John Nixon: EPW Polychrome
Folkways records are the perfect marriage of political and cultural artifact, vinyl junkie fix, and for the contemporary artist, aesthetic eye candy.
For the exhibition of the work of Folkways designer Ronald Clyne (1925-2006) at The Narrows, John Nixon and Stephen Bram displayed a collection of his album covers that ran in a continuous frieze around the gallery walls. These records can still occasionally be found lurking in dusty second hand record bins, while a search on Google brings up quite an extensive online archive representing the more familiar folk forms like blues, jazz and hillbilly music through to less well known material from native cultures such as Creole songs of Haiti, New Guinea folk songs, Melanesian chants, Torres Strait Islander and Maori songs—to name but a few.
Nixon and Bram trawled their own and others collections (such as that of Sonic Youth collaborator and fellow artist Marco Fusinato) for examples of Clyne’s work which utlilise the modernist simplicity of two colour printing, a stock-in-trade of Folkways graphic output and a process familiar to the world of agit prop publishing, political posters and song sheets. The images on the covers are mostly of an ethnographic nature, (monotone photographs for example), or use modernist squares and text, as in the blues and jazz covers. Other ephemera in the exhibition included a small display case of books on Folkways, an album of songs by Barbra Dane with the striking title I Hate The Capitalist System, and a video interview featuring Folkways label founder Moses Asch with his own collection of tribal art arranged tastefully in the background.
Asch established Folkways (arguably the longest running independent record company in the world) in