Wilco’s Ode to Joy — Lawrence Azerrad
An airplane window, an eyeglass lens, a blind spot of light, or simply — the shape of nothingness. Lawrence Azerrad’s art piece for the band Wilco’s album Ode to Joy draws a contemporary blank, tracing the shape of an oblong absence with a black mark docked on its side. For me, it evokes the practice of the Mono-ha group, which may be because I’ve been reading ArtAsiaPacific’s roundup of Lee Ufan’s works.
Mono-ha, if you read the article, is focused on ‘revealing the world’ — that is, reimagining the forms and shapes of the world around us. Dirt, glass, air, and water are all simply part of a Mono-ha artist’s arsenal of ingredients that have the power to transmute. And transmute they do. In one notable piece, Lee Ufan lifts a cylinder of soil out of the ground and places it, perfectly packed and formed, next to the crater it created. Presence, absence, nature, form, and space all intertwined in a singular dimension.
The forms that Azerrad plays with are multidimensional: his art appears on the cover of vinyls, of CDs and in the medium of Spotify pixels. It is endlessly replicated, the same blankness printed out over and over again on somethings. But the blankness isn’t just blank; it’s traced by existence. Presence. And that presence is traced by the infinitude of the edge of the vinyl jacket, which nudges against the empty space of the air, filled with nothingness and molecules shaped like the blob on Ode to Joy.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to Ode to Joy in full, but the first song, Bright Leaves, brings me back to that moment: the sun beating down, an earthy permeating the black-and-white fringes of the photograph as a cylindrical column of dirt floats above the hole it’s left behind.
