Why has Kai Althoff's music been included in exhibitions of his art? There doesn't seem to be any way in which his recorded work passes as audio art, in the ways in which audio art has become a familiar genre in the last decade. It's not site-specific, and it just as easily could be listened to at home as well as - or perhaps even better than - in a museum. All of the examples of Kai Althoff's music that appeared in the exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, in Boston, 'Kai Kein Respekt' ('Kai No Respect', 2004), were commercially available. Even works produced in relatively small editions sold for a typical list price. At the time of the ICA Boston exhibition, his solo LP Fanal (produced in an edition of 500 by Galerie Neu, Berlin in 2003) was still available. As was the album Engelhardt/Seef/Davis (1996), listed in the catalogue as existing in an edition of 50. A little research revealed that it was still available at its €15 list price from a distributor in the Netherlands.

The point is that it's not difficult to find these recordings, meaning they exist in various listening contexts. It's available in the museum, yes, but it's also in record stores, online and so forth. Like the artist's music itself, its dissemination is resolutely unfussy.

Workshop is Althoff's long-running project with Stephan Abry and a cast of occasional conspirators. The idea for the group dates back to the beginning of their teens. The name 'Workshop' was chosen in homage to the Children's Television Workshop, the production group responsible for Sesame Street. From their records alone - especially the early ones - it's difficult to tell who's involved. There are a number of what I take to be pseudonymous characters floating about, some of whom claim authorship for liner notes or artwork, including Sheree Otnes, Francia Gimble Masters, Quirmbach. I can think of few other groups whose mode of presentation so happily and resourcefully incorporates fictive elements. Perhaps the best way to get at this enigmatic group is to ask how Workshop fits into Kai Althoff's artwork, and how Kai Althoff's artwork illuminates or creates an especially vivid context for Workshop. Workshop seems to have broken loose from Althoff's artwork in the way that an inflatable pig broke loose from the photo shoot for the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals (1977).

Althoff's chosen media include paintings, drawings, sculptures, installations, poster graphics, sound recordings, album designs, music videos and narrative videos and films. He specialises in representing the interpersonal dynamics of insular, frequently allmale groups. His work, often made in series, represents largely homosocial environments such as a hippie commune, the army, a Catholic monastery, a right-wing student group, a quasifictional filmmaking collective and, germane to this essay, rock bands. The rock band, in Althoff's art, is not so different from an army barracks, which is not so different from a Cistercian Brotherhood. They're composed of individuals forced to negotiate power dynamics within these various sects. These are microsocieties, themselves dissident from society, yet containing their own rules and hierarchies. A major theme in Althoff's artwork is the fate of these creative, asocial dissidents, these dropouts.

Critic Diedrich Diederichsen has recounted that he knew something funny was up when he came across the song title 'Frankfurt Art Fair '79' on Workshop's first record, the intriguingly titled People take action to receive certain results, like the Workshop now deliberately giving in to a momentary urge to make music (1990). The cover of this album is an image from Althoff's Erwachsen werden, Fabio (Growing Up, Fabio, 1991), a series of sixteen watercolours presented in the form of a children's book, but in this case credited to 'Joey Engelhardt and Workshop at P.I.P.'.

I was passed a cassette of Workshop in Hamburg in the mid-1990s. When I later mentioned Workshop to a friend in Munich, I recall his referring to the group, disparagingly, as 'Cologne backgammon-table music'. I took this as a bit of indie-rock homophobia, i.e. not knowing what to make of a group with an androgynous, gay singer that sounded a bit like 1970s hippie groups such as Can and Pink Floyd, but which also had released a 12-inch single with club remixes. Then there was the art connection - suspicions abounded in that narrow, highly normative world of post-punk, post-grunge independent music.

