Five for Friday, written by a variety of MoMA staff members, is our attempt to spotlight some of the compelling, charming, and downright curious works in the Museum’s rich collection.
To call David Bowie an art enthusiast would be something of an understatement; at times it seemed that his very existence was an art project.
Hipgnosis. Album cover of Pink Floyd, Animals. 1977. Courtesy StormStudios and Roddy Bogawa
As a teenager growing up in Los Angeles in the late 1970s, grappling with his identity as an Asian American of Japanese heritage, Roddy Bogawa found community in the hardcore rock and punk scenes, where being different was cool. He and his friends spent hours perusing music stores and studying album covers.
The Beatles’ Revolver, with Klaus Voorman’s haunting illustration and photo-collage work, was the first LP cover added to the design collection in my time at MoMA and I was thrilled to see it arrive. Recently Help!, Rubber Soul, and Sgt Peppers’ Lonely Heart’s Club Band LP covers were acquired and all are currently on view in Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye along with The Beatles, aka the White Album, from MoMA’s drawings and prints collection. Exhibited together, these Beatles album covers offer a design-based narrative of the band’s evolution, and at same time read as a cultural narrative of the times.
Installation view of Making Music Modern: Design for Ear and Eye, The Museum of Modern Art, November 15, 2014–November 1, 2015. Photo: John Wronn
“Don’t you wonder sometimes/’Bout sound and vision?” sings David Bowie wistfully on a track from the album Low, released in 1977. Recently I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how music—an essentially invisible and immaterial art form—grounds us in the physical world, influencing the mood and tone of everyday life. Without it we definitely lose our bearings.
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