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Call for Responses: Pop! Art School Reunions
Pop Music, Pop Art, and Art Schools have long and entangled histories, from Warhol’s dalliance with The Velvet Underground to John Lennon, David Bowie, Brian Eno, and Kim Gordon, M.I.A. to Florence Welch. This special issue of Riffs journal calls for a reunion of these elements, but with an added ingredient: experimental music and performance. It is no accident that pop music was conceived in art schools in the 1960s and ‘70s at the same time that the boundaries between fine art, experimental music and performance were most fluid and least policed. Or that for the seminal art book project Notations (1968), John Cage and Alison Knowles aimed to include examples of music from Arnold Schoenberg (writer of cabaret songs as well as pioneer of serial music) to The Beatles.
For this issue, Riffs is collaborating with the artist, performer and musician Dr Anat Ben-David (Chicks On Speed / Central Saint Martin’s and RCA) to present workshops and performances with the Royal College of Art, Birmingham School of Art, the University of Leeds, and the Royal Academy of Art (RCA, London). These events will act as a canvas and catalyst for contributions to Riffs, reflecting on the relationships between Pop Music, Pop Art, Art School, and Experimental Music and Performance, potentially ranging from reviews, photo essays, and lyrics, to collages, AI pieces, or other artworks and creative interventions.
We also welcome contributions as articles addressing the theme from different perspectives, from those unable to attend these events. These might consider the peculiar relationship between “Art” and “Pop” and the “double lives” of those who practise across both domains (Heiser, 2019). Or their tangled histories – such as the coining of “pop” as a speech bubble (“POP!”) from the end of a gun in Eduardo Paolozzi’s 1947 collage I was a Rich Man’s Plaything. To the fascination with media culture and pop stardom of pop artists just as modernist conceptions of Art were sliding towards the postmodern (Mednicov, 2018). The erasure and sublimation of experimental music from founding as well as recent accounts of the art / pop relationship could also offer points for reflection (Frith and Horne, 1987; Walker, 1987; Roberts, 2018; Strange, 2022; Diederichsen, 2023).
Pop! Art School Reunions will be edited by Dr Ed McKeon (Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, BCU) and published online in winter 2025.
If you can, please join us for one of the free events in Birmingham or Leeds.
If not, please do respond to and expand the discussion and provocations within this call on Pop! Art School Reunions.
Please send us your full piece (and a short bio for each contributor) by June 16th 2025 to riffsjournal@gmail.com.
Your response can be text-based (in the form of a poem, lyrics, a review, a short story, an ethnographic study or theoretical reflection etc), visual (in the form of a photograph essay, a zine, etc), audio (an original song or spoken word piece, sound art, curated found sounds, etc), audio-visual, or an engagement with a range of forms.
We ask that responses are less than 4,000 words or up to 8 pages of A4 in length. Please only include materials that were produced by yourself or can be used through a Creative Commons License (with appropriate credits included). Please host audio / audiovisual elements externally (ensuring long-term access for readers) and provide links to these as part of your submission.
Submissions will be reviewed by one external expert. This process will be blind unless the identity of the creator(s) is central to the piece. The reviewer will then provide suggestions for the development of the submission. All accepted submissions will be included in an online issue of Riffs and hosted on our journal website.
As ever, we encourage solo and collaborative pieces from contributors from all sectors and backgrounds. As a volunteer run journal, we cannot offer contributor fees, but the issue will be available Open Access, and the copyright remains with the creators (for circulated and republication elsewhere).
References
Diederichsen, Diedrich. Aesthetics of Pop Music. Cambridge: Polity, 2023.
Frith, Simon, and Howard Horne. Art Into Pop. London: Routledge, 1987.
Heiser, Jörg. Double Lives in Art and Pop. Berlin: Sternberg, 2019.
Mednicov, Melissa. (2018). Jukebox Modernism: Popular Art and Popular Music. NYC: Routledge.
Roberts, Mike. How Art Made Pop And Pop Became Art. London: Tate, 2018.
Strange, Simon. Blank Canvas: Art School Creativity from Punk to New Wave. Bristol: Intellect, 2022.
Walker, John A. Cross-Overs: Art Into Pop / Pop Into Art. London: Routledge, 1987.