Dan Grahamコミュのrock my religion 03

During the 1950s and 1960s, family life is lived in isolated suburban houses.
The family is linked to the outside world through radio, tv and the car.
It is by these means that teenagers communicate the covert massage
of rock's new codes.

The rock club and concert performance are like a church,
sanctuaries against the adult world.
Electronic instruments unleash anarchic energies for the mass.
The rock star sacrifices his body and life against the regime of work:
by living his life and performing at the edge,
he transcends the values of everyday work.
His transcendence is achieved at the price of the sacrifice
of his ability to become an adult. He must die, or fall from fame.
By the late 1960s rock groups live as extended families
in large urban houses, travelling to concerts in buses
outfitted for collective living.
At outdoor rock festivals, the fans live together in tents.

Originally, rock expressed male, adolescent sexuality.
The electrified guitar, microphone-projected voice and body
of the performer became phallic symbols.
This was challenged by Jim Morrison in his notorious Maiami performance
in which he allegedly exposed himself.
He had come to believe that rock, having become big business, was dead.
The exposure of his penis was read by the public as a pathetic gesture;
for Morrison, it meant the death of his prowess as a rock star.
By showing his (pathetic) penis, instead of making his body and performance
phallic, he wished to question the mystique of rock as spectacle.
Morrison's earlier performanced had taken the form of the ritual.
In this 'death of rock' ritual, he wanted to re-enact the castration complex.
Through the star's own emasculation, he expressed his desire to see rock
bring about the destruction of the Oedipal order.

Patti Smith took Morrison's 'negative trip' and attemped to make it
- and rock - into a positive social good.
She is the first to make explicit the truth that rock is a religion.
Patti believed that the role of the female prepatriarchal
Egyptian priestess could be merged with the 'tent revivalists'
talking in tougues' to create a new rock language, which
would be neither male nor female.

The religion of the 1950s teenager and the counterculture of the 1960s
is adopted by 'Pop' artists who propose an end to the religion of
'art for art's sake.'
Patti takes this one step further: rock as an art form
which will come to encompass poetry, painting and sculpture.
If art is only a business, as Warhol suggests, then music becomes
the more communal, transcendental emotion which art now denies.


Dan Graham "Rock Religion,'in Scenes and Conventions In
Architecture by Artists, 1983 , pp.80〜81.