Karma to Burn

Here are two not so unrelated facts:

1) Karma to Burn are a fine band.

2) Jim Turbert is a fine artist.

The practice of both artist and band playing with ideas of appropriation, and of identity.

Karma To Burn releasing a few songs that are infact based around Rage Against the Machine riffs.  They have done this quite blatantly, and during their live sets there is no doubt why.  Audiences lap up “that Rage song”, and why wouldn’t they? For a few blurred and blessed moments of confusion, blasting a riff, they become Rage, albeit without the singer (or that other guy, though that is another story).  Karma To Burn aren’t necessarily playing with Homage, I would suggest they are doing this to  test an archetype.  Specifically that of a powerhouse, trying on for size a costume they haven’t weathered themselves.

Jim Turbert does something similar.  His “Expectations vs. Reality” series of self-portraits sets himself in the role of an actor, donning the robes of fantasy or daydream.  Recreating idle thoughts of becoming an astronaut, athlete, Oxford Don, or Quiz-Show contestant convincingly. As if documenting a fictitious history so that he can get a better understanding of himself, and how his path has diverged away from these token childhood ideals.  That in creating these pictures he is satisfying a curiosity, but one that makes it highly apparent that the photographed reality is not the case.  His conviction being not one of abandon, but rather a knowing one.

At a festival in Tillburg in 2010 these two practices collided.  Karma To Burn convincingly recreated this notion of themselves as powerhouse rockers “Jim Turbert style”.  In fact I would argue that they did so to such a high degree that the above photo (coincidently taken during “that Rage song”) could happily sit among Mr Turberts.

For someone familiar with both band, and the artist, it not only seemed as if Jim were there on-stage playing the drums, but that the possibility of him being an astronaut was just as probable.  That the artifice of the camera, and the expectation that the ‘staged’ photos were actually the lie.  For a blessed hour or so Jim alter histories became real; rock god, spy, secret agent….