Don’t Touch Anything is a column the place William Van Meter takes a wonderful person to a noteworthy exhibition.
It was late September at Canada gallery in Tribeca, and the musician Chan Marshall was intently admiring Marc Hundley’s billboard-size portray of a backlit Achilles at nightfall, his sword and protect held aloft. Behind him, partially obscured, the phrase “nature” is printed in a big white font. “I love this one,” she stated and emulated his warrior pose. “It looks like he’s defending the earth.”
Marshall turned her head and remarked, “The gold background color could be climate change.” The gilded hue accentuated the rose-gold grill that lined the underside row of her entrance tooth. Marshall’s different equipment had been massive brass assertion hoop earrings, an outsized Panama hat, and a camouflage military surplus coat worn as a cape. On the again was her self-designed insignia rendered in electrical tape: enigmatic and rune-like, it’s a united “C” and “P” that stands for Cat Power, the sobriquet she information and performs beneath. A visionary songwriter, her voice is incomparable.
Chan Marshall admires Marc Hundley’s Nature (2023). Photo: Elvin Tavarez.
Marshall regarded throughout the room on the silver-tinged The Narcissus of Pompeii, the opposite key piece that bookends the exhibition, an outline of a statue misplaced in his personal magnificence. “It looks like he’s staring at a cellphone—self-obsessed while lava flows and the world is burning.” Hundley’s “The Vanity of Human Greatness” closes on October 22, and it’s a deft research of pop graphics and blurred artwork types interplaying with prospers of the profound. Besides the dramatic Roman centerpieces, Hundley recreates movie stills and ads, appropriating pictures from old books and dictionaries.
Marshall’s subsequent full-length, her twelfth, additionally offers with covers. Cat Power Sings Dylan is out November 10 and preempted by three sold-out Los Angeles performances. The album sounds each totally important and like a throwback: indie sufficient for her hardcore followers who see her as her technology’s Dylan, however universally pop sufficient to cross over to his personal followers and a wider realm. Recorded in 2022 at London’s Royal Albert Hall, it’s a track-by-track recreation of the historic 1966 “Dylan goes electric” present, his post-Newport Folk Festival live performance that rendered his European fan base apoplectic amidst cries of “Judas!” from the viewers. Marshall’s vocals sound totally assured. “My hands were shaking so bad I had to make fists and shove them down into my suit jacket pockets to control my nerves,” she stated, and walks as much as the floral-patterned They thought he would combat fiercely (2023). In Hundley’s assertion on the present, he equates the work with bullfighting and girls’s love of true crime.
Cat Power’s Chan Marshall visits Marc Hundley’s exhibition “The Vanity of Human Greatness.” Photo: Elvin Tavarez.
Cat Power Sings Dylan might be Marshall’s first reside album, however the fourth assortment of covers since 2000’s plaintively highly effective benchmark The Covers Record. It’s required listening and opens with the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” however sans swagger and refrain, slowed all the way down to a lament. Marshall usually celebrates a music by deconstructing it, including her personal lyrics, discarding passages, fully altering the music—mind-melding with the songwriter and making a pastiche. Earlier in her profession these would usually come off as channeling unhappiness and ache, a psychic howl. “To me they sounded triumphant,” she stated. When unruly audiences would jokingly name out for the Lynyrd Skynyrd anthem “Free Bird,” she’d reply with a straight-faced somnambulant dirge. On her final assortment, 2022’s Covers, she turned Bob Seger’s cheeseball energy ballad “Against the Wind” right into a building squall.
“How you might enjoy the song by turning on your radio or putting on the record, I enjoy the song by singing it,” Marshall stated. “I can hear things in my head that aren’t there,” she stated of her course of. “I don’t know how to describe it. They look like dense colors that are moving. I can’t hear them exactly, but I know that the notes go up or down, or whatever. I have no idea what I’m doing, but my brain knows what it needs to be. My subconscious has heard what it could be. I’m just scrambling to articulate what my subconscious heard.” As such, Marshall doesn’t attempt for duplication. “The only way I’m going to be able to personally believe that I’m covering the song,” she stated, “is if I fuck it up a little bit. Because I’m the one that has to like it and believe it.” The result’s usually unrecognizable from the unique.
