Study Sessions: Sonic Bauhaus - Being in a Band

About

Nottingham Contemporary
Tuesday 1 October 2019 | 6.30pm - 8.30pm
Booking Required

Being in a Band: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Pop - Led by Gavin Butt.

The Study Sessions are informal discussion groups. This season, Sonic Bauhaus is a series of study-as-listening-sessions exploring critical pedagogies of twentieth-century art schools and how these influenced developments in sound and systems of music creation. Join one session or all.

What happens when artists get together to form a band? After punk in 1976, many students in Leeds art schools rejected the hackneyed image of the artist as a lone genius in a garret, downed paintbrushes in favour of guitars and synthesizers, and formed groups to challenge the limits of rock and pop music. Born of a progressive art education once celebrated as the "most influential in Europe since the Bauhaus," they took avant-garde ideas out from the artist's studio to the record buying public, even to Top of the Pops and American Bandstand.

Members of bands as diverse as Gang of Four, Delta 5, Scritti Politti, and Soft Cell created situationist anti-rock, feminist funk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and made electro-dance music about "sex dwarfs": all to shake-up, even détourne, music industry business-as-usual.

Through an introductory talk, music samples and discussion, this study session seeks to explore the role UK art education has played in making pop history.

In conjuction with Nottingham Contemporary's latest exhibition Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus