Friday, March 16, 2012

Music videos matter - Cincinnati.com

Sponsored Links

Music videos matter - Cincinnati.com

Music videos matter - Cincinnati.com

Posted: 16 Mar 2012 04:49 PM PDT

Jonathan Wells and his wife, Meg Grey Wells, have something of an advantage as curators of "Spectacle: The Music Video," the exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Center showing now through Sept. 3.

"Spectacle," debuting at the CAC, is billed as the most comprehensive museum exhibition on music videos ever presented, so the Los Angeles couple is setting a template of what a show of this kind and this size should look like.

For starters, it's not some sort of VH-1 or old Blender Magazine-type of "50 Greatest Videos Ever Made" show or list. The videos on display are important, but not necessarily from an MTV-centric point of view.

Instead, the show is broken into themes or categories, including cinematography, choreography and animation in a way that states the case for music video as an art form. And from the standpoint of arguing a point through exhibit displays, "Spectacle" leaves visitors with the impression that a flat screen showing a certain music video deserves as much museum wall space as other two-dimensional works of art – an oil painting or a photograph.

"Spectacle" takes place on the CAC's fourth and fifth floors, with an additional standalone installation of Bjork's "Wanderlust" on the sixth floor. Visitors climbing the stairs to the fourth floor are greeted by the "In the Beginning" section, documenting the birth of music videos, before they were called such, through the periods of 1950s and '60s rock and onto the innovators of the early-MTV era.

As is often the case, the earliest examples of an art movement are often the most interesting, and it doesn't get better than watching the disembodied head of Louis Armstrong chase Betty Boop in a 1932 cartoon, as Armstrong sings "I'll Be Glad When You're Dead, You Rascal You" (if of course you can look past the racial insensitivities of the day that are present in the clip). Just as it's important to know that rock didn't begin with Elvis Presley, it's nice that "Spectacle" points out that music video didn't begin with the Bugles and Nina Blackwood.

(Page 2 of 2)

On display on the opposite wall is a Moonman, the prize handed out at the MTV Music Awards. This one went to Stephen Johnson's 1987 video for Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" in the category "best concept video."

There's an effort to present the videos in "Spectacle" as more than just images flickering on a screen. The black-and-white cartoon concept from A-Ha's iconic "Take On Me" video becomes a three-dimensional display. There's a Baroque gold frame around the flat screen showing Kanye West's "Power" video on a loop, which plays off the video's neoclassical imagery. It makes the video look like something that could be hanging in the Cincinnati Art Museum.

For a section titled Agent Provocateur, which spotlights controversial videos, the method of display is conceptualized. Viewers must watch each of the 12 videos through its own peephole, which emphasizes the notion that these videos are meant for mature audiences.

It's a clever presentation, but it contradicts the thesis spelled out in the wall text, that the result of these videos was in part to "accelerate social change" by addressing "themes such as racism, sexism, sexual orientation, poverty, and alienation."

"Spectacle" provides several strong examples of the video's place in visual-arts innovation. And a visit to the sixth floor is well worth it.

This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read the FAQ at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php#publishers. Five Filters recommends: Donate to Wikileaks.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)