Brian Eno at 77 Million Paintings
In a career spanning almost thirty five years and an astonishing range of artistic practice, Brian Eno has become an iconic figure within international contemporary culture. As an artist, musician, ideologue and systems-maker, he has not only written, performed, recorded and produced some of the most intoxicating and original music of the last thirty years, but has also established a philosophy of cultural production which links the enquiring spirit of conceptual art to the broadest applications of popular culture and sociology.
Best known in the field of music, Eno's discography as a musician, producer and artistic collaborator includes some of the most acclaimed recordings in the history of modern music. Artists as seminal yet varied as John Cale, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, David Bowie, Bono and Peter Gabriel have chosen to work with Eno, and he is one of the most sought after figures working across the spectrum of contemporary music, from guitar driven rock to film scores and electronica.
Eno's role as a founder member of the art rock group Roxy Music, in 1971, can still be regarded as one of the most accomplished debuts in the history of pop. By colliding a highly stylised selection of popular music forms "from French chanson to surfer rockabilly by way of Johnnie Ray" with an uncompromising backdrop of atonal, electronically massaged atmospherics, Roxy Music were and remain the most eloquent and spectacular testimony to Eno's definition of pop.
But Eno's creativity required a broader laboratory and playground in which to renew itself, unboundaried by the specific demands of working within a rock group. Departing Roxy Music subsequent to their second album, "For Your Pleasure", in 1972, a typically eclectic yet interconnected set of projects immediately followed.
Two solo albums, "Here Come The Warm Jets" and "Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)" matched Eno's exuberant surrealism as a lyricist to his warmly melodic vocal style. They also maintained his fusion of avant garde freedoms with snarling rock theatricality and a near Beat Boom pop sensibility. Eno's now legendary "Another Green World" and "Before And After Science" albums were released in 1975 and 1977 respectively.
In the early and middle 1970's, his recordings with the former King Crimson guitarist, Robert Fripp : "No Pussyfooting" and "Evening Star" established a template for luxuriously minimalist recordings that contained within their sheer aesthetic gorgeousness and new approach to how music might be made, and, as important, how it might be heard and listened to.
In 1975, in collaboration with the artist Peter Schmidt, Eno also developed the "Oblique Strategies" set of problem-solving cards for artists. Each card states an act or attitude which can make an immediate intervention into the creative process. In effect, this simple yet highly refined mechanism pre-figures the current vogue for re-patterning creative thinking as life-coached today through NLP programme by nearly a quarter of a century.
It was also in the 1970s that Eno established the "Obscure" label of recordings. Audaciously harnessing his by-now extensive fame as a "rock" musician, to a progressive, curatorial role as a producer, Eno single handedly brought some of the most interesting and important musicians from the musical avant garde to the vast new audience commanded by rock. Thus Michael Nyman, John Cage, Gavin Bryars and The Penguin Café Orchestra, as well as many others, released albums on "Obscure" in a series of uniform (yet slightly differing) black sleeves, and a special lower cost to a mainstream pop or rock album. The series would also include Eno's own "Discreet Music" : a recording of simple variants of musical tones, and a founding example of Eno's creation of Ambient music as a genre and a softly philosophical statement.
By the late 1970s, Eno's legendary collaboration with David Bowie on the latter's "Low," "Heroes" and "Lodger" albums, combined with his own "Ambient" series and "Music For Films" releases, enthroned Eno as a the presiding spirit of much immediately post-punk, industrial and electronic music. In his work with Talking Heads, Devo, Snatch, Ultravox, as well has renewed curatorial role on the "No New York" compilation of New York New Wave groups, Eno was regarded as a Phil Spector-like figure for new groups enabled by punk.
Eno's audio-visual work shown internationally in venues as prestigious as the Venice Biennale, the Pompidou Centre, the Hayward Gallery, London, White Cube/Jay Jopling and the Marble Palace at the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg makes eloquent the social philosophy which seems to lie at the core of his thinking as an artist. These created environments ask the visitor to leave aside their preconceptions of what "looking at art" might involve, and instead attempt to experience the present moment, in the present moment.
Eno has spoken in the past of how such environments might become a part of civic architecture, providing space for people to take refuge from their hectic, short-term thinking, rather like public parks for the spirit. It is at such a point, perhaps, between aesthetics, science and politics, that all of Brian Eno's remarkable achievements are ultimately combined.
(Michael Bracewell, January 2005)