Sonic Boom

Exploring art's explosive relationship with rock

September 28, 2007—Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art may not be the most rock 'n' roll place in the world, but that's changing (a little) this weekend. Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 eschews typical rock "art"—apologies if you think John Lennon's scribbles of Yoko nude deserve the removal of those quotation marks—for the actual kind, like Richard Kern's photograph Kim Gordon With Gun, left. (Slater Bradley's video Year of the Doppelganger, in which a football team practices in an empty stadium while a drummer slugs out the beat to Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks," we're admittedly on the fence about.) Source material for some of rock's most memorable album covers is here, too, including Peter Saville's classical inspirations for New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies, and Pedro Bell's dense Afro-futurist marker drawings for Funkadelic's The Electric Spanking of War Babies. "It was interesting to me to balance works containing rock iconography with works that have a more oblique representation of rock and roll's intensity," explains curator Dominic Molon, who's clearly not going to let some rock exhibit keep him from talking like someone who works in a museum. For a somewhat less oblique representation of intensity, check out Rock/Art, the museum's October 7 concert featuring seven Chicago indie bands. And bring a brush.

Sympathy for the Devil, Sept. 29–Jan. 6, 2008, Rock/Art (featuring Califone, The 1900s, Flosstradamus with the Cool Kids, The Eternals, Headache City, and Poster Children), Oct. 7, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave., (312) 280-2660, mcachicago.org