My first and only encounter with Workshop in performance was an epic one. Workshop concerts have been few and far between; they're not the sort of group that will head off on tour at the drop of a hat. In 1998, the Cologne artist Cosima von Bonin, together with music writer Christoph Gurk, organised a project for the Steirischer Herbst festival in Graz titled 4 Plattenladen für Graz - or 4 Record Stores for Graz. The project came from the basic idea of having live performances and parties that would represent music from Cologne. Von Bonin and Gurk chose to stress the centrality of the record store to music in Cologne, and asked four of these to select groups to play at events in Graz on four successive weekends. Steirischer Herbst rented commercial space in downtown Graz for a month; every week a different record store from Cologne representing a different type of music moved its stock from Cologne to Graz. The Kompakt store brought techno records and programmed a techno concert; the Groove Attack store handled hip hop; A-Musik brought abstract electronic music; Normal imported the aforementioned vaguely post-punk, 1990svariety indie rock. For their event, Normal staged a concert with Workshop and The Red Krayola, two groups known for having the wherewithal to say 'no'. I forget who said 'yes' first. Maybe von Bonin lied and told each group that the other, after protracted negotiations, had relented and agreed to appear at Steirischer Herbst. It's hard to say. In the end, both beasts were booked, and set to sport large line-ups - The Red Krayola, with whom I performed, numbered seven, but I recall two more friends wandering onstage for most of the set. Workshop also numbered seven before being augmented by a DJ.

Workshop, for not being what you would call a conventionally active band, certainly seemed like one when they arrived in Graz. It was rumoured that during the train trip from Cologne they had written an opera that would last longer than the twelve-hour journey. They then proceeded to get on the hotel management's bad side by making a Workshop logo with black electrical tape on the door of one of the rooms.

If The Red Krayola's set at the festival was chaotic and vaguely disastrous, this was explained in advance by Albert Oehlen's manifesto of 'New Stream' music, which was copied and distributed for the event. In Oehlen's formulation, New Stream - sounding suspiciously like New Wave crossed with Third Stream, the famously unnecessary 1950s hybrid of jazz and European classical music - took as its stylistic reference points The Beatles's 'Revolution 9' (1968), The Red Krayola's 'Free- Form Freakouts' from their 1967 debut album The Parable of Arable Land, Sun Ra at his least musical, and the British group The Deep Freeze Mice in their phase of making LP-side-long tape collages. (Workshop later appeared on one of Oehlen's New Stream compilations titled Rearcar/Rearprojection, 2001.) Regardless, The Red Krayola's performance was one of wilful awkwardness and impenetrability, occasionally interrupted by full-group stabs at previously unreleased songs that predated their thirty-year-old first album.

I suspected that Workshop were in a bad place; that they were also planning on a little realtime risk-taking; that they would appear more like an art project than a one-brained, many limbed rock group; and that The Red Krayola had stolen their thunder by presenting a similar kind of wild sprawl. I was wrong.

The seven-piece Workshop at Steirischer Herbst consisted of Althoff - wearing layers of torn dresses or slips, as well as what I recall as pirate features drawn directly on his face - along with Stephan Abry on guitar and five other determined individuals drafted specifically for the event. It was a three electricguitar line-up, more reminiscent of American southern rock like Lynyrd Skynyrd than your average art-school band. The first surprise was that they seemed extremely well-rehearsed. They played as a group, and not as a demonstration of the autonomy of individuals within the context of a band in scare quotes. The set began with Althoff perched atop a stool, in an attitude of theatrical shyness, swaying back and forth and singing in the most hesitant manner. It was like someone dipping their toes into a pool and refusing to dive in. The group slowly calibrated itself to his every squeal and hiccup. They followed the nuances of his singing, but they also urged him forward. It was three or four songs before they'd finally coaxed him off of the stool. Everything about this set was pitched on an epic scale - it took several songs to get Althoff to sing above a whisper, several songs for him to come down from the stool and stand on his own two feet; it took another song or two for him to start moving to the beat of the music; and finally another couple of songs for him to match the musicians at their level of intensity. It was a coquettish performance - the onus was on the band to convince the singer to lose himself within the onrush of the music. At one point Althoff switched to drums, enacting the anti-Phil Collins or anti-Ringo move, where the singer becomes a drummer. It thus had a screwing-around-in-the-practice-room quality, where it's okay to switch instruments if it keeps things interesting for the musicians. I was largely unfamiliar with the songs they played, and yet they played them as if they'd been playing them for years, as if these were all hits ingrained in the mind of the audience.

Albert Oehlen once said that if he could sell his soul for anything, it would be to not have to hear the same music twice. The Workshop set at Steirischer Herbst was precisely that. It was an intoxicating, groove-heavy rock show of memorable songs of which the audience had no prior memory. If only all concerts could be like that. If only the groups that you went to see play live had all the synergism and inexplicably complex dynamics and telepathic interplay without playing songs that you've heard played to death.

