Bumper Value Jotter

Growing Up and Coming Down
Press Release
Another Time Another Place

MUSIC SECURITY ADMINISTRATION is the name Walter Dahn and Philip Pocock gave to their collaborative painting and drawing works between 1994 and 1996.
It began in the Broadway Café, the artists' watering hole in Cologne. Walter asked Philip to write a line from a song - When It Rains It Really Pours. They went back to the studio and began working on a white-on-white painting inscribing over and over with the other end of brushes - When It RAINS it Really pours - into the drying paint. That afternoon, someone dropped by and put several large bills in their hands in exchange for their first 'word painting'. They looked at each other and from that day on for months they listened, saw and read music. The only electric they used was for a CD player. They painted with daylight only, and when twilight came they stopped and would migrate to Dos XX or an equivalent bar for orange juice and dialogue concerning popular culture, music, synaesthesia, relationship of sound and sculpture, photography and even modern American history.
At the studio, they would rip apart music mags and books, read lyrics to each other, always seeing them synaesthetically, and knowing that Philip was an American (Canadian) and Walter a German (European) they understood their crossover and how Fluxus, Grafitti, Outsider and Conceptual Art, as well as East Village and Wildemalerei had spanned the same ocean with ease. Their juncture was somewhere between Robert Filliou, Philip Guston, Cage/Beuys, Will Oldham and The Bob.
They had become enamoured - this was early - for Palace (Will Oldham) and other so-called 'lo-fi' music, and how they related to the lyrical music of the quiet revolutionary period in American music since the Blues - Blind Lemmon Jefferson, Memphis Ma Rainy, and the current response to electro as being the 'painted song'. They felt a connection to the social and lyrical documentary project initiated in the Great Depression by the Farm Security Administration, and this link gave us our collective name - Music Security Administration.