Paul Rooney (artist)

Paul Rooney (born 1967 in Liverpool) is an English artist who works with 'music and words', primarily through installations and records.

For other people named Paul Rooney, see Paul Rooney (disambiguation).

Paul Rooney
Born1967
Liverpool, England
Alma mater
OccupationArtist
Notable work
Lucy Over Lancashire
AwardsNorthern Art Prize (2008)
Websitewww.paulrooney.info

He studied painting at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating with an MFA in 1991. In the late 1990s his art practice shifted from painting to music, initially with the band Rooney and their three experimental lo-fi punk pop albums about everyday life.[1] His work later focussed on music within gallery installations, performances and video works.

His art works often explore the difficulties inherent in the representation of 'place'. The curator Claire Doherty wrote that: "Rooney asserts [the] occupation of place through real and fictional occurrences, acknowledging the overlooked and proposing the equal status of urban myth and lived experience."[2][3]

Rooney was the winner of Art Prize North in 2003,[4] the Northern Art Prize in 2008,[5] and the Morton Award for Lens Based Work in 2012.[6] His works have been purchased for the Arts Council Collection[7] and through the Contemporary Art Society Acquisitions Scheme.[8]

Career: 1990s

The three CD music albums released from 1998 to 2000 under the band name Rooney (not the later US band of the same name)[9] were broadcast by BBC Radio 1 (John Peel Show) and BBC Radio 3 (Mixing It) amongst others,[10] and the track Went to Town reached number 44 in John Peel's Festive Fifty of 1998.[11] All of the Rooney songs were centred around lyrics describing banal events, everyday objects or mundane jobs, with home-recorded lo-fi music exalting/disrupting these observations in various ways. As well as a solo recording project, Rooney became a live band in time to record a Peel session in 1999, but the project ended after a third album was released in 2000.

2000s

Paul Rooney continued to perform or work with other musicians in the early 2000s, such as The NWRA House Band, touring a 'variety night' and a 'rock opera' amongst other performance projects.[12] His gallery works — now primarily sound/music based installations but also including video and writing — developed through commissions for organisations such as Sound and Music and Film and Video Umbrella,[13][14][15] and through a period of residencies and fellowships at institutions in the UK[16][17] (including Tate Liverpool[18] and Oxford University,[19]) and abroad, from Havana to Melbourne.

Paul Rooney: La Décision Doypack (commissioned by Radar and Matt's Gallery), 16mm film still, 2008.

Electric Earth: Film and Video from Britain, a British Council exhibition which toured internationally from 2003, included early music/video work by Rooney.[20] In 2004 he curated Pass the Time of Day, a UK touring exhibition dealing with the relationship between music and 'the everyday'. Pass the Time of Day included works by Arab Strap, Fugazi and Jem Cohen, Mark Leckey, Rodney Graham, Susan Philipsz and Phil Collins amongst others.[21][22][23][24] The following year Rooney's work was selected for the survey show British Art Show 6,[25][26] which toured the UK in 2005–2006. Rooney had solo shows at venues such as Site Gallery, Sheffield (a two-person show with Susan Philipsz, 2003); and Matt's Gallery, London (2008).[27][28][29]

He returned to releasing records in 2007 with the red vinyl 12" Lucy Over Lancashire, on SueMi Records of Berlin, a dub anti-hymn to North West England.[30][31] Released under his full name of 'Paul Rooney', it was specifically made for broadcast on BBC Radio Lancashire,[32][33][34] but BBC Radio 1[35] and BBC 6 Music were amongst the other stations who broadcast the piece (despite it being 16 minutes long), and it reached number 5 in that year's Festive Fifty, now organised by Dandelion Radio.[36][37][38]

2010s

In 2012 Rooney had a solo show in the Liverpool Biennial official programme, at which he launched Dust and Other Stories,[39] a collection of short fiction.

The Rooney Peel session was repeated in 2016 on Gideon Coe's BBC 6 Music show,[40] and in 2017 Rooney's first album for seventeen years, Futile Exorcise, was released on Owd Scrat Records on transparent vinyl.[41] The album was on Stewart Lee's list of best records of 2017[42] and a track from it, Lost High Street, reached number 1 on the 2017 Dandelion Radio Festive Fifty.[43] Owd Scrat Records was launched by Paul Rooney and other collaborators in 2014, and releases works by artists who are pseudonyms/fictional creations of Rooney himself. It has released work by The Seven Heads of Gog Magog, The Creeping Things and Alain Chamois amongst others.[44]

Discography

EPs and singles

Got Up Late (as Rooney), Common Culture (1997)

Different Kinds of Road Signs (as Rooney), Common Culture (1998)

Foreign People Speaking (as Rooney), Common Culture (1999)

Lucy Over Lancashire 12", SueMi (2007)

Lucy Over Lancashire (CD re-issue), Owd Scrat (2014)

Interference Zone: The Tapes of Alan Smithson (as Alan Smithson and Annette Gomperts), Owd Scrat (2015)