Anyway, back to the theatre of the formerly coquettish lead singer bursting into bloom. By the final third of this 90-minute-or-more set Althoff, who had seemed so shy perched on his stool with his pirate makeup and multilayered torn dresses, was now firmly ensconced as lead singer, as group leader. Like James Brown, he commanded the group effort: the musicians were following his every gesture as he conducted more with his body, his long hair flying every which way, possessed but in control, ever the focal point while acting a part halfway between Robert Plant and a lion tamer. You can hear on the Workshop recordings that Althoff is a gifted improvisational singer; his singing seems comparable to, for instance, his draughtsmanship. One has the sense that it's the result of a lifetime of refinement, of singing that began in childhood, just as he began to draw as a child. The voice is every bit as individual as the lines in his drawing, in the forms and figures that are echoed from work to work. By the end of the set, Althoff looked as if he commanded centre stage every night, that this was another stop on a never-ending tour; one can hardly remember that he had been the shy creature perched atop a stool less than two hours before. It was a kind of All About Eve performance without the rival, or a frontman's Bildungsroman live onstage - an underground star is born, but, of course, it's Workshop, it's a one-off, it's not going to be taken on the road and repeated night after night. Althoff looked like Nico impersonating Robert Plant at his head-banging best, and just when the set reached its peak of capital-R rock, they were suddenly joined by the Cologne house DJ Neon Leon, who augmented the group at the turntables, and rock concert and dance club began to superimpose themselves. It was as if they had learned to be a powerful rock band, mission accomplished, on to the next mutation - you've seen Workshop learn onstage (or rather you've seen them representing, onstage, a learning process that a band goes through, normally over a longer period of time) and, as with Wittgenstein of the Tractatus (1921), the ladder is kicked away and we're on to the next phase, no looking back - or down.

Workshop eventually leave the stage, and it became Neon Leon's turn to keep the party going. I'm not sure that I've really ever seen a group move an audience like that while playing material that was unfamiliar to most everyone in the room. When Neon Leon turned the space into a house-music party, we seemed to be a long way from the 4 Record Stores for Graz concept of representing four different kinds of music through four meeting places or four social spheres. I assume that this was something that helped persuade Workshop to agree to perform in the first place - not that they would represent a particular scene, but that they would toss the model of the four discrete scenes out the window. Though it makes sense to represent these musical genres in terms of their social spheres - that is, the record store as its own individual public sphere - Workshop isn't a group that came about through hanging out at the record shop, even in its context as a quasi-fictive group.

What then about this status of Workshop as a fictional group? Workshop's recordings, like the live performance in Graz, belie the designation. Besides, in any pop context, it's always fair to ask 'Who are you calling fiction?' Fictive groups, fake bands and so forth exist along a continuum. The relevant question is not in discerning real versus fake, but in asking about the fiction's purpose. What does fake want? Does it aspire, chrysalis-like, to transform itself or to merely pass as real? Alternately, does it revel in its mischievous status as fake, as obviously fake, and in full view? Or is ambivalence, above all, the goal? Is the aim to style oneself or one's group as a fake amidst the real - the delight of the poseur - or, dandy-like, to cut everyone's realness down to size?

The first Workshop record foregrounds the pleasure they take in playing with what it means to be a group. The pseudonymous Francia Gimble-Masters's liner notes are gushing jottings about the glamour of being - not necessarily being in, but being - a modern pop group:

Now I can see them[the band]walking towards their newly purchased bungalow, while the 'supergrouping-thing', which had taken over their consciousness for the duration of a 'sup-tea, dancing with the Gay Gordons, feeling Cutty Sark-grand, tam-o'-shanter, Black Bum, getting our hair done by the Ginger Group's Alex, (ginger grouping in general), and being leader of all packs - SEASON'will henceforth give way to a new process of thinking about things differently. I.e., to sense absolute greatness…

I should mention, if it's not clear, that the Gay Gordons, the Ginger Group and SEASON, which is presumably supposed to be a music magazine, are all fictive. Not quasi-fictive, not with any recorded documents - this is a swinging scene first and last glimpsed in Workshop's liner notes. Even if Workshop doesn't really fit into 4 Record Stores for Graz, or into Albert Oehlen's genealogy of New Stream music, they in fact do have their own scene, right alongside the Ginger Group, the Gay Gordons and all the other peers of their own imagination. Francia Gimble Masters's liner notes frequently correct themselves mid-sentence, creating a sense of free-associative spontaneity: when the rhetoric starts to sound too blandly rehashed ('will henceforth give way to a new process of thinking about things differently') Gimble-Masters shifts gears, getting to the point of the exercise, namely that Workshop will 'sense absolute greatness'. As she concludes, 'It's maybe not the music that makes it work here for me that much, but the brilliant approach of thinking people towards being a pop group'. What other record has as its caveat, 'it's maybe not the music that makes it work here for me'?

