Record Covers - Slovenia

Artcoustics
The Stories Told by Record Covers

Record covers made a definitive mark on the visual image of twentieth-century urban culture.

The exhibition has been conceived as a multilayered and multimedia cultural and educational experience. Records and their covers – those fascinating, seductive objects that could once be found in nearly every home – are presented here as a phenomenon that reveals the commercial, class, sexual and ideological parameters of the twentieth-century world.

The first section of the exhibition presents the development of audio media from shellacs, singles, LPs, and cassettes to compact discs, as well as various forms of record packaging and the different ways records have been used.

The second section presents the colorful world of the record sleeve, as it was designed in the twentieth century by such visual artists as Marcel Duchamp, Jean Dubuffet, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Beuys, Raymond Pettibon, Jože Slak-Đoka, Bogdan Borćić, Matjaž Vipotnik, Bronislav Fajon, Laibach, Kostja Gatnik, Slavko Furlan, Tadej Pogačar, Ediscroato, Marko Ilič, Jugoslav Vlahović, and many others.

The third section analyzes record covers with regard to their design and their social and political implications. It presents the stereotypical designs that emerged for jazz, rock, punk, classical music, popular folk music, etc., and examines the content of record covers that attempted to broach various social and political issues. It also looks at records that were the product of different music subcultures and their distribution networks both in Slovenia and abroad.

Finally, the exhibition speaks to the fact the many private and public record collections can be said to represent the most prevalent and most widely dispersed form of collecting twentieth-century art and visual culture.

Approximately 1000 record covers are on display in the present exhibition. The exhibited records have been borrowed from both private collections and public music libraries. The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with Radio Slovenia and Radio Študent. The curators of the exhibition are Nikolai Jeffs, Guy Schraenen, and Božidar Zrinski; serving as consultants are Ičo Vidmar, Polona Poberžnik, Jure Matičič, and Branko Kostelnik.

The Gorenje Company is the sponsor of exhibition;
the IPF Institute is the exhibition donor.

More information: 01 2413 800, lili.sturm@mglc-lj.si, www.mglc-lj.si