Art Gallery Of NSW Curator Jonathan Wilson Talks Kim Gordon, Andre 3000 and Putting Art To Music

Interview by Campbell Milligan. Photos by Daniel Boud.

With Volume kicking off July 5th until July 21st, who better to talk us through the whole thing than the very man who curated it - Jonathan Wilson.

In a world first role as a music curator of an art gallery - Jonathon has a special talent for merging music and art to create unexpected and unique experiences. He actively looks for artists who push the boundary, then challenges that some more by getting them to play in obscure settings all the while bringing people together.

The first thing I’d like to ask is what is your official title? 

Music and Community Curator which is a long-winded thing. That kind of looks at the two polars of my career, so they kind of fuse together. I do a lot of community engagement. You know, music is community anyway. 

Yeah, sure. 

I started out studying art, and played in a band in the 2000’s and by being in this field studying I then ended up working in galleries that signed record deals and went and did music. And then flowed that into starting my own record company, and managing bands. 

And that was Speak n Spell?

Speak n Spell, yeah around the 2000’s period. Music was different, there was no Spotify. I’d been living in Los Angeles but I moved back to Australia and I took a job back in Penrith where I grew up. So I ended up back at the Penrith Regional Gallery, which I'd worked at in 2002 straight out of art school. I was working under the boss at the time, who was a guy named John Kirkman, who is retired now, but John had his hand in the visual arts across Sydney and Greater Sydney. And he just said, I've got this thing that I think you could do, which was a community engagement project around this space in Penrith called the Mondo. Kids were just causing total chaos around there. I liked it because instead of telling people what was good, I had to figure out what it was they wanted, and ask what do these kids actually need? Why is there chaos happening here? So, I managed to convince Westfield at the time to let me play music through their PA system on a Thursday night when all the trouble was happening, and it kind of just shifted all the kids, you know, They'd stopped doing what they were doing and just stood next to the speakers and talked to each other and listened to music. I was like, oh cool, we've got them. And then I got this job doing community engagement. Something sort of shifted around 2019, people were wondering what are we gonna do for the Sydney Festival? Hold on, I've got this great idea around music, and bringing a whole bunch of music across the gallery, in sync with an exhibition. So I created a four hour experience across the gallery in 2019. We had ten year olds through to ninety years olds coming in, buying tickets. We sold like 3000 tickets for three nights. And that’s when I realised this is a thing.  

Photo: Anna Kucera

Did you have to pitch it to the gallery? 

Totally. A lot of the artists on that list weren’t people that internal people would know right? There was no music curatorial role here because it's a gallery, it's an art museum. It's not a venue, well, it's not a traditional venue.  At that time one of the artists that I brought in was a guy named Dean Hurley, who'd been David Lynch's main sound guy for thirteen years. I invited him over and was like, before this series I didn't want any playlist of music. I want music. If there's no artist playing, your music's playing, so you've gotta compose a whole score. It went so well and the Covid happened. The silence in the gallery was deafening. During that time I met Joji Malani who just quit Gang of Youths. And so I rang Joji and I'm dude, do you wanna come just play guitar in the gallery? No one's gonna be here. I'm gonna film it and we're just gonna see what happens. We ended up launching a whole new kind of performance online series for our then called ‘Together In Art’ with that. And everybody was like, oh, that's a thing. We got a thing there. Music in these buildings makes people look and see the art in different ways so let's fill it with people.

Was it exciting coming out of Covid knowing the crowds could come back? 

Totally, it fast-tracked that conversation around music in the gallery, and that's where the music curatorial job arrived. So a kind of flow between both these spaces, which is about activating people, bringing people into the fold. A massive project with Solange is as much a community engagement project as it is music because you're bringing multi-layered diversity and artists at scale who were sitting outside of what people's expectations of them are. 

With Andre and also what I've seen Kim Gordon do lately with the experimentation, it is completely different to what they're known for. Like, it's not Outkast. It's not Sonic Youth. It's just completely different. But here’s a place to do it now, the perfect bridge. 

It's the space to do it. It is a space where you should be challenged and you should be willing to go into something with a bit more of an open idea, this isn’t a transactional experience. This should be deeply experiential and life-changing. It's like a great painting. I always think about the time I lived in London briefly years ago, and I would go and sit in the Rothko Room in the Tate. And I’d just sit there for hours. I think about that often. I think about that kind of moment being in that space and what that kinds of thing around me shifted. And that's what I want. Yeah, you can, go to concert halls and things like that, they are great, but there's an understanding of what you're going to get. Somebody is in front of you on a stage and you pay and you watch.  