The album didn't come with a lyric sheet and it's difficult to decipher all of the words. Unlike most of the later Workshop records, the lyrics are in English, which seems apropos given that they were placing themselves in the company of the Ginger Group and the Gay Gordons, which sound like Swinging London bands. I can make out the following lyrics:

Junior's contract is already signed Daddy wants Junior to succeed in this world But I give you my word - you'll soon be heard By all those beautiful twerps, all those beautiful twerps Yes you will be heard, by all those beautiful birds

A song about being in a pop band that's just starting out. The lines 'You'll soon be heard / by all those beautiful twerps' already look forward to an album they would make a decade later, Es liebt Dich und Deine Körperlichkeit, ein Ausgeflippter(You and Your Physicalness Is Loved by a Dropout, or A Freak Loves You and Your Physicalness, 2001).

The two earliest Workshop records are in some ways musically the least appealing, because they seem so stylistically indebted to Can, the most celebrated of Cologne's music groups. Can started in the late 1960s with a couple of its members having been students of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit's nimble touch and dogged pursuit of an endless groove anchored the group, albeit lightly, while they tried to figure out what to do for a singer; the idea being to be a rock group. And a rock group - back then, at least - needed a singer. Can's first singer was the African-American soul-shouter Malcolm Mooney, who provided a strong counterpoint to the group's instrumental coolness. Mooney was replaced by the anomalous Damo Suzuki, a brilliant vocal improviser with a voice that could be as delicate and as persistent as Liebezeit's drumming. Althoff both sings and plays drums in Workshop, and on these early records it feels like he's channelling Suzuki and Liebezeit to a disarming degree. I suppose you could say that Can is the sound of Cologne the way that Nirvana, at least for a while, became the sound of Seattle, or R.E.M. the sound of Athens, Georgia. The Can-Workshop connection is itself a bit of a Daddy 'n' Junior relationship, especially as Althoff's parents were friends with members of Can. Prior to taking the name Workshop the group was known as 'Mago', after Can's album Tago Mago (1971). But as the song says, hopingly: 'Daddy wants Junior to succeed in this world.'

If the world of Workshop already seemed like a work of fiction or a world of daydreaming, the group's next stylistic shift only made this characterisation more complex. Talent, which was made between 1991 and 1994, is composed largely of samples from other records. The trick is that they made it sound like Workshop. Even though Talent appears to be comprised of samples, I'm pretty certain that I hear Althoff's drumming in there, gluing together Indian tabla, disco strings and Ennio Morricone- ish harpsichord samples, making it aurally recognisable as a Workshop record. I can't think of any other record besides The Chipmunks' Chipmunk Punk (1980) or Robert Wyatt's The End of an Ear (1970) that relies as heavily on the technique of speeding up recordings of vocals. Almost fifteen years after this record was released, it's difficult to imagine how hard it was for people at the time to grasp the idea that most of its parts were taken from other records. I recall at the time wrestling with the question of whether such an action counted as plagiarism - as if the artist had merely mechanically duplicated an existing work, as opposed to selecting and deploying individual strands into a new composition. In terms of musical aesthetics, it really does seem like a long time ago. Talent was the first sample-based record I knew of that was neither specifically a dance record nor a record with the built-in alienation effect of, for example, Christian Marclay's turntable manipulations. I always thought that Talent was a brilliant and very funny title for a record on which a group didn't 'play' in the thencurrent sense of the term.

The liner notes, this time from Sheree Otnes of the House of Marvick, have a very different tone from the 'I can see them walking towards their newly purchased bungalow' quality of the first record. They begin with a declaration:

Triumph, triumph, as the Workshop heralds out the news so gaily: We don't need you anymore! Never has its subtle-super-inturning-mode been carried to such glamorously flawless, buxom, slinky, extent; a summery synthesis of wrangling nostalgically with the valuation of 'avant-garde' - and do we become it? We'd know.