Marc Hundley, A Battle (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Canada.
Except with regards to Bob Dylan. Dylan has all the time been sacrosanct when she’s completed a rendition. “I don’t want to do anything wrong,” she stated quietly. “He’s the Mount Everest of American songwriters. I wanted to do something that feels super-monumental, to make sure that my respect for his songs was in alignment.”
Marshall was raised by her grandmother after which shifted between her dad and mom who launched her to Dylan’s information at round six years old. “Listening to Bob, it was almost like a magic spell or listening to a fable,” she says, and takes a seat on a bench beneath Cigarette (for James) (2023). This room within the gallery is meant to emulate an out of doors streetscape, the work doubling as ads. Hundley can be a talented furnishings maker and crafts all the seating and constructions in his exhibits by hand (he additionally made a carpet for this one). As Marshall pretended to smoke beneath the recreation of Roy Lichtenstein’s monumental cigarette, Hundley, who was popping by to fulfill a possible purchaser, came to visit and hugged Marshall and defined the theme of his exhibition.
“I read The Castle of Otranto [1764], which is the first gothic novel,” Hundley stated. “I liked it in the book when Horace Walpole said, ‘Behold the vanity of human greatness!’ I was like, oh my god. We think we’re so great, and we’re not sustainable. We love killing each other. We’re sitting on the top of a food chain with a gun.” Hundley’s imaginative and prescient isn’t nihilistic, although. His present riffs on totally different artwork actions, the dial twisting by eras with themes exploring violence, peace, and pleasure, and hidden inside are deeply private obscured vignettes, addresses, and birthdays—Easter eggs to mates and family members, a mode Marshall can recognize, with shoutouts buried inside her deeply private biographical lyrics.
Marshall sits atop a bench at Hundley’s present. The artist makes all the seating for his exhibitions. Photo: Elvin Tavarez.
Hundley leaves and Marshall and I’m going to a big bench centered in entrance of Narcissus. She sits on the ground and outstretches her legs beneath it like a toddler at a espresso desk. I sprawl atop prefer it’s her piano and I’m going to warble torch songs. Marshall’s fashion of piano and guitar taking part in are rudimentary, primal and distinctive. “I don’t know how to play, I was never taught,” she stated. “I don’t know chords, I just find something that I like in my head and I play it.”
Marshall and Hundley met peripherally within the Nineties, when ‘downtown’ was a a lot smaller idea, with a vibrant Lower East Side scene centered across the Ludlow Street bar Max Fish. Marshall was continually touring. Both had been expensive mates of Ben Cho, an ahead-of-his time (and now much-copied) clothier who was additionally a connecter of creatives in disparate realms, and in a way the glue that held the scene collectively. He overdosed in 2017 and Marshall sang “I’ll Be Seeing You” at his memorial service, the place she grew to become higher acquainted with Hundley and his twin brother.
The gallery was now bustling with a Friday crowd, and a few sneered at us showing overly snug and slovenly. We ignored them they usually swirled round and shortly appeared to vanish. Achilles was watching over us. Marshall decamped to Miami round 2005, however has saved a room in an East Village house since 1994. As she reclined within the gallery, she mused about how she might need taken a really totally different path. “Before I started singing and writing songs in Atlanta, I was always painting,” she stated. “I knew that I would be a painter. But when I moved here, my objective wasn’t to be in a band or to be an artist. I just had to get out of the South.”
Marc Hundley, Pansies (for Bill) (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Canada.
