Rock My Religion, 1982/1984
Still: Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York
Collection
Single-channel video installation, b/w and color, sound
55 min 27 sec
It is interesting that one of the most important texts on the theory of rock music is neither a text nor is it by a theorist of rock music or the counter culture. Rather, it is by a visual artist. First of all, Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion is a video, from which a transcription was made. The title, however, has also been used for the edition of his collected writings from 1965 – 1990 that includes this transcript. Secondly, it is the first systematic work concerning the connection between sexuality and capitalism as the basis of a cultural complex with many different, but nevertheless specific forms of appearance. Graham focuses on two symptoms of the American version of the complex. On one hand, there is the prehistory of a specific combination of socialist-utopian, ecstatic, and precisely regulated social formations that protestant and other heretical sects have brought to America from England since the seventeenth century and that they then tested and developed. On the other, there is the aftermath of this development: rock and roll.
In reduced and simplified terms, Graham’s thesis would be that this connection is the forgotten link to the counter culture that is based on pop music. When he formulated this thesis in the early 1980s, it was new and consequential. This was also the time when it looked like rock and roll could once again rejuvenate and reinvent itself as a messianic, transgressive culture by way of punk and New Wave. In New York, the so-called No Wave culture combined experimental rock music (James Chance, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Mars, DNA, later, Sonic Youth) with a Super-8 Film avant-garde (Scott & Beth B, Eric Mitchell, Lydia Lunch, James Nares, Vivienne Dick and later Nick Zedd, Richard Kern etc.). The return of an explosive mixture of elements from messianic religion and nihilistic aggression in the music of the early 1980s appeared to verify Graham’s theory that he developed when considering people from the 1960s and 1970s, like Jim Morrison and Patti Smith.
These days, the diverse phenomena that have helped to shape rock and roll culture—especially its revolutionary Messianism—have taken on every day appearances in the society of the spectacle. For that reason, they have had to have been ripped out of their original context. Graham’s video essay has become so pertinent because he has worked out the elements that—often unconsciously—make the important connections in rock culture. He exposed the subcutaneous traces of a genealogy, which at first seem to be comprised only of the particularly crude and clear appearances that do not make any foundational connections. Graham’s theory of performativity, however, clearly exposes the latent element that determines the entirety of classic rock culture, namely, the stabilizing aspect of the performative act that creates community. Graham shows precisely how the celebrated sexuality of the individual, of the star, creates the sense of community. But the community is one that is produced in a quasi-religious manner by independently motivated individuals who have experienced transgressions vis-à-vis a hyper-individual performer, instead of priests or sacrificial animals.
–– Diedrich Diederichsen
This text is an excerpt of Diedrich Diederichsen’s essay “Ecstasy and Abstraction. Dan Graham’s Description of Counter Culture in Rock My Religion and Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty,” in Figura Cuncta Videntis, TBA21 exh. cat (Cologne: Walther König, 2011), 109–114.
*1942 in Urbana, USA | Living and working in New York, USA
55 min 27 sec
It is interesting that one of the most important texts on the theory of rock music is neither a text nor is it by a theorist of rock music or the counter culture. Rather, it is by a visual artist. First of all, Dan Graham’s Rock My Religion is a video, from which a transcription was made. The title, however, has also been used for the edition of his collected writings from 1965 – 1990 that includes this transcript. Secondly, it is the first systematic work concerning the connection between sexuality and capitalism as the basis of a cultural complex with many different, but nevertheless specific forms of appearance. Graham focuses on two symptoms of the American version of the complex. On one hand, there is the prehistory of a specific combination of socialist-utopian, ecstatic, and precisely regulated social formations that protestant and other heretical sects have brought to America from England since the seventeenth century and that they then tested and developed. On the other, there is the aftermath of this development: rock and roll.
In reduced and simplified terms, Graham’s thesis would be that this connection is the forgotten link to the counter culture that is based on pop music. When he formulated this thesis in the early 1980s, it was new and consequential. This was also the time when it looked like rock and roll could once again rejuvenate and reinvent itself as a messianic, transgressive culture by way of punk and New Wave. In New York, the so-called No Wave culture combined experimental rock music (James Chance, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Mars, DNA, later, Sonic Youth) with a Super-8 Film avant-garde (Scott & Beth B, Eric Mitchell, Lydia Lunch, James Nares, Vivienne Dick and later Nick Zedd, Richard Kern etc.). The return of an explosive mixture of elements from messianic religion and nihilistic aggression in the music of the early 1980s appeared to verify Graham’s theory that he developed when considering people from the 1960s and 1970s, like Jim Morrison and Patti Smith.
These days, the diverse phenomena that have helped to shape rock and roll culture—especially its revolutionary Messianism—have taken on every day appearances in the society of the spectacle. For that reason, they have had to have been ripped out of their original context. Graham’s video essay has become so pertinent because he has worked out the elements that—often unconsciously—make the important connections in rock culture. He exposed the subcutaneous traces of a genealogy, which at first seem to be comprised only of the particularly crude and clear appearances that do not make any foundational connections. Graham’s theory of performativity, however, clearly exposes the latent element that determines the entirety of classic rock culture, namely, the stabilizing aspect of the performative act that creates community. Graham shows precisely how the celebrated sexuality of the individual, of the star, creates the sense of community. But the community is one that is produced in a quasi-religious manner by independently motivated individuals who have experienced transgressions vis-à-vis a hyper-individual performer, instead of priests or sacrificial animals.
–– Diedrich Diederichsen
This text is an excerpt of Diedrich Diederichsen’s essay “Ecstasy and Abstraction. Dan Graham’s Description of Counter Culture in Rock My Religion and Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty,” in Figura Cuncta Videntis, TBA21 exh. cat (Cologne: Walther König, 2011), 109–114.
*1942 in Urbana, USA | Living and working in New York, USA