Pop Art

The LP Show
EMP, through April 14, free w/ EMP admission.

For a while now, I’ve been a bit desolate about EMP–that weird, expensive, beautiful shell, a museum with not much in it, a container without content. Now, however, there is a show worthy of the big vain structure that surrounds it.

The LP Show comes in abbreviated form from Exit Art in New York, and it’s at least as much about passion and excess and collecting as it is about music. In it, 1,500 album covers tile the walls, arranged in ways that make not so much sense as gorgeous nonsense. Eric Weisbard, an EMP spokesman who is also freshly arrived from New York, told me that it was organized “by cliché,” and the result is an overwhelming joyride through six decades of music’s visual language.

It begins in the late 1930s, when Alex Steinweiss, then a young graphic designer at Columbia Records, invented the cardboard sleeve with art on it. It moves, in no particular order, through abstract covers and Op Art, trucker albums and Japanese pop, work by “real” artists (Ben Shahn, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol), sexy covers, clown covers, covers in terrible taste. There is no agenda, because the covers speak for themselves, and to each other. There’s an album called You Don’t Have to Be Black to Love the Blues, featuring a boy of indeterminate race eating a giant slice of watermelon. Above it, Ike and Tina Turner, in sly and sinister whiteface, eat the same fruit in a context so loaded it becomes at once funny and frightening.

I recommend getting strung out on your favorite dislocating substance (caffeine, Jose Cuervo, cough syrup) and going to The LP Show at an odd time when it’s not likely to be crowded. This way, you can let the experience wash over you in waves, moving from anxious and overstimulated to comfortable and turned-on. The show is hung so democratically that it becomes the viewer’s own: to hunt for favorite covers, to play a kind of memory game, to slowly come to understand the influences that ricochet back and forth through time, from sincerity to irony and back again.