So this song kills fascists

Installation views of this exhibition at Tate Britain
Photo © Tate 2007

The twentieth-century notion that popular culture could effect real political change found its expression in a subversive subculture. It is in its darker recesses that Seb Patane finds his raw materials. Drawing on Dionysian sources, transgressive underground literature or the iconography and sonic experimentations of industrial bands such as Current 93 and Nurse With Wound, Patane collects and resurrects imagery that once had or still possesses a potency and charge. In an attempt to distil its essence, Patane subjects his raw material to a painstaking process of refinement and filtration. Like a pathologist carrying out an autopsy to ascertain the cause of death, he dissects and dismembers his subject as he examines it. This rigorous editing process, combined with simple gestures of adaptation and customisation in the form of concealing or masking information, bleeds the material of narrative context and leaves a residue of menace. Patane’s archive comprises found imagery, drawings, sound and occasional live elements which he orders and assembles into stylised and pared-down tableaux.

Patane’s installation for Art Now roughly divides into three sections: a salon-style hang of framed drawings and wall-based work, a rudimentary construction reminiscent of a stage set, on and against which various elements are propped, and a sound work from which the installation takes its title. Patane’s interest in experimental music permeates his art and he sees a structural equivalence in the two practices. So this song kills fascists, one of several collaborations with Giancarlo Trimarchi from electronic outfit Loozoo, examines the notion of music, and especially songs, as a vehicle for political revolution. A ricocheting tribal beat layered with sparse voice-based and electronic noises (sounds rooted in early techno music) gradually builds up and accelerates, promising sustained momentum before abruptly and unexpectedly falling away. The minimal form and continuous loop are suggestive of a sort of sonic mantra, while the unstable rhythm questions the idea of music as a potentially subversive tool, turning the title of the installation into a sarcastic rejoinder.

Seb Patane
Studio session recording for So this song kills fascists 2007
Courtesy the artist

Seb Patane
Studio session recording for So this song kills fascists 2007
Courtesy the artist

The idea that music has the power to suggest a non-visible dimension is also implicit in Patane’s drawings. In an early series he defaced theatrical portrait photographs taken from the Victorian magazine The Sketch with obsessively dense accretions of sticky biro ink. Obliterating and engulfing the protagonists’ heads, these delicate yet brutal doodles resemble clots of matted hair, parasitic growths or phantom presences unwittingly captured by the photographer. Borrowing from the aesthetic of recent cult Japanese horror films and alluding to a parallel or subconscious realm, Patane’s interventions contrast starkly with the supremely static poses, animating them with an eerie, alien energy. He comments that this act of interference is not destructive but rather borne out of an ‘intense connection’ to the image. In his new drawings the wayward hairball no longer conceals an existing image but, in the vein of Surrealist or psychographic automatic writing, has been unleashed onto the blank page. The accumulation of densely layered marks extends long spidery tendrils which occasionally spawn further smaller masses. There is something innately terrifying and otherworldly about the contrast between the density of the built-up mass, or black hole, and the wispy delicacy of the individual marks. This sense of unease is further heightened by the solitary presence of a small faceless figure observing the spectacle.

Seb Patane
Last Dance of the Nodding Folk 2007 (detail)
Courtesy Maureen Paley, London

The central installation Last Dance of the Nodding Folk – a series of loosely arranged MDF platforms and boxes – brings Patane’s precise yet informal process of collaging into three dimensions. The structure suggests an expressionist stage set, a theme echoed in the framed images leaning, placard-like, against it: a squatting clown and a street procession of marchers sporting painted faces and theatrical costumes. At one end of the structure a monitor plays footage of a fire juggler, a contemporary symbol of urbanity replete with primordial connotations now belonging to a whole genre of street entertainment. The footage introduces an element of ritualised and controlled movement, linking to the energy of the drawings and our choreographed passage around the installation. Patane identifies an aesthetics of subculture where protest has been exchanged for theatricalised performance, a husk detached from belief.

Text by Lizzie Carey-Thomas