Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard

File under Sacred Music
video installation, 25min., 2003

File under Sacred Music (Reverberation)
Duratran print in aluminium lightbox, 65 × 90 × 11 cm, 2003/2007

File under Sacred Music is the remake of a secretly taped video documentation of the legendary concert by the American punk-rock band The Cramps at the Napa Mental Institute in California, which the group performed for the facility’s patients on June 13th, 1978.

The concert quickly achieved legendary status, strongly supported by the video, which since then fetches very high prices in music forums and on eBay. In 2003, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard recreated this concert performance at the ICA in London. The script not only stipulates that British musicians Holly Golightly and Alfonso Pinto should play the roles of The Cramps stars, but also that patients from psychiatric units be invited as the audience, who thus play two roles: the fans from 1978 and themselves. After the concert, the footage was edited by hand to give it the aesthetic appearance of the original material: In coarse-grained and shaky black-and-white pictures one sees the band and patients go crazy together.

File under Sacred Music achieves its value because of the cult status of the original Cramps concert, which raises certain questions: questions as to its author and originality, artistic identity, pop-cultural legend-building, and last but not least its status as a “live” event. Is that what we see “live”? What is the difference between live-act, live-stream, and live-recording? Since 1996 the artist-duo Forsyth and Pollard work with remakes of “ holy moments” of music (and art) history. Their process-based work also focuses on the social contexts in which the original event and the remake take place, and on the relations between the systems of music, art and market, media and politics at the end of the 1970s and in 2003.

Anke Hoffmann



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