'The Record' makes noise, artfully

There are some relationships that stand the test of time — Romeo and Juliet, peanut butter and jelly, wine and cheese.

If The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke has any say in the matter, records and art will be seen as an equally classic pairing.

This week, the museum launched “The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl,” an exhibition that highlights art in which vinyl plays an integral role.

Trevor Schoonmaker drew on a long-standing tradition of visual artists’ use of the record to curate the show.

“The record is a subject that artists have been working with thematically for years and years,” he said.

Schoonmaker’s experiences as a UNC post-grad impacted his thought process as a curator.

“When I graduated, the first job I had was in an independent record store. I moved back to Winston Salem and I worked at the Record Exchange,” he said.

“It stems from that, but then more so once I moved into curating, just looking at work and seeing the motif of the record as a subject that comes up over and over — it hadn’t really been dealt with before.”

Mark Katz, a professor in the UNC music department, contributed an essay to the exhibit’s catalog called “Beware of Gramomania: The Pleasures and Pathologies of Record Collecting.”

For him, vinyl’s physical properties make it conducive to visual art.

“I think the tactility of vinyl is important to people. You can pull out a recording, you can hold it, you can look at the grooves,” he said.

“This is a slippery term, but it has a kind of authenticity to it.”

And while the exhibit orbits around a central theme of the record and its role in art, the works themselves range from small-scale drawings to large installations.

“For me, every piece is important to tell a different story, in some ways for a different audience,” said Schoonmaker.

With a roster of artists that range from textbook names to relative unknowns, the exhibit should draw an assortment of viewers.

“The most savvy art aficionados will be drawn to different works because maybe they’ve never noticed that Jasper Johns ever produced a work engaging a record.”

Though the exhibition takes place in the context of a museum, the intricacies of the relationship between records and visual art extends far beyond the confines of the Nasher’s walls.

Katz sees the connection between these two worlds on the sleeve of a record.

“Some are really beautiful covers, these 12-by-12 artworks. That’s a lot of the motivation behind record collecting. People associate the records they have with the covers,” he said.

But in an age of CDs and mp3s, does vinyl still have relevance with the Pitchfork generation?

Schoonmaker is confident that records have a sense of nostalgia and viscerality that modern medium lack.

“Mp3’s, they’re singular,” Schoonmaker said.

“When you look through old records, it’s like they’re teleporting you to another time and place. I want people to get that feeling in the show.”

Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.