financial contributors to their production. It is a very specific blind spot: there is no end of works that comment, or are in themselves, the trace or documentation of their physical process or material manufacture; or make a point of communicating the contributions of the personnel who made them - especially collaborative works exploring authorship.

This is an opposite scenario to the institution hosting the work; the visibility of an institution’s dependence on a corporate sponsor is exactly the motivation for the company to sponsor in the first place.

One can see why artists suffering this blind-spot are so widespread: the individuality, ethics and autonomy of a practice can immediately be called into question when juxtaposed with a particular sponsor. It leads to an explosion of questions around who we should work for, accept money from, to what end – what is the danger and potential of compromise – is one immediately co-opted? and to whose gain? Will the benefits fall to a company whose policies you are happy with - or will their policies conflict with arguments made by your work? Far better to feign ignorance, or declare such considerations beyond the concerns of one's practice. Nonetheless the financial chain of production, visually symbolized by the corporate logo, is as worthy a subject matter of a work of art as its material or conceptual process - Either there is an interest in the circumstances of production - or there is not. Just as a site-specific work recognizes its physical circumstances, could it not also engage with its financial environment. I.e. be economically-sensitive?

Oliver Payne and Nick Relph are clearly not afflicted by this blind-spot… Their 3 minute digital animation: Music is Food begins with a circle against a monotone grey background, in the corner of the frames are right angled ‘L‘ shapes – similar to a videogame gun-sight - the circle, slowly rises like a sun. There is no turning of blind eyes. Payne and Relph turn the opposite way. They look the sponsors in the eyes – unblinkingly - as directly as we are asked to look at the diagrammatic disc, or circle, or sun – and risk a metaphoric burning of our eyes. This disc, glides with the certainty of direction possessed by an astronomical body. The proceeding smoothness calls to mind the alignment of stars and moons creating eclipses. One thinks of cartoon representations of Mayan temples activated by sundials: the interlocking shifting bricks of archeological adventure films, depicted as graphic little blocks and lines, sliding into position with uniform speed - as though ordained. These simple geometric shapes evolve into a diagrammatic landscape - in which the London Eye (or the outline of a tyre-tread) becomes recognizable. The picturesque scene is completed with a silhouetted template of Big Ben – descending from the top right hand corner of the screen with the easy efficiency of an electronic automated windscreen wiper or sunroof. Going from black, grey and white to colour, the apotheosis of the film emerges as the BMW roundel in the centre: (the famous circle divided into blue and white quarters). It seamlessly rotates anti-clockwise as text rotates from the bottom of the screen clockwise - gliding from outside the frame entering in an arc and eventually halting above the logo: 'Frieze Film is sponsored by BMW and supported by Channel 4 and Art & Business'.

Looming over the aforementioned references is the spectre of the Channel 4 test card and its ident, called ‘round and back’ (used from 1982 – 91) in which animated blocks slide from the edge of the TV frame to form the Channel 4 logo itself the number 4. With TV idents in mind (and a channel switch) the Big Ben also calls to mind the Thames Television ident of London’s skyline – appropriate when we consider Frieze is a London fair.

This cool, distant, shrugging of shoulders, or prostration at the feet of corporate power and influence takes product placement to such an extreme that it is reduced to absurdity, to the extent the work acquires the whiff of Dadaist prank: the Power Point lecture reprogrammed to go out of control and overstate its statistics, or a demo of a Tetris game, that can’t escape ‘demo mode’… All the while an honesty is being mined in this yielding to (and recognition of) corporate presence. Simultaneously a very classical tradition of the representation of an artist’s patron is being toyed with, revived and reworked. It is commonplace for Renaissance paintings to include a portrait of a patron in group depicting a Biblical event. The funder’s portrait often inserted among a watching crowd – as though an ordinary bystander (to emphasize humility), other times the patron’s face would be given to a much more central character in the depicted scene. The difference is that the veneer of self-less generosity has been stripped – the patron’s face is all, anything else is marginal, if represented at all.

Behind the inorganic, icily unemotional, overtly constructed façade of the animation one can sense Payne and Relph’s delight and despair (a delight shared by many of the first generation of Pop artists) in their appropriation of the populist visual environment. And behind Payne and Relph’s delight and despair, even nostalgic warmth (born 1977 and 1979 respectively). After all this is not the appropriation of the immediate visual noise (of 2007), or Channel 4’s current visual identity – but that of near two decades ago. The animation’s score, by Alexis Taylor (of Hot Chip) makes music of a blend of test card monotone washes, simplistic homemade Casio keyboard tunes, and early 8-bit videogame jingles. The sonic simplicity compliments the visual aesthetic: that of material made on rudimentary graphic design packages or programmed on a Commodore 64+ - the early home computer that took videogaming into a domestic space and out of arcades. Here we are in the land of games on cassette tapes, Sega’s Master System, Thundercats and Transformers. To see the work through the lens of a diaristic picture book, is to recognize and shudder at the thought that, the autobiography of every Western Europe born 80s kid is intertwined with the growth spurt and boom of corporate globalization and its branding.