MONTREAL - Three Montreal museums are hosting concurrent exhibits this winter exploring the joyous, harsh and potent brew that is rock 'n' roll.
"These are exhibits that you hear and sounds that you see," says John Zeppetelli, curator with Montreal's Foundation for Contemporary Art, which will feature visual artist Christian Marclay's "Replay" exposition from Nov. 30 to March 29.
"Music is a very successful pop art form. It's pop culture with accessible cultural reference points. These are images we're all familiar with."
Marclay crafts musical pieces "plunderphonics"-style -- creating unique compositions by re-imagining, re-inflecting and reappropriating found and discarded audio -- and focuses on how sound can be visualized.
The works featured in "Replay" will include "Video Quartet," a visual and audio collage that Zeppetelli calls one of the great works of the 20th century.
"It's beautiful to behold and fantastic to listen to," he said. "It's truly exultant. It's a masterpiece. There's no other word for it."
The concept is simple: four simultaneous screen projections of stitched-together musical Hollywood film clips create a pure sound montage bursting with pop culture references.
"It's all about energy," said Zeppetelli. "It's all to do with sounds and noise."
Marclay, whose work has been featured at the Tate, Pompidou and Guggenheim museums, has collaborated with musicians as diverse as radical rockers Sonic Youth and avant-garde composers Kronos Quartet and was inspired early on by punk's raw and chaotic energy.
"Replay" will also feature more Hollywood-influenced pieces, including a collage of shoot-'em-up film clips in which the viewer is literally caught in the crossfire.
Up the street, at the Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal, "Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967" explores the relationship between avant-garde art and rock music over the past 40 years, and runs until Jan. 11.
Named for the Rolling Stones song and the Jean-Luc Godard documentary film, the show features 130 works by 60 artists who examine musical culture through photography, sculpture, video, paintings and installations.
"It's not a show about rock 'n' roll but a show about the links between contemporary art and rock," said assistant curator Francois Letourneau.
The exhibit addresses key geographic areas and their influence on artists and rock musicians from the past 40 years, from continental Europe's Kraftwerk , to Iggy and the Stooges out of the U.S. Midwest, and the U.K.'s punk scene.
"What I really wanted to do was set out and tell this history, using 1967 as a starting point," said Dominic Molon, curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, who organized the original show.
It was a pivotal year for rock.
Pop artist Andy Warhol produced the Velvet Underground's first album and the Beatles released "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" just a few weeks after guitarist Jimi Hendrix made his debut with "Are You Experienced."
The show underpins the intersections between art and rock music and the dual role many artists play in the sonic and visual realms.
"So many artists have been inspired by rock music, have grown up with it, have made it a part of their lives," said Molon.
"Art takes a risk and enters into this Faustian bargain by collaborating with this fast youth-oriented popular culture that risks looking populist, not looking serious."
It's where rock 'n' roll and high art collide and erodes the boundaries between the two.
"Visual artists are the most resistant (to this collaboration). They have a very purist idea of the relationship between art and rock music," he said.
Marclay makes an appearance at the show with his vinyl-covered floor installation, along with visually arresting pieces by British artist Jim Lambie and U.S.- based artist Robert Longo.
Warhol also has his own multimedia exhibition -- "Warhol Live" -- probing the role of music and dance in his art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which runs until Jan. 18.
His early fascination with music and fame and willingness to embrace everything from pop hits to high-brow classical compositions helped spawn a four-decade career exploring 20th-century musical culture.
"Warhol loved every form of music and dance, whether it was classical forms, avant-garde forms or popular forms," said Matt Wrbican, archivist at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
"He was just all around it all the time."
Warhol's work with the Velvets also produced the classic peelable banana album cover featured alongside the other 50 album covers he illustrated between 1949 and his death in 1987.
Cover collector Paul Marechal said they show the transformation of the marketing and sale of music through image, ranging from the personification of the artist to the conceptualization of the band, like the zippered cover for the Stones' "Sticky Fingers" album
"Andy Warhol, more then any other artist, understood the importance of drawing music," he said.
The exhibit, a collaboration among the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Andy Warhol Museum, incorporates more than 100 music samples and features 650 works from Warhol and other artists.