Cat Power started as a four-piece band in Atlanta (two of the members have since died). Marshall and the drummer moved to New York within the winter of 1992. The state of affairs swiftly grew to become dire. “It was freezing cold on Bleecker Street and it was snow up to the knees,” Marshall recalled. “I didn’t have any job. I didn’t have any money. My roommates were about to evict me. I went into a store because snow was blowing sideways and I was pretending that I was going there to shop.” The attentive salesperson would transform a lifeline. “I went in the dressing room and I just couldn’t stop crying,” Marshall stated. “I felt so stupid. I was trying on this, like, thong one-piece situation, and I showed her and I was bawling and I couldn’t speak. It was before I could look people in the eye. But then she started asking me questions like, ‘What’s wrong?’”
The salesperson hooked Marshall up with a brief job on the boutique after which with an ongoing gig at Todd’s Copy, a now-mythic Xerox joint that was additionally an art-world nexus on Mott Street. “Kiki Smith, Jim Jarmusch, Nan Goldin, Barbara Ess, Vincent Gallo, John Giorno—he was a buddy—all these people were coming in,” Marshall recalled. “Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore used to work there, before my time.”
The Cat Power duo gigged at experimental venues like ABC No Rio and Bicycle. “There was none of that rock-and-roll posturing,” Marshall stated. “None of that cool vibe. It was just real expressive. People weren’t locked into a genre. I didn’t know how to sing, I screamed.”
Installation view of Marc Hundley, “The Vanity of Human Greatness.” Courtesy of Canada.
The copy store segued to a profession as an artwork assistant, first with the sculptor Carol Kreeger Davidson. “She was brilliant, but damn, she was tough,” Marshall stated. “She was just hard on me. You know how that New York vibe can be really tough. She had these huge bronze sculptures. My job was to move it from point A to point B without a dolly, so it was a living nightmare.” Marshall switched camps when she met one other artist with a studio in the identical building within the freight elevator, the sculptor Joan Giordano (who fortunately labored in paper). “She could tell I was poor by the way I was dressed,” Marshall stated, who was concurrently working as a nanny, bartender, and housekeeper. She sees the artist as a savior throughout this struggling interval. Marshall paid her homage years later—that’s a 1978 Giordano sculpture on the entrance of The Covers Record.
Marc Hundley, La Couronne d’Or (2023). Courtesy of the artist and Canada.
Marshall goals of having the ability to go to an artist’s retreat. She nonetheless attracts and takes pictures. “In my 20s, I would paint in acrylic with muted, pale colors on thick, raw, unbleached paper—expressionistic faces of friends and strangers from photos I would take from around the world. In my early 30s I started using metal tools and thick brushes with wide, pointless strokes, with same muted pale colors on large canvases. They were all abstract; I was painting for the direct ‘healing feeling’ I had been missing. Then in my late 30s I did some large, minimal, fine pencil and charcoal figurative drawings with one or two points of acrylic color, with short texts.” Most of her work had been destroyed in a flood in her Atlanta home. “I have a small painting I salvaged,” she stated. “I painted it from a Polaroid I took from the back of a speeding van, on the desolate highway from Tanzania to Mozambique.”
The following day Marshall was off to England to go to the artist Tracey Emin. “We became friends over Instagram during the pandemic,” she defined. “She came to the Dylan show. We were wearing the same outfit, three-piece black suits. Sorry to everybody else who’s a female, but she’s my favorite female living artist.”
The musician Chan Marshall stands exterior of Canada gallery on September 22, 2023. Photo: Elvin Tavarez.
After the subsequent month’s Dylan exhibits, Marshall is worked up to focus on her personal materials. She has three months booked to document the subsequent studio album and might be producing it herself, in addition to taking part in all of the devices. “It’s a tearjerker,” she stated. “Get your fucking Kleenex ready.” Some songs are new, others have been gestating for 20 years. She’s excited for her subsequent chapter.
“When I had my son, there was a lot I had to work through,” she stated. “A lot of life changes that I was going through at the time. The phone just stops ringing for a lot of women who have children. There’s a lot less opportunity for artists, actresses, anybody in the field of any work. I feel like it should be the opposite.” She went on, “Not being a kid anymore and being sober 152 days today, I am now able to see the support I have around me. I feel like I’m at the beginning of something again.”
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