Pop! Art School Reunions – Birmingham (UK) – 25th March 2025
Join us for a free event at the Birmingham School of Art (room G. 20) on Tuesday the 25th of March 2025, 17.30-20.00.
Please be in the room for the 17.30 start. Birmingham School of Art, Margaret Street is accessible on all floors. Further information on location and accessibility can be found here.
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.
Artists’ practices were often intuitive and immediate – they didn’t wait to be told what was appropriate to express. Rather than simply expanding the discourse, then, this special issue begins by emphasising the necessity of doing, of enactment. Special guest artist Dr Anat Ben-David (Chicks On Speed / Central Saint Martin’s and RCA) is leading workshops with fine art and music students exploring improvisation, song-writing, image-making, and performance, with informal performances at three: Birmingham School of Art (25 March), the University of Leeds (18 March) and the RCA, London (20th Feb, invite only).
This series of events will act as the canvas and catalyst for contributions to Riffs, reflecting on the relationships between Pop Music, Pop Art, Art School, and Experimental Music and Performance. In the spirit of not predetermining what is appropriate in this context, we are open to responses in the form of reviews, photo essays, lyrics, theoretical speculations, collages, AI pieces, or other artworks and creative interventions. In this way, the journal becomes – for this issue only – a kind of exhibition catalogue for a series of Performance Art / gigging events crossed with a peer-reviewed journal.
After attending this event, please send us your response (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, and an ethnographic study 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).