- The contemporary art world has become used to work overwrought with concept—particularly when it comes to recent years' net-centric pieces. This summer, LA museum The Broad has been running Nonobject(ive), a series of late-night music, dance and spoken word events that take inspiration from the in-house collection of glossy pop art. SOPHIE headlined last weekend's final instalment, titled Shifting Horizon Exploding Star, Underground And Rave Cultures, almost a year on from the release of his hyper-conceptual debut album and the objects that came with it. His performance couldn't quite transcend the materiality that Product both mocks and celebrates. Instead, he felt like the The Broad's newest, shiniest relic.
I arrived early to see the spectacle: SOPHIE's colorful quiff emerging through the luminous fog, "HARD" blasting through the plaza soon after. The stage was small, but still you could sense a distance between him and the audience. I examined the display from various angles, first from afar and then close-up, as I had done with every exhibit that night. SOPHIE moved from one high-octane pop track to the next with no rest or release. Sure, his showmanship was impressive, both sonically and visually. But this wasn't meant to be your typical SOPHIE concert; rather, it was meant to be an installation. Ultimately, it was little more than a mildly interactive piece of post-rave pop art.
Even so, there was still a sizeable group of trendy devotees, phones up, enthusiastically moshing to the producer's candied electro. Everyone else was dutifully attentive, if removed from the experience. SOPHIE and the other PC Music affiliates are divisive figures in the music world, often criticized for being too meta, too shtick-y, too quick to blur the lines between self-awareness and selling out. This setting relieved some of that tension. In a museum, the movement is repurposed and catalogued, its narrative and influence archived. As a cultural artefact, it's no longer a threat to the current state of popular music.
SOPHIE's set was bookended by two visual-heavy live performances, both of which took place upstairs in The Oculus Hall. Elysia Crampton delivered a full-on one-woman show, moving fearlessly through a relentless mashup of trap, horror soundtracks, Three Six Mafia samples, Beethoven, a number of Latin American genres and her own narration. Later, Julianna Barwick had the whole room seated on the floor, entranced by her ethereal vocals. Accompanying her was the New York-based filmmaker and visual artist Charles Atlas, who VJ'ed live. His videos, which incorporated facets of popular imagery and consumer culture, were some of the most immersive I've seen in a while. In the end, though their "product" wasn't displayed in a neat, museum-ready package, Crampton and Barwick offered much more to unpack.
Photo credits /
Dicko Chan