You kind of know what you're getting, people are there to see the hits. Do you find that exciting thing about this? Especially because so much is consumed via digital media and phones. This really is a chance to slow things down. 

That's right. The physicality of the physical presence of people, I think that's a really interesting thing that we're still coming to terms with post covid. How do we all come together to experience something? With the Solange show, she was right in front of them. She walked through that crowd. Like on what planet does Solange walk through a crowd to go and fill up a bathtub and then get in the bathtub and sing? that's amazing. That's the stuff that I'm interested in.

Well, as I get older as well, I've seen most of the bands I wanna see, and I'm after those experiences. I want to leave somewhere and go, wow. Did you see Nick Cave with Colin Greenwood at the State Theater? 

I didn't go. No.

It was two people on a stage at the beautiful State Theater with an intimacy that grabs you. Obviously he's got a routine that he likes to run through most nights, but I  love the idea of going somewhere and being surprised by something or at something unexpected. Especially with an artist you know.

That's what it should be. Kim made that statement. She’s like I'm 71 doing trap music. It’s just the best thing in the world, you know, like, she's cooler than all of us. 

Yeah. No, no one can touch her.  

No one's ever gonna be as cool as Kim. And Andre as well. 

I mean, that flute, that album's amazing. 

These artists have just been doing this all along. With Solange. She hadn't done anything in nearly five years. And just came and did this incredible performance in this tank that was three nights only. And the interest was extreme. The people who loved it and who wrote to us were unbelievable. You become enamoured with these messages. I was talking to a young, agent, and he goes, there was a moment when I was watching and I realised, I can just walk around and I don't have to stay put. And he goes when I started to walk around, I just realised the entire expanse that she put into that work. And it was unbelievable. That was the best thing, when it's as though you're in a performance and you have to shift your own perceptions of what you're about to experience when you’re in it and you get it and you go, oh, I'm in another place.  I love that. That's exactly what's supposed to happen. You come into these things and be like, you know, this is not what I expected, but actually, it’s a million times better than what I expected. 

That's a great point of being able to stand up and walk around the piece, as it's happening. Just such a cool thing.  What's the process of commissioning music and art? 

I just want to hit the global perspective of what creative culture is. People sitting on the edge of art and music. You can't be thinking flat. I want the most diversity across all ages. A wide spectrum colliding together. And let's just focus it on some key artists who are working at that level and who are already challenging things. You know, Genesis Owusu is constantly pushing music. 

And he seems to kinda like being a character that's constantly morphing his own appearance and stage presence as well.  

All these people who aren't intent on staying still in what they do. Like I said, Kim Gordon, 71 years old is doing some of the best music of her entire career. But then the artists too. Working with people like Jonathan Zawada who did Flume’s artwork. Exploring the bizarre symbiosis between visual art for a record. What does that mean to bring that into a museum?  Flume is obviously someone who has created entire new genres and for Jonathan to work so closely with him - it requires such a spherical understanding of music and art. 

When we put a magazine together, we have wish lists of artists and stuff we wanna talk to. It’s one of the most exciting parts. I enjoy the challenge of finding how to get to someone. How is that process for you? 

Yeah I mean there are people who we don’t always get but my lists are usually built around musicians who I feel are already pushing the boundaries so they’re more open. 

Where are you looking for music and the next thing? 

I read loads. Lots of blogs and critical writing on music. The radio. I always listen to Kranky on NTS Radio. I was listening to them at Christmas and they played this track by this artist called Belmont Girl. And I must have spent like three weeks trying to find who Belmont Girl was. I find random, random things where I can. I think the stuff that links in through TikTok and Instagram is super interesting. It’s wild how the algorithm works now. I did an interview recently and somebody said to me, oh, do you just get to pick all your favourite bands and put them on? No, it doesn't work like that (laughs). But then I get to work with artists and by the end of the project, they usually are my favourite artists. A lot of time I go back into things as well. Start researching music from different periods. And then what's interesting is hearing people who are referencing that now. You can find something from the late sixties, or seventies and realise they're doing that now and discover a whole new scene.

Yeah, for so long I thought I hated The Cure because of their one hit and then someone put a song on from one of their first albums and I was like, holy fuck, who is this? 

Just missed the whole thing? 

Yeah and just revisiting that whole amazing album that for some reason whenever I was younger, for whatever reason I wasn’t into because I was into punk or whatever. Just totally dismissed them but now there’s this whole catalogue of music to go through. 

I think that’s a generational thing right? You didn’t deviate from the music you were into. But now you can google stuff or find out about it on a podcast. And, and things rise again, but like, it's the reinterpretation of when they rise that I like. It gets really interesting. That’s what we’re trying to do. 

Check out the full program and get tickets to Volume here.