Mekons Delta by Douglas Wolk World Art Magazine

A little background for the uninitiated: The Mekons started as an art-school punk band in Leeds, England, in the late '70s, when art school and punk bands were practically synonymous. Their first record was a single called "Never Been In A Riot:' a hilariously inept riposte to the Clash's "White Riot:' In the subsequent 20 years, the band -named after the alien villain in the comic strip Dan Dare -learned to play their instruments, tried and failed to break up, made successful stabs at synth-pop, American country, dub and experimental music, released an album called Rock .n' Roll about the treason that "kap-eee-italismus' favorite boy-child" (meaning rock) has wrought, collaborated with the late novelist Kathy Acker, wrote most of a novel themselves… had legendarily horrible experiences with record companies, scattered to the ends of the earth and got back together for glorious, drunken, celebratory performances and recordings.

Oh, yes; and they've also operated as a visual-arts collective. "Mekons United," their multimedia show (with all works simply credited to "the Mekons"), was initially displayed at the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida, in April 1996; since then, it's also been shown at three other places in the USA, and there's also an impressive, unconventional catalogue of the show.

Jon Langford, probably the most visible Mekon (thanks to his plentiful musical side projects, solo art exhibitions and weekly comic strip in New City. in Chicago), answered some questions about the group's history and artistic practice. When the group started in the middle of punk's initial explosion, he says, "Our pants were caught on fire with all sorts of year-zero radicalism and idealism. We were always very good at saying what we didn't want to do or be, and then making something out of what was left. We didn't want to be artists or pop stars - we were more interested in politics."

By the mid '80s, though, the Mekons' art-school roots resurfaced. "We started our own label, Sin Recordings, and the visual stuff became more important - we worked collaboratively on that. We would have bursts of painting in damp cellars in Leeds. We'd work on paper simultaneously, bumping into one another and painting over what someone had just done."

Some of the "Mekons United" pieces look more collaborative than others -a few use multiple, distinctly different approaches In the same work, like the exquisite corpse-ish 16-panel piece, A Frightened Horse II. Others are more in a single style: The paintings of old-time country stars in the same color-knob-adjusted pointillist style Langford uses for some of his solo work. or the computer-manipulated photographs that repeat and reflect a single flash of nature as in a kaleidoscope mirror. What kinds of collaboration are involved in the Mekons' visual art? "They all come from a shared pool of ideas and experience, so in that sense they're all collaborations," Langford explains. "We tried to force the issue with various tactics. We've sent a lot of stuff back and forth in the mail -elected certain persons Captain of a painting and supposedly did their every bidding -but, having a bit of a problem with authority. did whatever we want anyway. We really try to think of it in the same way as writing songs: One person may finally execute the work, but there's a lot of fingers in the pie."

And, in fact, the bylines on some of the work are flexible, Langford points out. "When I show my work on my own, which is quite a lot at present, it's credited to me. But I used a lot of the same stuff in the "United" show, and credited it to the Mekons, as it comes out of our 20 years' experience on the fringes of the music industry." The way the music business turns the struggle between art and commerce into a horrible ongoing battle has been a constant presence in the Mekons’ career as musicians, and there are allusions to it all over the group’s artwork. Certain images recur, most often the head of Elvis Presley (superimposed transparently onto Pollock-like paint squiggles, or primitively painted in an array of frames that’s half Warhol lithograph, half Greek Orthodox shrine, or being stood in for by two Elvis impersonators in a multimedia collage about an attack on Margaret Thatcher). There’s a series of paintings of American country legends, seen in the context of the economics and politics of their lives: Hank Williams Signs His Contract (looking up and smiling at some kind of flayed and splayed carcass), Bob Wills Signs His Contract #1, Patsy Cline and the White Heat of Technology, Cold Cold War (Hank and the contract again, beneath a banner that reads "You’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive" and a cosmonaut’s head). These are followed, inevitably, by The Mekons Sign Their Contract, a creepy, bacchanalian piece with the band nowhere in sight (unless the passed-out blonde at one end of the banquet table is meant to be their singer Sally Timms).The series is painted in a single, grainy style; old photographs reconstructed through the discoloring, crosshatching fog of memory, with light vertical lines running down them like scratched-up film.

The Mekons’ work plays fascinatingly with the idea of photo-representation elsewhere, as well. Self-Portrait In The Image Of Herbert Huncke, the most striking piece in the show, incorporates three panels: a little black-and-white photograph of Huncke in his room, from a yellowing piece of newspaper, looking more than a little grotesque; a small color painting of the same scene, incorporating elements of painterly stylization (in the folds of cloth and the lines of Huncke’s face, for instance); and a much larger color painting, modeled on the small painting but incorporating the dot-screen effect of the newspaper photo. It raises a number of questions about where the "self-portrait" of the title lies, exactly -not to mention how a self-portrait can be in an image of someone else, and what the term even means in a work credited to a collective.

Their stylistic palette refers explicitly to great artists of the past, usually several at a time; while -being good socialists -they have a particular fondness for styles that are unusually labor-intensive. "We’re all working lads and lasses," says Langford. "We think of art- ists as workers, and we know what hard work is, trying to do a band for 20 years." Their dry sense of humor holds the elements together: A Boy by the Sea in the Style of 19th-Century American Folk Painting is exactly that, meticulously executed, but the canvas is also aged, cracked and dirtied to look like it is actually 150 years old. Is a 19th-century style necessarily linked to the grimy patina of age?

The funniest works they’ve done, though, are a series of paintings inspired by the band’s own past (and early repertoire), and by bombastic religious artwork. In This Sporting Life, three scruffy-looking athletes levitate mid-air beneath a pair of angels with gold coins sprinkling out of their hands; The Writing Of Where Were You’, painted in the same lush, quasi-Old Masters style, depicts more of the Heavenly Host lifting away drapery from a scene of boozy punks watching a band on stage -at avenue a few million times too posh to be an actual rock club. Only if you know the words of "Where Were You" (a two-chord rocker on an obscure single), is it possible to notice a reference to the lyrics, one of the drinkers watching a girl with yellow hair across the room: a sly joke on the modern impenetrability of allegorical meanings in classical painting.

The delight of the Mekons’ artwork is that it lives up to its ideals (of collaboration for the collective good, of craft and labor, of attention to the economics and politics that lie behind the pleasures of entertainment) and also works on a purely immediate level. The group’s collaborations, the erasures and additions its members make to each other’s pieces, keep its art fresh and unpredictable. In the context of the Mekons’ greater body of work -the records, novel and various other projects they turn their group-mind to -it’s an essential product of their beery camaraderie and intellectual rigor.