TateShots: Sound & Vision is a series of six films I proposed and directed about the intersection of art and music.
F eaturing contributions from Jeffrey Lewis, David Byrne, Lydia Lunch, Mark E Smith, Cosey Fanni Tutti and Billy Childish.
The series screened at the Tate MOdern Starr Auditorium on 15th January 2010, and has subsequently been released on the Tate Channel

Directed by Nicola Probert / Produced by Jared Schiller
www.tate.org.uk/tateshots

Episode 1: COSEY FANNI TUTTI

Cosey Fanni Tutti is the ideal artist to start our new series on art and music, having worked across the two mediums since 1969.
In this film, interspersed with live footage from her bands Throbbing Gristle and Chris and Cosey, she talks about her distaste for decorative art and how her music is all about emotion.
She also discusses her work from the 1970s, in which she modeled for glamour magazines as a way to explore the commodification of sex.
It would have been hypocritical, she explains, to use images of other people when she could have done it herself.
Moving seamlessly between the sex, art and music industries, Cosey puts herself at the heart of her artistic output.

Part 2: JEFFREY LEWIS

In this edition of TateShots, part of our Sound & Vision series, we talk to American ‘anti-folk’ singer Jeffrey Lewis.
In his live shows, Lewis often tells stories illustrated by comic books he has drawn himself.
This film covers his thoughts on drawing and performing, and includes a clip of his illustrated ‘History of Communism’ (part 5, North Korea), filmed in Birmingham during his UK tour in 2009.

Part 3. DAVID BYRNE

In part 3 of Sound & Vision TateShots meets artist, musician and cyclist David Byrne.
With his band Talking Heads, solo, or in his collaborations with Brian Eno, Byrne’s music inspires huge passion from his fans, thanks in no small part to his artistic sensibility and the attention he pays to his live performances.
In this interview, made at the Camden Roundhouse during his exhibition Playing the Building, Byrne talks about making art in multiple media and the role choreography plays in interpreting song.

Part.4. LYDIA LUNCH

New York-born Lydia Lunch is a singer, poet, writer, actor, visual artist, and the fourth subject of our Sound & Vision series.
From signaling the end of Punk with her first band, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks, to presenting art installations as a reaction to Tracey Emin
– “I want you to smell the blood on the sheets…” – Lunch’s work is provocative to say the least.
In this film, featuring excerpts from her live performances, she talks about how Goya and Marcel Duchamp are amongst her favourite artists.

In Part 5 of our Sound & Vision series TateShots went to visit famed Punk rocker and former ‘Stuckist’ artist Billy Childish at his studio in Kent.
After being expelled from school, Childish trained as a stonemason in Chatham dockyard.
Born Stephen Hamper, he got the name Billy Childish from a mate in one of the punk bands he was in as a teenager.
Since then Childish been as prolific a painter as he is a musician, and in this interview he talks about how his approach to making music art and poetry is often the same:
‘I’m interested in the elemental, not impressing myself and not impressing others. I fail, I often impress myself and I have sometimes impressed others’

Part 6. Mark E Smith.

In the last installment of our Sound & Vision series, English Post-Punk singer Mark E Smith gave us a brief tour of his rise to fame
with The Fall and the early influence of angry British Surrealism on his music.