For decades, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and the artist Stanley Donwood have been locked in an intense creative partnership. They scribble over each other’s drawings, scrawl in each other’s notebooks, push each other, inspire each other. Their work has been on every Radiohead album cover since 1995’s The Bends, every Yorke solo record, every poster and every T-shirt. Nothing is farmed out to designers or agencies – Radiohead’s visual identity has been fully overseen by Donwood and Yorke.
And now, in a homecoming of sorts for local hero Yorke, their artistic output is being celebrated at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. There’s no doubt that Donwood and Yorke, who met while studying at the University of Exeter, have created some of the most recognisable, ubiquitous and maybe even iconic album covers of their generation. But do they make sense in a huge, historic gallery such as the Ashmolean? Does any of it make for good art? Does it stand up to scrutiny when removed from the context of the records and merchandise it was designed for? It’s a nice dream, but nope.
The exhibition starts with LPs, CDs, posters and T-shirts arranged as though you are in a very hip but dour record shop. The gasping, deathly resuscitation dummy of The Bends; the ghostly schematics and angry doodles of OK Computer; the weeping little fella of Amnesiac; the mountains of Kid A; the multicoloured poetry of Hail to the Thief; the woodcuts of Yorke’s The Eraser. This is how the work was meant to be seen, this is the context it works best in: arranged as if in racks, as if you could pull a record off the wall and play it.
Donwood clearly has an issue with art galleries. “They’re just intimidating – it’s not very democratic,” says a quote of his on the wall. “Whereas you go into a record shop and it’s full of all kinds of oiks.” I’m not sure I buy into this. Record shops can have exactly the same atmosphere of sneering exclusivity as galleries. There’s a touchiness here that makes the show feel a little bitter. Guys, you’re in the Ashmolean. You’re not kicking against the establishment, you’re in it.
The exhibition goes album by album, with sketchbooks and paintings displayed to lay bare their creative process. Everything is jointly attributed, positioning Yorke and Donwood as equals.
OK Computer sets an unfairly high bar early on in the show. The 1997 album captured the era’s zeitgeist with its anxious teardown of corporate facelessness, technological paranoia and capitalist excess. It still resonates, as does its sense of isolation and loneliness in a world where you’re constantly surrounded by people. The artwork looked like nothing else of its era: featuring a motorway overlayed with airplane safety manuals and the ghosts of people rushing by, the cover image looks how the music sounds – cold, frustrated, isolated, desperate. A brilliant meeting of music and album artwork.
But it works infinitely better as a CD insert. You gain almost nothing by seeing these digital images enlarged, framed and plonked on a gallery wall.
Radiohead would struggle to capture the moment again in quite the way they did with OK Computer. The same goes for the art. Donwood and Yorke made vast, bleak acrylic paintings for the covers of Kid A and Amnesiac. Eight canvases are displayed here and they are an unbelievable mess: badly composed, poorly executed, smudgy, splodgy, confused landscapes that even the RA Summer Exhibition would reject. The paintings of spiders and trees for 2011’s King of Limbs are even worse; sub-A Level attempts at Max Ernst that almost make me embarrassed for them.
The woodcuts for Yorke’s solo albums are less visually offensive, and the ultra-colourful paintings of rivers and forests for the most recent albums by his other band the Smile work better as artworks, but are still quite a distance from anything you’d call brilliant.
Plenty of the work here, especially from the 90s and early 2000s, has entered the wider public consciousness in a way that proves album artwork has cultural heft. It matters. It has an impact. But that doesn’t mean any of it is especially good, or even interesting, as art.
If you’re a Radiohead fan, there is tons of insight and detail here to keep you happy, but from an art perspective it is a succession of bad paintings. Donwood and Yorke probably shouldn’t have put themselves in this position, but they did it to themselves, and that’s what really hurts.