Shake it Off (as Why Why?), Owd Scrat (2017)

Lucy Over Lancashire (Remastered 2017), Owd Scrat (2017)

New Theme to Still at Large (as The Creeping Things), Owd Scrat (2018)

L E T M E T A K E Y O U T H E R E (as Alain Chamois), Owd Scrat (2018)

Stolen Things (The Creeping Things Remix), Owd Scrat (2019)

This Job's Forever - The Peel Session (as Rooney), Owd Scrat (2020)

Albums

Time on Their Hands (as Rooney), Common Culture (1998)

On Fading Out (as Rooney), Common Culture (1999)

On the Closed Circuit (as Rooney), Common Culture (2000)

Futile Exorcise, Owd Scrat (2017)

1981 (as Immaterial), Owd Scrat (2017)

The Seven Oracles of Gog Magog (as The Seven Heads of Gog Magog), Owd Scrat (2018)

Tony's a Winner (as The NWRA House Band), Owd Scrat (2020)

Compilations

Subculture Fanzine CD1 (as Rooney), Subculture (2001)

02 - Flux Collectable CD2 [CD Rom], Flux magazine (2001)

Ua2 (as Rooney), Underwood Audio (2002)

Radio Radio (as Rooney with Rob Hughes), Revolver (2004)

The Topography of Chance (as Rooney). Curated by Stewart Lee. Sound Arts Network (2006)

The Drift: Fool Me, New Media Scotland (2009)

Wire Tapper 44, The Wire Magazine (2017)

References
  1. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 13 April 2014. Retrieved 12 April 2014.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  2. "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 March 2014. Retrieved 5 March 2014.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  3. Cowley, Julian. ‘Cross Platform – sounds in other media: Paul Rooney’. The Wire. January 2010
  4. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3173914.stm
  5. http://www.northernartprize.org.uk/2008-prize
  6. http://www.royalscottishacademy.org/pages/exhibition_frame.asp?id=296
  7. "Arts Council Collection website".
  8. "Contemporary Art Society website".
  9. http://www.cosmik.com/aa-september01/reviews/review_rooney.html
  10. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 6 March 2014. Retrieved 7 March 2014.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  11. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/johnpeel/festive50s/1990s/1998/
  12. "Grizedale rock opera".
  13. http://www.grizedale.org/artists/paul.rooney
  14. http://www.fvu.co.uk/projects/detail/artists/paul-rooney
  15. http://www.soundandmusic.org/projects/thin-air
  16. http://www.dundee.ac.uk/pressreleases/prmar02/paulrooney.htm
  17. http://pers-www.wlv.ac.uk/~in5127/40ad/events%20exhibitions%20posters%20image58.html
  18. http://www.air-artists.org/artists_talking/article/83669
  19. http://www.ruskin-sch.ox.ac.uk/research/detail/arts_council_england_oxford_melbourne_fellowship
  20. http://visualarts.britishcouncil.org/whats-on/exhibition/11/15892
  21. http://www.royaljellyfactory.com/davidbarrett/articles/artmonthly-list.htm
  22. Barrett, David. ‘Pass the Time of Day’. Art Monthly. March 2005
  23. Falconer, Morgan. ‘Painting with Sound’. The Times. 22 January 2005
  24. Thatcher, Jennifer. ‘Pass the Time of Day’. Flash Art. January–February 2005
  25. http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/british-art-show-6
  26. https://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/articles/2006/01/24/280106_rooney_bas_feature.shtml
  27. http://www.mattsgallery.org/artists/rooney/exhibition-1.php
  28. Milliard, Coline. ‘Paul Rooney, Matt’s Gallery’. Modern Painters. July/August. 2008
  29. Charlesworth, JJ. ‘Paul Rooney, Matt’s Gallery’. Art Review. June/July.
  30. http://massivecrushonmusic.blogspot.co.uk/2008/01/paul-rooney-lucy-over-lancashire.html
  31. http://coffeetablenotes.blogspot.co.uk/2011/06/paul-rooney-lucy-over-lancashire-suemi.html
  32. http://www.isthismusic.com/paul-rooney
  33. http://otwradio.blogspot.co.uk/2006/11/playlist-18th-november-2006.html
  34. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01lcs2t
  35. https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/huwstephens/tracklistingarchive.shtml?070503
  36. http://dandelionradio.com/2007festive50.htm
  37. http://louderthanwar.com/quick-fire-john-peel-related-questions-to-dandelion-radio-djs/
  38. http://louderthanwar.com/the-festive-fifty-the-dandelion-radio-years-plus-how-to-have-a-say-in-this-years-edition-of-the-chart/
  39. https://bookmunch.wordpress.com/2012/10/23/the-treachery-of-stories-and-words-dust-and-other-stories-by-paul-rooney/
  40. "Gideon Coe track listing".
  41. "The Wire Magazine preview".
  42. "Stewart Lee".
  43. "Dandelion".
  44. Bliss, Abi (September 2018). "Alain Chamois, Let Me Take You There". The Wire.
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