Popular Music, Popular Art August 31, 2007

Song siren Laura Burhenn with SAAM's Harry Bertoia

American art makes a few surprise appearances in popular music this week:

• James Hampton's Throne Of The Third Heaven Of The Nations Millennium General Assembly is discussed in SAAM's latest podcast on The American South—and it's also the title of the forthcoming album by Le Loup, a band based in Washington, D.C. In interviews, songwriter Sam Simkoff has described his feeling of kinship with Hampton over a labor-of-love project built in private (Hampton created The Throne in a rented garage and it wasn't discovered until after his death)—as that's the way he wrote the music for the album.

  Jessica Robertson of Spinner finds a link between the cover of PJ Harvey's album, White Chalk, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl at the National Gallery of Art. It certainly appears that both women are wearing strikingly similar dresses, but I'm not sure if that alone is a strong enough linkage to support the notion that Harvey is citing Whistler. Harvey typically appears on her album covers, so the fact that she's on White Chalk isn't any special nod to a portrait. That said, Whistler and Harvey share a great deal of thematic ground. The broken lily in Whistler's White Girl, symbolizing lost innocence, has all sorts of parallels in Harvey's mournful music. In these images both women appear expressionless, and they cast a passive, disinterested gaze on the viewer.

  Be that as it may, if Harvey were citing Whistler, she would have borrowed or mirrored more elements of the original to make the reference clearer.

• Finally, Brightest Young Things pairs local pop-phenom Laura Burhenn with Harry Bertoia's Sculpture Group Symbolizing World's Communication in the Atomic Age. Perhaps the editors of BYT think Burhenn is explosive. The point is, editors and graphic designers for locally focused publications are seeking out cut-and-paste content for their publications. It's another way that people interact with museums at a local level.

• Harry Bertoia, Laura Burhenn, Le Loup, James Hampton, James Abbott McNeill Whistler,
  PJ Harvey, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum