Mark Richardson

NEW YORK — A man’s voice recites lines from a poem as fantastical low-resolution images of cityscapes are projected on a screen in a darkened room. “When I couldn’t sleep/I learned to write,” we hear him say. “I learned to write/what might be read/on nights like this/by one like me.”

The lines come from Leonard Cohen’s “The Only Poem,” and the visuals, by Jon Rafman, are a collection of processed found photos and landscapes from video games that take the words somewhere far away and transform Cohen’s crisp verse into the narration of a dream.

This piece can be found in “Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything,” an exhibition celebrating the life and work of the singer-songwriter, who died in 2016. It comes to the Jewish Museum on Friday after a run in Montreal.

The lines from “The Only Poem” speak to the almost mystical bond between those who create art and those who consume it. When a transmission like the one described in the poem happens in pop music, particularly fertile ground for intense longing of all kinds, we might hear a fan say, “That song saved my life.”

This emotional identification is, to varying degrees, the animating force behind four current museum shows that center on music, including “A Crack in Everything” and exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design and the Museum of Sex. Each has something to say about how pop music fits into our lives, how we absorb its history, what it means to present the pop experience in an institutional setting, and how people use music to find themselves.

At the Met, “Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock &amp; Roll,” which opened Monday, seeks to enrich what you already know, telling a familiar narrative through objects that seem like stars in their own right. Presented in collaboration with the Rock &amp; Roll Hall of Fame, “Play It Loud” offers a vision of history in which the rock music that flowered in the 1960s and ’70s sits firmly at the center.

The format of the rock band provides the structure of the show, with one room given over to the rhythm section (here we see a double bass from low-end legend James Jamerson, whose playing provides the rhythmic drive for dozens of Motown hits, as well as drum kits from the Beatles and Metallica) and another showcasing “Guitar Gods,” featuring instruments from Eric Clapton, Jerry Garcia and many more. Another room has a display highlighting the guitar’s destruction, with pieces of instruments trashed by Kurt Cobain and Pete Townshend.

To the extent that it shifts focus toward the tools of the rock trade, the show is illuminating. Of particular interest is the room set aside for “Creating a Sound,” which focuses on the sonic possibility of electronics and includes beautiful objects like the first Moog modular synthesizer owned by Keith Emerson of the progressive rock band Emerson, Lake &amp; Palmer.

Emerson’s instrument is a towering monolith with patch cords hanging off it like an automaton’s viscera, and it highlights how the story of popular music is bound to technology. The Moog presents itself as a roadie’s worst nightmare — it’s almost impossible to imagine a crew packing up a machine of such complexity and loading it onto a truck for the next show.

The lighting in “Play It Loud” is dim, perhaps reflecting rock music as the sound of the night. Each individual instrument shines like a beacon, as if it’s catching the glint of an onstage spotlight. It makes the space between audience member and musician seem vast, but that doesn’t diminish the wonder of browsing the tools once used by pop royalty.

One of the defining principles of punk, in contrast, is that this gap should be much narrower. “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986,” which opened Tuesday at the Museum of Arts and Design, adheres to this stricture. The presentation, curated by Andrew Blauvelt, director of the Cranbrook Art Museum in Michigan, is modest, befitting the humble beginnings of the images on display, and the show offers a fascinating look at how punk and new wave music met the eye.

Many of the objects on display in “Too Fast to Live” were first hung in record stores or in the bedrooms of teenagers. Posters promoting new albums, tours and shows are mixed in with album art, zines, buttons and other miscellany. Most of the pieces are affixed to the walls with magnets and are not framed, and almost all show signs of wear. The presentation reinforces that this was commercial art meant for wide consumption, and the ragged edges and prominent creases in the works make the history feel alive.

That enduringly ragged aesthetic extends to the design itself. Punk as an idea has never left the conversation and retains its aura of cool. Peter Saville’s iconic image for Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” album, for example, seen here in a promotional poster, could just as easily be found on the T-shirt of a current high school student.

Early on, punk’s cheap, trash-culture aesthetic bumped up against the art world, and the mix of high and low makes “Too Fast to Live” a rich show. One room focuses on the influence of comics, as seen in posters for the Angry Samoans and the Damned, while large and beautiful Stiff Records tour posters, designed by Barney Bubbles, bring to mind Warhol’s screen prints.

But while the range of style and aesthetics on display is striking, almost everything here was created for a specific commercial purpose, and directed squarely at those who loved (and might one day love) these bands. The display of buttons that once decorated book bags and jean jackets drives this home. “Too Fast to Live” ultimately feels like a celebration of record culture and fandom. Through these objects, most of which were very inexpensive, a subset of music fans defined themselves as part of a tribe.

The Museum of Sex has a show that comes at punk from another angle, illustrating the visceral core lurking beneath these iconic images. “Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985” essays a secret history of this music, one based on the presentation of desire.

In the exhibition, which opened in the fall, chain-link fencing surrounds mannequins adorned with fetish gear, and between that and the rivet-studded steel floors, you feel like you’re inside one of the trash-strewn early 1980s downtown New York clubs on display in films like Slava Tsukerman’s “Liquid Sky”or Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours.”

As music movements go, punk rock, which, at its extremes, can be nihilistic or politically didactic, isn’t necessarily associated with sex. But “Punk Lust” suggests that carnal energy throbs at the music’s core.

The show begins with imagery from the Velvet Underground: the 1963 paperback of that title, an exploration of what was then called deviant sexual behavior and gave the band its name, is one of the first objects on display. Working through photos, album art and flyers by artists like Iggy Pop, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, and, yes, the Sex Pistols, the exhibition demonstrates how punk offered a space for sexual expression outside the mainstream.

In the story told by “Punk Lust,” much of it laid out in placards by writer and musician Vivien Goldman, one of the show’s curators, graphic sexual imagery is a tool for shock that frightens away the straight world and offers comfort to those who remain inside. While some of the power dynamic is typical — underage groupies cavorting with rock stars — images from female, queer and nonbinary artists like Jayne County and the Slits make a strong case for sex as an essential source of punk liberation.

That sexual expression in music can encompass both crude pornographic flyers created by Adam Ant, which are on display in “Punk Lust,” and also the cool and elegant sensuality coursing through the work of Cohen, says something about how vast the subject is. The erotic side of Cohen’s catalog is one focus among many in “A Crack in Everything,” an exhibition that shows rather than tells.

The curators of the show, John Zeppetelli of the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal and Victor Shiffman, commissioned artists of various disciplines to develop pieces inspired by Cohen.

Some are simple and quiet, like “Ear on a Worm” from film artist Tacita Dean, a small image playing on a loop high in the space that shows a perched bird, a reference to “Bird on the Wire” from Cohen’s 1969 album “Songs From a Room.”

Some are closer to traditional documentary, like George Fok’s “Passing Through,” which intercuts performances by Cohen throughout his career with video that surrounds the viewer, suggesting the songs are constant and eternal while the performer’s body changes with time.

Candice Breitz’s installation “I’m Your Man (A Portrait of Leonard Cohen)” gathers video portraits of 19 men over the age of 65 singing and humming Cohen’s songs. Each is life-size and high resolution, and the effect of walking through the room is as if the men were present. It’s a breathtaking meditation on fandom, aging and impermanence. (Cohen remained fully immersed in the last two subjects. His final album, “You Want It Darker,” a meditation on his own mortality, was released a month before his death at 82, after a fall in the night.)

Taken together, the layered work on display in “A Crack in Everything” has a lot to offer on Cohen, but even more to say about how we respond to music, bring it into our lives, and use it as both a balm and an agent for transformation.

Event information:

“Leonard Cohen: A Crack in Everything”: Through Sept. 8 at the Jewish Museum, Manhattan; 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.

“Play It Loud: Instruments of Rock &amp; Roll”: Through Oct. 1 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

“Punk Lust: Raw Provocation 1971-1985”: Through Nov. 30 at the Museum of Sex, 233 Fifth Ave., Manhattan; 212-689-6337, museumofsex.com.

“Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: Punk Graphics, 1976-1986”: Through Aug. 18 at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, Manhattan; 212-299-7777, madmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/arts/music/music-exhibitions-leonard-cohen-instruments-punk.html" id="408faf4e-381a-32bc-a4d0-9127013868cc">The New York Times</a>.

The Art of Rock: Four Museums Explore How We Connect to Music

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Mark Richardson

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The Art of Rock: Four Museums Explore How We Connect to Music