Art/Rock/Revelry

Art/Rock/Revelry: Artifacts & Oral History from Philadelphia’s Alternative Music & Club Scene of the Late 70s to Mid 80s

On view July 29, 2022 - September 18, 2022 at the Neon Museum of Philadelphia

Explore Philly’s vibrant era of do-it-yourself spirit and dance-til-you-drop passion through show flyers, posters, zines, photos, recordings, and oral history.

While touring acts saw Philadelphia as a place to warm up before their New York gigs, local artists didn’t shrink in New York’s shadow, but fostered creativity and community in converted warehouses, night clubs, record shops, clothing stores, and college radio—reveling in their independence from the mainstream.

We’re talking punk, post-punk, new wave, no wave, art rock, poetry, fashion, and performance in places like East Side Club, The Hot Club, The Wet Spot, Funk Dungeon, Omni’s, Starlite, Painted Bride…the list goes on and continues to expand throughout the life of the exhibit.

See our display of artifacts from personal collections, listen to the music, watch videos of old performances as well as new interviews with those who were on the scene—artists, musicians, DJs, revelers.

Presented in collaboration with Brewerytown Beats, JoeyBruno MusicArchives, Red Pedal Media, and Jere Edmunds, with contributions from Jim Meneses, Bobby Startup, Dennis McHugh, Joe Ankenbrand, Kenn Kweder, Sheva Golkow, Frank Blank Moriarty, Matt Marello, Sic Kidz, Elliott Levin, Rikki Ercoli, Roe Poalino, Nancy Barile, and Michael Zodorozny. Produced by Alyssa Shea.

“Witness exploits a tactic I call “diachronic motion,” which involves presenting several different aspects of an action on the screen at once. In this case, I shot a total solar eclipse off of the coast of Africa and showed the event as if it were stretched out in time so that we can see the beginning and ending of the event simultaneously.” - Peter Rose

“Solaristics takes advantage of a primitive machine called a Flip Camera that defaults to black when the image is too bright. In this case, the sun itself is bright enough and so we appear to be seeing another eclipse, but it is an artifact of the technology. It is a record of seeing how many ways we can look at the sun.” - Peter Rose

“Studies in Transfalumination exploits modified flashlights to project sheets of light, rather than beams of light, onto ordinary objects and spaces. I think of it as a method of drawing, or more accurately, feeling with light.”

“Is it possible to think of a beam of light not as something that departs, is reflected, and returns, all of which posits Time, but from the point of view of the photon, for which time stops, so that the simultaneity of departures and arrivals mimics touch? Can seeing be a form of touching? Is there something apocalyptic or epiphanic about this?” - Peter Rose

“Pneumenon, commissioned and exhibited by the Fabric Workshop and Museum, is a two-channel video installation that offers dramatic visible metaphors for ideas about appearance and reality, sign and referent, cause and effect. The heart of the piece is a video shot on the Rio Grande in southern Texas. A blue tarpaulin hangs from a line of rope and sways in an intermittent breeze. The shadows from the leaves on a tree in the distance are projected onto this surface by the sun, and they grow and decline in size as the tarp sways back and forth towards the camera. One can begin to guess the structure of the tree from the shadows, but as the wind occasionally lifts the tarp, the entire landscape behind is revealed: a tree, some RV vehicles, a road. And then the curtain falls again, fluttering.”

“This image is projected from behind onto a large silk screen that hangs in front of the viewing audience. A small fan is positioned in front of this screen and has been tied to the chapter numbers in the DVD so that it goes on and off on a pre-programmed basis. When it does so, the projection screen itself (onto which the image of the tarp is being thrown) rises in a complex furl and reveals a hitherto unseen image on the back wall of the space.”

“It is an image of a tree, but it has been constructed according to the laws of a hyperdimensional perspective. By implication, we are now seeing behind the apparent reality constructed by the projected image, and come to understand a deeper, more complex space whose projections are responsible for everything we see. Simultaneously, the image we have taken for real is thrown out into the space beside and behind us and we are now enclosed by our illusion.

This is a piece about phenomenon and noumenon, about air, wind, breath, and light, and it operates at an odd juncture between video art and a theatre of objects. The accompanying video gives some idea of the whole business.” - Peter Rose

“Trump Talks Back takes one of Trump’s State of the Union speeches, runs it in reverse, and accompanies it with subtitles that subtly deconstruct the stupidities of his diction, gesture, and speech.” - Peter Rose

“Skateboard Park, Habitus, and Eversions are excerpts from Dimensional Excursions, an exploration of multi-dimensional video that superimposes two stereoscopic videos in order to conjure another dimension of vision. Skateboard Park was shot outside the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Habitus was shot in an installation by Ann Hamilton that was shown down on the Delaware River, and Eversions resulted when left and right eye perspectives were inverted, turning space inside-out. To be seen with an iPhone in a set of Google Cardboard Glasses. Available here.” - Peter Rose

“Foit Yet Cleem Triavith takes a kind of rap audio by David Moss and Peter Rose and elaborates it with 3D images taken from earlier works.” - Peter Rose

“Memories of Shared Air is a paeon to the time when we shared social space without anxiety or hesitation. It is a celebration of the ways in which we used to feel comfortable being with each other.” - Peter Rose

“The Oculus Opens is a visual tone poem in six-dimensions to be seen with an iPhone in a set of Google Cardboard Glasses.” - Peter Rose

“A Sign of the Times uses the Flip camera profiled in “Solaristics” and renders it in 3D to propose an astronomical catastrophe that serves as a metaphor the politics of the moment.” -Peter Rose

ABOUT WELCOME WORLDS – AN OCCASIONAL AUDIO SERVICE

DIRECTOR – JIM MENESES

PROJECTS 1981 – 2022

Welcome Worlds was founded in 1981, the first projects being: organizing a concert series at the loft space The Wet Spot, with saxophonist Jack Wright, presenting improvised music performances every Monday night from December 1981 through December 1982. Following this was a document of the Wet Spot series, an independent publication titled The Wet Spot Magazine, which documented the activity at the loft, plus articles featuring reports of various other independent activities in Philadelphia.

In 1987 and 1989, two audio compilations were produced: Welcome Worlds – Music from Philadelphia (’87) and Welcome Worlds – Poetry in Philadelphia (’89). Both were presented
in special unique packaging imported from Germany.  

A series of international exchange programs followed – in 1989 the Philadelphia band New Ghost played a tour in Switzerland and Germany, and in 1990 two concerts were presented at Philadelphia’s Painted Bride Arts Center: Gruppe Fine, from East Germany, and from Switzerland, The Gattiker/Schuetz/Koch/Gerber quartet.

In 1999, the program Welcome Worlds – Music From Philadelphia was presented both in Philadelphia and in Prague, Czech Republic, at the Alternativa Festival. The artists were New Ghost, Krakatoa, Meneses – Makihara Duo, Stephen DiJoseph, and films of Peter Rose.

Most recently, the Neon Museum of Philadelphia, under the direction of Alyssa Shea, curated an exhibition titled Art/Rock/Revelry, which featured recordings, flyers, and interviews from participants in the Philadelphia scene from the late 70s to the early 80s, featuring the work of the Wet Spot/Welcome Worlds project.

-Jim Meneses