On a recent Friday night in the vast atrium space of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, six string players took their place in a semi-circle and began performing the first movement of one of Mozart’s most sanctified sonatas. For the first five minutes or so, the musicians played his String Quartet No 15 in D Minor exactly as it was written until, suddenly, the conductor began acting like the host of a bingo game by throwing a six-sided die, with each side representing a particular player.
“Two,” the conductor cried, before pointing at the second violinist, who immediately stopped what she was performing and began to play her part in the piece back from the start, while the others soldiered on through the score. “Four,” the conductor called after his next toss, pointing at the cellist who, likewise, went back to the beginning of his part, in the process establishing a pattern of calls and re-starts that continued for the next 25 minutes. Amid the unfolding drama, one of the world’s most well-worn classical works was twisted into something strangely fresh, resulting in not so much a deconstruction of Mozart’s work as a reformation of it, with each component treated like a separate piece in a bold new puzzle.
“At one point, the sonata started to sound like something by Bartok,” said Stephen Prina, the musician-slash-artist who created this wild riff on the master. “At another, it started to sound like Shostakovich! It just kept changing.”
The result, says Prina, “plays with the relationship between the familiar and the unfamiliar. What do you have to do to something that’s familiar to render it so unfamiliar that you can exact a different relationship with it? How do you take works that are on a pedestal and listen to them again instead of simply revering them?”
Prina has been posing questions like that in his work for five decades now, using a broad array of forms to do so, including visual art, music, dance, film and spoken word. The music in his pieces draws from the worlds of classical music, movie scores, rock, pop, and folk, repositioning works by guitar bands (like Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix and Sonic Youth), singer-songwriters (Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens and Odetta), and composers (Beethoven, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg). Distinctions between “high” and “low” are a mirage to him. The most enduring of Prina’s sources sit comfortably next to fleeting cultural blips such as Who Let the Dogs Out?
Now, for the first time, the full range of Prina’s music-based pieces are on display at MoMA in a retrospective titled A Lick and Promise. The title echoes an antique phrase that means a job hastily done. In fact, Prina’s works couldn’t be more thoughtfully planned. He chose the title because “big survey or retrospective shows can be intimidating for an audience – and for an artist”, he said. “I felt it needed a modicum of self-deprecation.”
That element in his work might not be obvious to everyone, given the density of ideas on display and the sometimes arch construction of his pieces. At the same time, Prina took it as a compliment when a friend recently described one of his string works as “hilarious”. “I’m all for instilling more playfulness in things,” he said, “especially in the domain of art.”
In fact, play is central to his work, which commonly involves reinventions of pre-existing pieces. All of the works and performances in the MoMA retrospective involve some act of appropriation. Even the element of chance he introduced to his Mozart-based piece was borrowed, in this case from one of his heroes, John Cage, who famously composed pieces that involved a throw of the I Ching wands. For Prina, allusions to other works aren’t just inevitable but illuminating. “Every artwork is an act of cultural appropriation whether the artist intends it or not,” he declared. “Unfortunately, a lot of people are gunning to demote any act of appropriation as not being ‘original.’ In fact, there are no original thoughts. Nothing happens in a vacuum.”
Instead, he sees his work “as seizing upon a cultural product that’s already in circulation in the culture. Then I treat it in some way and re-release back into the culture,” he said. “I feel that connects me to something bigger than the relatively autonomous world of the art object.”
According to the curator of the retrospective, Stuart Comer, one of the reasons MoMA wanted to mount the show to begin with was because the museum had already showcased other artists who work intimately with appropriation, including Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler and Christopher Williams. However, “most of those artists deal with photographic appropriation”, Comer said. “Prina is doing something really different by working with sound and music. More, he began doing so during the rise of hip hop and sample culture, which connects his work to something broader.”
Because Prina himself performs covers and original works in some of the presentations, he sometimes likens his work to performance art. Some critics have also tried to categorize him as a conceptual artist, a tag that makes him bristle. “I owe a big debt to that movement,” he said, “but I always like to say, ‘I’m too young for it.’” (He’s 70).
Instead, Prina prefers to label his art “post-conceptual”, an approach that uses ideas as a foundational part of the piece while elaborating them with the physical experience of the objects he creates or varies. The term “post conceptual” came into use in the early 70s through the artist John Baldessari who taught at the California Institute of the Arts where Prina went to school in the 80s. Though Prina grew up in the small midwest town of Galesburg, Illinois, he was lucky enough to encounter avant-garde musical influences as a teenager when some local kids in his neighborhood began improbably roaming the streets reciting lyrics from Captain Beefheart songs. “I ended up being in bands with at least two of those people,” Prina said with a laugh.
He studied music and art at Northern Illinois University before going to Cal Arts for his MFA. In the 1980s he taught at Artcenter College of Design in Pasadena where, in the 90s, he taught a class on Keanu Reeves, a move that would barely bat an eye in today’s academia where even Harvard offers a class on Taylor Swift. Back when Prina did it, though, pearls were clutched. “The Los Angeles Times accused me of being a primary agent in the deterioration of higher education,” he said. “Secretly, I found that flattering.”
He began showing his work in museums during the 80s and started teaching at Harvard in 2004. (He recently retired from that post). His Mozart piece, cheekily titled String Quartet for Six Players, conceived in 1976 when he was 21, represents the oldest of his works in the retrospective. One of the most elaborate, and certainly the loudest, piece, dating from 1992, called Beat of the Traps, focuses on the core of popular music – the beat. A multi-disciplinary piece, Beat comprises dance, spoken word monologues, live drummers and a performance by Prina of whatever song topped the Billboard chart that week.
That last component references a separate piece he created that’s also on display at MoMA titled The Top Thirteen Singles from Billboard’s Hot 100 Singles Chart for the Week Ending September 11, 1993. For that piece, he tricked up a giant clock to chime on the hour with one of the top hits of that week, including songs by artists ranging from Janet Jackson to Soul Asylum. Prina calls the work “a monument to the ephemeral”, a description that nails one of pop’s central ironies. While pop can be fleeting – yesterday’s top hits might be forgotten tomorrow – it’s also eternal because, Prina said, “once something is out there in the culture, it’s always out there”.
Comer thinks there’s a parallel between Prina’s use of Top 10 hits and MoMA’s mission. “Our identity is based on building the canon of modern art, which is like creating a Top 10,” he said. “At the same time, Stephen is playing with the idea of hierarchies to form an institutional critique through his work.”
The monologues in Beat, written by Prina’s collaborator in the piece, the late artist and punk rocker Mike Kelley, were inspired by four of rock’s heaviest drummers – Keith Moon of the Who, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin, Paul Whaley of Blue Cheer and Mitch Miller of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. The monologues, read by an actor, comprise disjointed elements of the drummers’ work and personae. “It’s almost as though you’re looking at the desktop of someone who’s doing research on rock music,” Prina said. “These are your notes before you commit to the final essay.”
In the piece, the drummers play various patterns from the stars’ recordings, culminating in Bonham’s part from Led Zeppelin’s When the Levee Breaks. Only in this case, the drummers play a beat out of sync from each other and their snares have been tuned slightly differently. “I think that would drive John Bonham crazy,” Prina said with a laugh.
Much like his Mozart piece, Beat takes elements of a canonized work and pulls them apart like strands of yarn from a sweater. The move means to make listeners more aware of every component of a classic, in the process encouraging closer listening. The result also has an element of protest by countering the age of social media which has made us less attentive than ever. More, the mutations in the piece force listeners to take a more active role in the music as they try to make sense of its new shape. “Marcel Duchamp famously said that the artwork is not completed in the artist’s studio,” said Prina. “It’s complete when it meets the spectator.”
To physicalize that point, the Mozart performance I caught featured a reprise in which the musicians repositioned themselves behind the audience where they took a second run at the piece. In puzzled reaction, the audience slowly began to turn their chairs around, making us virtual collaborators in the piece. Not that everyone always chooses to do so. In one instance, Prina said, an audience member wouldn’t turn his chair around and, so, wound up staring directly into the face of the person who had been in front of him. “It created a whole new drama!” the artist said.
At one point during the Mozart performance, the conductor fumbled the die, sending it hurling towards the floor, in the process adding an extra level of randomness. “The conductor was mortified,” said Prina. “I was delighted!”
Another key element in his pieces fosters rediscovery through the use of jarring juxtapositions. In his piece Sonic Dan, he brings together works by Sonic Youth and Steely Dan by performing covers from each. “People have asked me, incredulously ‘How do these things come together?’” Prina said. “I say, they come together in me.”
Given the daunting number of allusions in his survey, it’s unlikely that any individual listener will get all of them. That doesn’t bother the artist in the least. “Even I don’t get all of my references,” Prina said. “I think that’s good. As a kid, I was always drawn to whatever I didn’t understand. Some people get angry at that, but I just thought, ‘what an interesting proposition?’ At the end of the day, isn’t that what all artwork is about? Each piece is a proposition on how to think and live in the world.”
A Lick and A Prayer continues at MoMA on New York through 13 December