Whether they become avant-garde or not, it becomes them. Had Workshop chosen to disappear, Talent would have been an opportune moment - in it the soul of the group was sublimated into its record collection, the tide returning from whence it came. Around the time that Talent was released, this was the sort of talk in the air in Cologne and Berlin - the group Oval was said to be planning to market their own sound-processing software that would render Oval unnecessary (or perhaps multiple, or omnipresent). That the group could voluntarily - and happily - become redundant, either through sampling or music-processing software, was prevalent in the years that followed Talent. But Workshop, again, were headed off in another direction.

I'm going to pick up the thread more than half a decade and a handful of records and side projects later. In 2001, Workshop released Es liebt Dich und Deine Körperlichkeit, ein Ausgeflippter. I can testify to variant English translations of the title because after years of trying to convince US record labels to release records by Workshop, I went ahead and licensed this album for US release on my own Blue Chopsticks label. I can also testify to the experience of interesting people in the US in an album with an extremely long and difficult to translate German title. Here is a translation of the lyrics to the song 'Erfüllung ' ('Fulfilment'):

I should want to reconcile To everything there is. I should want to be All once And thus I touch the work.

I should want to surrender And simply cannot do. [...]

I want, I want I should want to win silence over, Leave life with creation to itself And give the gifts to the glorious empire, And so no more be I alone Like those days But with half a wit.

You and your physicalness is loved by a dropout.

Listening to that track makes me think about the ways that notions of sincerity or directness are related to record production. In some cases, a very raw, unproduced, real-time sounding recording conveys sincerity, lack of artifice, etc. But at this point in Workshop's career it would have been redundant to make something recorded as roughly as the earlier records. Es liebt Dich… is the smoothest, most 'produced' of the Workshop records, and in a strange way, given the context of their other records, it also feels like their most intimate and - I'll use this word again - sincere, emotionally open and inviting recording. The fact that it is, so to speak, 'produced' - and particularly after so many rough, amateurish-sounding Workshop records - creates an effect of transparency that places the voice and the lyrics front and centre.

I also think that it is their most empathic record, beginning with Althoff's cover drawing of, presumably, the 'dropout' or 'freak' who loves you and your physicalness. In the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition 'Kai Kein Respekt', Althoff has written captions that go with the book's illustrations. In his essay 'Attraction and Repulsion' in the same catalogue, Olaf Karnik refers to the image on the album cover as 'the portrait of an ugly man'. ¹ I laughed out loud when I read Althoff's caption that accompanies the image: 'An ugly man…? Those writing essays are ugly.'² It's a long way from the fledgling pop group's newly purchased bungalow to the empathy with the so-called ugly man, the would-be lover.

Workshop occupies a reasonably unique space in contemporary art. The group's releases are undeniably part of Althoff's activities as an artist, and yet they don't participate in a tradition of sound art or sound installation. Quite the opposite - the Workshop records are pop records. You wouldn't say that they push the limits of exhibition practices or that they exist to interrogate a medium. The most general analogy, and one that frankly falls apart immediately, would be to the early presentation of The Velvet Underground in the context of Warhol's art, e.g. as a music group whose contours appear in an artist's dream.

The critical component of Workshop, while present, is appealingly subtle. Above all, it's never self-congratulatory. That's part of the pleasure to be had in Workshop, in contrast to the Sex Pistols or Sigue Sigue Sputnik or Fischerspooner or The Rutles or Spinal Tap. There is no Malcolm McLaren figure, no theatricalisation of boredom, no investigation of selling out. It's profoundly unlike the spectacle of a group hoping to become the stars who demystify stardom. Who doesn't understand stardom? Workshop comes across as perpetually in earnest, constitutionally notjaded, materially impoverished, so much about being a group and almost never - strange thing - about money. A pop group that doesn't thematise money? Surely they must be fictive.

Workshop doesn't ever seem to expect that the newly-purchased bungalow is anything but a fabulous daydream. The phrase 'Workshop Defended Against Its Admirers' speaks less to a fictive group than it does to a fictive audience.

This essay, in a modified form, was delivered as a talk at the ICA Boston (July 2004) and at the Experience Music Project's Pop Conference in April 2005. Thanks to Kai Althoff, Galerie Christian Nagel (Cologne and Berlin), Eric Weisbard, Ann Powers and Bennett Simpson.

- David Grubbs