Rock My Religion

Dan Graham’s 1984 video piece, titled Rock My Religion, is a 50-minute montage that offers a spread of imagery ranging from pre-revolution American settlements to evangelical religious revivals, to sunbathing hippies, to contemporary hardcore punk rock mosh-pits. Initially, these clips come in quick succession, with no apparent interest on Graham’s part in establishing any form of narrative structure. Different video and audio fragments that present various historical eras, cultural epicenters, and pop punk icons weave in and out of each other relentlessly, injecting the viewer with a monumental dosage of cultural information. From one minute to the next, we are plodding along the muddy lanes of a 17th century village, then staring up at Jerry Lee Lewis, dripping with sweat, banging on a piano with his shoe. Graham’s overwhelmingly diverse flood of footage is punctuated by low-budget text scrolls, which are often white block letters moving in front of an image, or else a solid black or red back ground. The text usually describes specific events or states philosophies relating to the topics of faith, worship, rock ’n’ roll, and American youth. The artist increases the risk of total disorientation by adding voice-over or sung lyrics to the scrolling text, which have no direct link to the written words.

After the first fifteen minutes or so, all the connections Graham is orchestrating begin to clarify. Early in the video he documents the organization of religious fanatics known as “The Shakers,” who would fall into rapture-induced comas and shake violently to announce the presence of the Holy Spirit in their bodies. Given this information, we are then confronted with footage depicting this same sort of ecstatic seizure in modern rock ‘n’ roll environments. The look on each movement’s participants’ faces—the eyes closed, the lips parted, the brow slightly furrowed as though expecting an answer from God at any moment—is practically identical. At one point Graham makes a particularly direct association by presenting visual content of an elderly crowd of churchgoers tossing and swaying with each other, that is then overlaid with a song by LA hardcore band, Black Flag, with remarkable synchronicity.

As the video progresses, each successive image or audio fragment comes with increasing familiarity. Graham’s montage finally establishes a direction to its movement, which seems to trace the development of American counter-culture identities through the combined powers of intense physical exertion and crowd-fueled delirium. He draws a connection between the loss of oneself by way of fanatical worship practices and the sublime displacement that sex-starved teenagers sought after in the thunderous drone of the 1960s rock concert. Graham isolates music and rhythm, and specifically the movement that they inspire, as the common binding in each of the cultural or religious factions that he imparts. The video feels much more like a documentary in the middle section, as he describes, in noticeably more coherent juxtapositions of text, imagery, and narration, the introduction of the guitar into worship services, and then the eruption of gospel music in African American communities. Graham suggests that the evolution of the church as an energetic social gathering that involved wild, redemptive dancing is what laid the foundation for rock ‘n’ roll.

Graham continues in this documentarian style a deeper exploration of the rock ‘n’ roll phenomenon of the 50s and 60s. He puts a lot of focus on the sexual liberation that accompanied this defiant new musical style, illustrating its importance with several minutes of Jim Morrison in tight leather pants, strutting in front of an incapacitated audience. His attention to this aspect of rock culture casts a new light on rock’s roots in religious fanaticism. It appears that throughout history humans have had a need for an aggressive response to the sexual energy that is pent up inside of them, especially in societies with rigid moral guidelines in place, such as America since the time of the Puritans. Graham points out that to American youth, the rock star represented the unrepentant sinner who demanded to receive his ecstasy in this life instead of waiting for salvation in the afterlife. This immediate gratification of course meant sex, which in this way took on an angelic quality; the pure, sacred benevolence of angels was replaced by a notion of pure sexual feeling. Patti Smith says late in the video that rock and violence must always coexist. Here, violence stands for all the obstructed energy that was seeking a way out in pre-revolution era religious rituals, up through Black Flag concerts.

Just when the video seems to tie everything together, Graham inserts an odd five-second gap in the tape, after which there is a brief description of Patti Smith falling off a stage and breaking her neck, then returning after a few months in a neck brace and continuing to perform. The piece ends abruptly here, leaving the viewer in the dark with a combination of the startlingly brutal report of Smith’s accident and an uplifting symbol of righteous perseverance, which seems to contextualize all 50 minutes of footage into a radical celebration of the vehemence of human nature.