Song as a Force of Social Transformation
Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
Susan Philipsz installation La Chanson
In Seville there’s a magnificent art museum where, during the last summer, I fell in love with an installation of the artist Susan Philipsz; there was silence in the air but the echo of the song throughout the space. This group exhibition is called La Chanson. The show, which brings different visual and sound installations together, takes its name from the French musical movement of the 1950s and 60s led by Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel, Boris Vian, Serge Gainsbourg, Juliette Gréco, Georges Brassens and Léo Ferré, among others.
The artist attempt is to underline the natural combination of contrasts that most of the main figures of the Chanson movement created in their songs. The use of irony vs drama; the importance of their preoccupation with the emotional and the social. It is these contrasts, combined with apparent ease by the Chanson movement, that provide the focus for this group exhibition, which-like the rest of its companions in the exhibition cycle devoted to the transformative social force attributed to song-attempts to analyze the role that the popular music of recent decades has played in instigating major changes of both a personal and collective kind.
Morethanlove
Susan Philipsz installation La Chanson
Songs: Nothing Last forever (Echo and the Bunnymen) | Pyramid Song (Radiohead)
Edith Piaf
