OXFORD, England — In 2023, Stanley Donwood, the artist who has collaborated for 30 years with his friend Thom Yorke on almost all the visuals for Radiohead and Yorke’s side projects, told the Art Newspaper’s Ben Luke that he was “a really early adopter of the internet and digital media generally.”
Radiohead made an album called “OK Computer,” so Donwood’s admission is hardly surprising. The cover of that album’s predecessor, “The Bends” — the occasion for Donwood and Yorke’s first major collaboration — displayed the openmouthed face of a resuscitation dummy. Looking for an iron lung, the pair had instead come across the dummy in a local hospital. They repeatedly photographed and re-scanned it until it resembled what Donwood called “an android discovering for the first time the sensations of ecstasy and agony, simultaneously.”
“But I kind of can’t stand it now,” said Donwood, referring to digital media and the internet. “It’s really boring. All this stuff about AI … I’m so bored of it.”
“And then NFTs came along,” continued Donwood, as Yorke laughed in agreement beside him, “and I’m like ‘Oh my God!’” He wanted, he said with an expletive, to tell artists making NFTs to go and “get a pencil or something.”
“NFTs!” chimed in Yorke sarcastically. “That really produced some excellent results, didn’t it? Some really worthy work came of that!”
“This Is What You Get,” an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (near where the world-famous band formed in 1985), displays the fruits of Yorke’s artistic collaborations with Donwood (whose real name is Dan Rickwood).
The visuals for Radiohead are as integral to the band’s identity as the music and lyrics. Never merely illustrative, they were created not after but during the creation of each album, often in a workshop space beside the studio with the band’s developing music piped in through speakers.
During breaks, Yorke, who went to art schoolin the 1980s, would join Donwood and meddle with the art before going back to the band, which meant, as a wall text explains, that “the artworks they created together also fed back into what Yorke took into the [recording] studio.”
The show’s matter-of-fact title is taken from “Karma Police,” a song from “OK Computer” inspired by the Beatles’ “Sexy Sadie.” Arranged chronologically, the survey leads us from visuals reliant on found images subjected to various digital processes to work handmade with materials such as oil paint, gouache, egg tempera and gold leaf.
Interestingly, the evolution doesn’t feel conservative in its trajectory. On the contrary, it feels resistant, as if fired by an intuition that AI, data and all things digitized present a threat to creative freedom, and that salvation, if it ever beckons, might have more to do with pencils and paint than AI prompts.
The show is made beautiful by its lack of preciousness. Most art exhibitions present finished work in frames, suppressing any whiff of the studio. Here — perhaps because the art was always intended to serve alongside the music — we are presented with things both finished and unfinished, central and peripheral, intentional and accidental.
Both Donwood and Yorke began to sense the old digital method’s expressive limitations. “It was almost so you couldn’t be blamed for anything,” said Donwood, in the interview with Luke, of the earlier work reliant on found images and digital processes. To which Yorke responded: “That was exactly what it was about!”
Instead, inviting “blame,” they purchased massive canvases and started slathering paint on with their “whole arm,” simultaneously filled notebooks with “endless Biro drawing” to a degree described by Yorke as “pathological.”
I’ve always been fascinated by art that allows you to see, in the work’s final appearance, evidence of earlier iterations and the process of its making. Think of World War I-era Matisseor World War II-era De Kooning — both artists excavating the paint they’d laid on, digging back into it and laying down more, in a looping process that allowed all the stages of creation to remain at least partially visible in the finished work. Or think of contemporary artists such as Rachel Harrison, Gareth Sansom and Charline von Heyl, who make intuitive, exploratory works, deliberately retaining traces of their early decisions.
Does Radiohead’s music ever reveal its own processes in similar ways?
Since seeing the Ashmolean exhibition, I’ve been listening a lot to “Fog,” a Radiohead song that exists in various versions. The first begins with a furry noise, like wind hitting a microphone. After a few seconds, a descending bass line kicks in. It’s set against slightly thwarted, asynchronous drumming and a high, chiming melodic line suggestive of children’s nurseries (and reminiscent of “No Surprises,” a song on “OK Computer”).
Yorke starts singing one of his more plaintive melodies, though with typically strange lyrics (“baby alligators in the sewers”), while harmonies poignantly embellish the ends of some of the lines. As the song continues, the drumbeat strengthens. Dirty, subterranean noises from an electric guitar spill out into the open as the melody peters out. The feeling, if one had to put it into words, is: “All right, we’re into something heavy now. No time for beautiful melancholy. No more childish illusions.”
A subsequent live version, “Fog (Again),” is stripped back to just piano and vocals. Yorke gives the melody a hint of swing, in slight tension with the steadier pulse of the piano. It’s very beautiful, like a drawing or print made after a painting — not an unknown phenomenon in art.
A third version, “Fog (Again Again),” replaces the piano with high, chiming arpeggiated sounds, some stretched-out, atmospheric notes from a synthesizer, and a gently swinging drumbeat. Here, too, the effect is enchanting, even if it lacks the grungy, evolving quality of the first version.
Comparing all three, you get a feeling for what the Ashmolean exhibit gives us in visual form — an insight into a collaborative creative process that is sometimes about simplicity and paring back and sometimes about building layers and dynamic contrasts to achieve a richer complexity.
Even more, you get a sense of experimental noodling about, as sounds and rhythms are tested out to see how they combine and how well each new amalgam resonates with something more internal — an emotion, an idea, certain combinations of words or shreds of stories — in a continual feedback loop.
“I enjoy the creative process in lots of different ways,” Yorke told Luke in the same podcast interview. “Writing, music, art, collaborating — I don’t see much of a wall between any of it.”
Donwood described himself as having a tendency toward “neurotic detail” that is very “right hand,” even though his “left hand” often wants to “go mental.” You can see this obsessive, pattern-loving side in the fabulous work Donwood did on Yorke’s “The Eraser” and in the duo’s more recent, gorgeously colored paintings for the Smile’s “A Light for Attracting Attention.”
Yorke, by contrast, is “all left hand.” Donwood might have spent long hours creating something in the “fiddly” style of a medieval Spanish church, he told Luke, whereupon Yorke would come in and brush loads of paint all over it. The process tried to approximate the effect of centuries of dereliction (“I’m the weather,” joked Yorke), with Donwood in the role of patient restorer.
But “as usual,” said Yorke, it “became something else very, very quickly.” They might start with an idea, in other words, but inevitably it diminishes in importance as the process unfolds. “We basically get lost in what we’re doing, and at some point one of us taps the other on the shoulder and says, [whispering] ‘That one’s done now.’”
With their vibrant oranges, greens and blues, and their combinations of loose brushwork and vibrant patterning, the duo’s recent work for the Smile, which took as its source an exhibition of maps Yorke saw at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, is arguably their best.
These large-scale paintings, along with a massive tapestry looming over the Ashmolean’s gallery of musical instruments, feel like maps drawn by little boys in states of fierce imaginative invention — maps made before borders and states and fixed identities took shape; maps innocent of constitutions and catastrophic conflicts; maps of places where things still felt possible.
This Is What You Get: Stanley Donwood, Radiohead, Thom Yorke Through Jan. 11 at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.
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