The special show at the Kunstsammlungen Jena shows almost exclusively record sleeves – but the whole thing turned out to be much more subtle and enlightening than one might think.
Exhibition. It’s a vinyl mantra that’s often claimed that records are better because they have such nice, roomy sleeves. Anyone who has ever rummaged through a stack of records knows that a lot of space is often also a lot of space for crap, and even if there are undoubtedly very artistic record covers, their job is not to be advertising space for art. And there we are, right next to the (really great, by the way!) Christmas market in Jena in the middle of the special exhibition of the local art collection: “Vinyl icons – 60 years of record covers”, the title sounds like a brainchild from the marketing conference table of the Rathauses: Bring on the hip theme for the unfortunately under-visited city museum – rocks!
Only: what should one expect there apart from walls full of record covers, of which inevitably only a fraction can be addressed, be it through the optics or through musical associations. And the icons? Well known: Nirvana Baby, Led Zeppelin Zeppelin, Velvet Underground Banana, Pink Floyd’s Prisma from “Dark Side Of The Moon” or the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper” celebrity montage, which has been analyzed many times. It’s not for nothing that the galleries of the most iconic, controversial, funniest or most provocative covers in rock history have been used for clickbait on the Internet for many years.
From the first idea
The show doesn’t even try to avoid all of these facts – and maybe that’s why it succeeds in subtly unraveling several myths behind the phenomenon of record covers. For example, the tagline for the advertised 60-year anniversary: the graphic artist Alex Steinweiss finally had the idea of printing the originally plain blank sleeves of (initially ten-inch) shellac records as early as 1940: his image of an iconic theater entrance for the record “Smash Hits” by Rodgers & Heart is considered the first record cover in music history. Twenty years later, however, people began not only to decorate the sleeve, but also to use it as an advertising medium for the music: the potential listener leafing through a stack of new records in the store should be so captivated by the sleeve that he listen to the disc. That sounds logical – but how tricky and complex it is is shown in an amazing way by the skilful arrangement in the mix of well-known and completely unknown cover artworks. In contrast to purely promotional advertising, the cover must be both surprising and familiar in equal measure. It needs to reflect the music for fans while appealing to new listeners. It needs to be very direct while being as subtle and intricate as possible.
balancing act between will to art and necessities
The show makes it clear in a cool, subtle way how record cover art has meandered through clichés and their constant breaking over the decades, how it served the respective zeitgeist on the one hand, but also constantly renewed it on the other. The curators’ most important trick is to hang the covers according to similar visual characteristics, so that various “markers” become visible as well as major trend lines of pop culture – and how people struggled over and with them. There are also numerous variants and breaks in a theme, such as ironic reinterpretations of iconic covers, horse deception or fooling the public. The balancing act between artistic will and functional necessities, which is torn in many places, is also exciting – including many original attempts to break out of this dilemma. Or austerity constraints: It is not uncommon for covers to be designed grotesquely “somehow”; under- or over-ambitious (in a stupid or cute way) they don’t fit the sound carrier at all.
The desire for tension
Moving in this field of tension is a hell of a lot of fun, especially since, thanks to the stylistic mixture, you keep bumping into dear friends and thus have a similar tension effect as when browsing through someone else’s collection: grandiose and creepy things are always in the eye of the beholder, together, Cult and junk alternate and are still a necessary part of the game, in which it can of course work to discover the next cool piece of music through the look of the case. Evaluating a record by its cover can lead to direct hits beyond the usual musical preferences. In any case, the Jena exhibition makes you want to buy a sound carrier “by feel” just because it triggers you when you look at it.
And: As if by the way, the show dispels the view commonly held by vinyl apologists that the design of record covers is something special and superior to CDs: the principles shown work exactly the same when designing the covers of silver discs. This is indicated by many specialties that work with a high gimmick factor. It just has to click in the head, and that has nothing to do with size or area. What just doesn’t work, and this is perhaps where the error is based, is the transfer of covers specially designed for records to the smaller CD format – and vice versa.
The “Vinyl Icons” exhibition can be seen in the Jena Art Collections until March 12th. » Kunstsammlungen-jena.de