Part performance, rock show, installation and film screening, BAND refashions the form and content of Jean-Luc Godard's film Sympathy for the Devil. A multi-staged art work, BAND will begin at this year's Festival with a concert that includes music, live narration and projected footage. Using a documentary and essayistic approach, artist Adam Pendleton will continue to unfold BAND in stages, operating across temporal and spatial platforms. The next manifestations, to be presented in major art institutions around the world, will utilize shot footage from the Toronto stage to create a video and film installation that blurs the lines between the scripted and the live, the original and the appropriated, the historical and the present. It will mobilize the structure and filmic techniques of Godard's original work as a means to explore ideas about contemporary experimental practice, language and the (re)making of history.
Filmed in 1968, Sympathy for the Devil breaks from Godard's Nouvelle Vague period into a more committed engagement with the politics and class struggles of the time. The central motif is a recording of a Rolling Stones session in London's Olympic Studios. Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, Rocky Dijon, Marianne Faithful and others rehearse and record the seminal track, “Sympathy for the Devil,” from its raw beginning to its eventual form as a samba-rock anthem. The session functions as a backdrop to exterior cutaways that intimate the social, ideological and political unrest of the period. Godard's film, a seeming burlesque of ideology, models the director's emerging political faith that radical formal complexity can undermine the bourgeois logic implicit to narrative filmmaking. The Stones become emblematic of the mainstream counterculture from which Godard is presently attempting to remove himself.
Pendleton's BAND has recast Godard's elliptical tracking of the Stones on the cusp of superstardom with indie-rock, post-punk band Deerhoof. This recasting stands, in an open-ended way, as a physical representation of the cultural shifts between Godard's era and our own. The earlier work anticipated the instability of the current context. BAND acts as a meditation on the present, read backwards through the canonical traces left by one of the leaders of avant-garde film.
Wayne Baerwaldt
Curated by Wayne Baerwaldt
Produced in collaboration with the
Illingworth Kerr Gallery at the Alberta College of Art + Design, Calgary,
The Kitchen, New York and de Appel, Amsterdam.
Adam Pendleton lives in New York. His multi-disciplinary art shifts the meaning of cultural forms, language and images, and has been widely exhibited internationally. Recent biennials and exhibitions include The Generational: Younger than Jesus (New Museum, New York); Performa 07; Manifesta 7; Object, the Undeniable Success of Operations (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam); Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago); and Manifesto Marathon (Serpentine Gallery, London).