You might have heard that “love is all you need” and that “love is all around” but what really is love? Through a short animated film, artist Andy Holden set out to answer the difficult question by listening to 8,572 songs about love.
According to the artist, he didn't pick the question “What is Love?”, the question picked him. To delve deeper into the question, we asked Holden how he tackled this complicated task, why he thinks so many pop songs talk about love, and why he loves Philip Guston’s paintings so much.
Why did you pick the question “What is love?”
It picked me. It was almost suspicious, like someone knew something, by the time the list reached me there was only one left and that one was in bold. Not at all how I normally set about making something. I guess Google knew everything; they have my search history, and my email accounts, so they were well aware I was just at the messy end of a fifteen year relationship and embarking on a new love affair. It was clear to me my search engine knew this and that’s why I got this question. It was the worst and best time to try and answer, or try not to answer, a question I don’t think I had ever thought about.
How did you approach this question?
I approached it with an unusual dose of cynicism, as something I had to do, which may or may not be an artwork, but as a way of maybe protecting myself a little from quite how vulnerable trying to an answer this question publicly made me feel.
How would you describe love?
I was interested in the relation between it as something that comes with such claims to the universal, but equally operates on the intensely personal level, something on the one hand is so easily represented as a cliche, on the other undoubted in its experience as a reality on a subjective level. It was the tension between these two ways of experiencing love that I hoped to express, not as a theoretical prospect but as itself an aching reality that leave one reacting in real-time present tense.
Why do you think so many pop songs talk about love?
Perhaps it’s something to do with the above tension. As the films harvesting of pop lyrical cliche shows it’s a very flexible in terms of imagery and metaphor. It is certainly not immune to darker imagery as well as the more charming and sentimental descriptions that permeate the early pop songbook.
I do still find it, in detached moments, really odd to be in, say, a supermarket browsing reduced dishwasher tablets and be hearing a song like 'God Only Knows' or 'I Got You Babe' piped through an in-store stereo, these intently personal expressions of love just background noise to help grease your shopping experience. Love is indeed all around.
What is your favorite song title or lyric about love?
“True love will find you in the end, but only if your looking will it find you.” RIP Daniel Johnston (1961-2019) who expressed vulnerabilities on behalf of many of us who could not.
What is one artist that you love?
Philip Guston’s paintings have been a constant for me since first seeing one as a teenager. It’s hard to say why you love something, like it’s hard to say why something is beautiful, you speak from the personal whilst also with the assumption that others would feel this too, that perhaps it is also this in a universal sense, whilst knowing ultimately, it isn't.
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