When rock music collides with fine art, the results are often variable. For every fortuitous meeting between the Beatles and Peter Blake, there has been a calamitous one. The odour of Damien Hirst and Blur's smug and unfunny collaboration with Fat Les hangs around the Barbican tonight. Brainy punk quartet Wire have elected to perform their remarkable 1977 debut album Pink Flag in its entirety, with staging by BritArt's Jake and Dinos Chapman.
By Chapman standards, it is a subdued performance: Wire are permitted to take the stage without Nazi uniforms or enormous prosthetic noses in the shape of penises. Instead, they play brief, jolting blasts of distorted guitars and dropped-aitch vocals to films featuring people doing aerobics. Once you've got the gag about this music being inappropriate for aerobics (no side-splitter to begin with), there's not much to see. The films distract attention from singer Colin Newman's intriguing dancing, somewhere between dad doing karaoke and a very, very drunk man at an indie disco.
Worse, they make the music itself seem repetitious. It takes a special kind of talent to tease out the hitherto-unnoticed boredom in what may be the most turbulent, innovative and intelligent music of the punk era, but the Chapmans clearly have it coming out of their ears. Even a finale featuring flashing lights and people performing aerobics on stage cannot prevent your mind wandering on to other matters, the most pressing being how much the Chapmans got paid for this.
The second half features new songs and staging from theatre designer Es Devlin. Each member performs inside a box, on to which faces and numbers are projected. It is striking without being particularly new, but at least it doesn't leave you harrumphing like Kim Howells.
The music is a different matter. Featuring caustic guitars, speeding rhythms and hollered vocals, it seems particularly startling coming from four men who these days resemble senior tutors at a liberal arts college. Forget the films and the props: the disparity between Wire's appearance and the noise they make is a startling visual juxtaposition in itself.
