by For decades, the Radioheads Thom Yorke and the artist Stanley Donwood have been locked up into an intensive creative partnership. They scribble over the drawings of the other, scribble into the other’s notebooks, slide each other, inspire each other. Your work has been on every radiohead album cover from The Bends, every Yorke solo plate, every poster and every T-shirt since 1995. Nothing is related to designers or agencies – the visual identity of Radiohead was completely monitored by Donwood and Yorke.
And now her artistic performance is celebrated in a kind of return home for the local hero Yorke in the Asmolean Museum in Oxford. There is no doubt that Donwood and Yorke, who got to know each other during his studies at the University of Exeter, created some of the most recognizable, omnipresent and maybe even iconic album cover of their generation. But do you make sense in a huge, historical gallery like The Ashmolan? Does something of it for good art? Does it get up if it has been removed from the context of the records and the goods for which it was designed? It’s a nice dream, but no.
It feels like they are in a very hip, but double record shops
The exhibition begins with LPS, CDs, posters and T-shirts that are arranged as if they are in a very hip but dark record store. The air -grown, fatal revival of the bends; The ghostly circuit diagrams and angry scribes from OK computer; The crying little guy of Amnesia; The mountains of Kid A; The multicolored poetry of the hail for the thief; The woodcuts of Yorkes The Eyany Gum. So the work should be seen. This is the context in which it works best: arranged like in racks, as if they could pull a plate off the wall and play them.
Donwood clearly has a problem with art galleries. “They are just intimidating – it’s not very democratic,” says a quote from his on the wall. “While you go to a record store and it is full of all types of Oiks.” I am not sure if I wrinkled myself. Plate shops can have exactly the same atmosphere of mocking exclusivity as galleries. There is a touchness here that the show feels a little bitter. Guys, you are on the Ashmolic. They do not kick the establishment, they are there.
The exhibition is album of album with sketchbooks and paintings that are exhibited to expose your creative process. Everything is assigned together, with Yorke and Donwood being positioned evenly.
OK computer found an unjust bar in the show early. The 1997 album conquered the zeitgeist of the era with the anxious dismantling of corporate lack, technological paranoia and capitalist surplus. It is still swinging, as well as his feeling of isolation and loneliness in a world in which they are constantly surrounded by people. The work of art looked like none of its era: with a highway that is overlaid with aircraft safety manuals, and the spirits of the people who drive past, the cover picture looks as the music sounds – cold, frustrated, isolated, desperate. A brilliant meeting with music and album works of art.
But it works infinitely better than CD use. You gain almost nothing when you see how these digital pictures are enlarged, framed and framed and accommodated on a gallery.
Radiohead would have difficulty grasping the moment as they did with OK computer. The same applies to art. Donwood and Yorke made huge, dark acrylic pictures for the ceiling of Kid A and Amnesiac. Here eight canvases are displayed and are an incredible chaos: poorly composed, poorly executed, dirty, played, confused landscapes that would even reject the RA summer exhibition. The paintings of spiders and trees for the 2011 king of limbs are worse; Sub-a-level attempts to put at the maximum that almost make me embarrassed for them.
The woodcuts for Yorkes solo albums are less visually offensive, and the ultra-colored paintings of rivers and forests for the latest albums of its other band The Smile work better than works of art, but are still entirely with everything you would call brilliant.
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Many of the work here, especially from the 90s and early 2000s, have entered the broader public awareness in a way that the album artwork is culturally proves. It is important. It has an impact. But that does not mean that something of it is particularly good or even interesting like art.
If you are a radiohead fan, there are countless insights and details to make you happy, but from the perspective of art it is a number of bad paintings. Donwood and Yorke probably shouldn’t have put themselves in this position, but they have done it to themselves, and that really hurts.
• This is what you get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke is from August 6th to January 11th in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford
