Was Animal Collective Worthy of Guggenheim Prestige?
Animal Collective and Danny Perez debut Transverse Temporal Gyrus at The Guggenheim
Thursday night, popular psychedelic indie band Animal Collective and visual artist Danny Perez engulfed The Guggenheim's rotunda with the debut of their site-specific performance piece Transverse Temporal Gyrus.
Weeks ago when the concert was announced, the band's rabid young fan base rapidly bought up all of the tickets, forcing the Museum to add an early second performance due to the demand. For the Guggenheim and their initiative towards appealing to a younger crowd, Animal Collective offered them the perfect opportunity. Unlike past concerts that have taken place within the rotunda, this Animal Collective performance provides a more solidified link between the worlds of fine art and popular music. But also unlike when a band like The Walkmen played inside Frank Lloyd Wright's spiral palace, Animal Collective's performance was very much a work of art. So with its display inside such a prestigious institution where artists such as Matthew Barney, Daniel Buren and Cai Guo-Qiang have transformed the space in recent years, has the Guggenheim given Transverse Temporal Gyrus more prestige than it's worth?
With last year's critically acclaimed record, Merriweather Post Pavillion, Animal Collective rose into an elite class of bands with both extensive commercial and critical appeal. Musically, they had managed to marry an experimental electronic psychedelia with Beach Boys '60s pop production and hooks. With their concerts, over the course the the last few years, they have become more and more prone to stretch their songs out into more lengthy soundscapes. The lights and stage design of their concerts have also gradually developed into something more elaborate over time. For anyone following these developments with Animal Collective, Transverse Temporal Gyrus seems like a natural progression.
Visually, Transverse Temporal Gyrus consisted of the trio existing almost motionless on the bottom floor, outfitted in strange costumes and white masks resembling the rabbit from Donnie Darko. Each member, standing about 5-10 feet from each other, was stationed behind an amorphous sculpture containing a round glowing screen with imagery that resembled the magma of a lava lamp. In front of them all was a row of clear, brightly lit stalagmites standing a few feet tall, and behind them glowed an amorphous white glacier sculpture with fragmented colors projected upon it. The entire space of the Guggenheim was lit up with bright shades of magenta, blue, and green.
Sonically, the pre-recorded music perfectly encompassed the space, often times circulating around the rotunda in a spiral through the speakers, fully utlizing the space. The soundscape flowed constantly throughout the entirity of the lengthy 3-hour performance, often building towards the more expected Animal Collective freak-out fans expect, but never quite breaking out of its moody psychedelia structure.
The members of Animal Collective have always displayed the strong influence of legendary avant-garde musicians The Residents in their songs, and while I experienced Transverse Temporal Gyrus last night, it was impossible to overlook the strong resemblance of the performance to The Residents' revolutionary 1979 record Eskimo. It was as though Eskimo has been brought into a more futuristic context with the fragmented blips and bleeps of the computer age co-mingling with the amorphous sounds of nature. Further strengthening the Residents connection, the costumes and stage design very much echoed the stage setups of past Residents tours. As major fans of the highly influential performers, I have to believe that any resemblance comes out of influence and homage to their heroes rather than anything less respectable.
Possibly best experienced on hallucinogenic drugs, Transverse Temporal Gyrus could act as a fine first step for Animal Collective to progress as something far more interesting than a simple rock band. It may also help influence the worlds of art and music to exist in a more unified place where performers like Laurie Anderson and David Byrne have always worked towards. No matter what the end result is, Animal Collective has now been given the torche to carry as the main link between fine art and popular music—a position Sonic Youth may have once held. Unlike Sonic Youth, Animal Collective has a younger fan base less interested in experimentation, so events like this could work against Animal Collective leaving fans disenchanted (as many seemed on Thursday).
