Matthew King
Paintings from the 1970’s
Grin Gallery, Providence, Rhode Island [link]
I think you mean the 1960’s
A night out with a lover listening to contemporary renditions of the songs of our past, clutching each other’s lustful intentions with a live sound track fulfilling our shallow needs. A good cover band, one that captures the original essence of music is something to experience even though the players are necessarily secondary to the music they copy. King, like many cover bands before him, offers us the flatness of the 1960’s shadowed in clippings of the 70’s with the simulated currency of the now: nostalgia.
~ Ian F. Thomas
images courtesy of Grin Gallery
Response to ideas in “I think you mean the 1960’s”
With a blatant attribution to the past the artist co-opts a proven stylization tuned for ready reception: a theoretically safe well-trod territory, which can become either a platform for innovation or a feedback loop of comfortable retro-banality. Nostalgia repackaging co-opts externality as individuality, shifting away from originality into the role of re-contextualization: a risk presuming relevance over inconsequence by re-enacting the paradoxical past-perfect. Equally as interesting, the re-enlivened content that is readily consumed is necessarily (gratefully) lacking the original animating spirit. The zombified pastiche is welcomed with nostalgia’s selective forgiveness and empowered anew by faux-familiarity.
