Exhibitions
Philip Brophy
In West Side Story the Puerto Rican chicks dance off against their men in the film's fieriest number, 'America' They spit at their men. The guys sling machismo back. The girls flap their Rican skirts in waves of thigh heat. The spiv studs respond with a series of erectile poses. It's like a dance-off between mermaids and matadors.
Aurora Snow directs herself in her series Assploitations. Buffed calendar studs with square jaws ram her trinity of orifices. She cajoles them, egging them on to penetrate her more. Aurora runs this show. These guys grimace as they desperately try to get to the other side. She can swallow them all in one gulp with her extraterrestrial deep-throat technique. Her spit is more substantial than their cum shots. Her voice withers their forced grunts.
Tom Hanks stands on one side of a wombic expanse of west coast water in Sleepless In Seattle. Meg Ryan psychically waits on the opposite coast facing him across America. As forcefully distilled as Safeway brand mineral water, their dumb closed mouths and glassy vacant eyes face the nothingness that forecasts their relationship. Its idealised status is the essence of cinematic factiousness. The insipid ballad that skates across the waterways and airwaves entrances these figures ghosted by love.
In Vox, a man opens his mouth. Stuff comes out. A woman opens her mouth. Stuff comes out. That's the way it is in the dimensional warp between the dick flick and the chick flick. Between the flaccid stylistics of Ocean's Thirteen and the neurotic warmth of Amelie. Between the rehearsed gender politics of Shirin Neshat and the uncontrolled gender detonations of Big Brother. Between you and your other. And your Other. Between your daughter holding a toy princess and your son holding a toy dinosaur. Between their legs.
Philip Brophy
Video clips are not art. There is no art to video clips, and lame quotations of any period of the visual arts does not make them ironic or postmodern. There is nothing progressive about viewing video clips as cool, confrontational, subversive, envelope-pushing or cutting-edge. Nor are video clips some mysteriously heightened, intensified realm of media production. And neither does making note of the affect YouTube, MySpace, iTunes or any other me-me-me consumerist insularism bring video clips into current media analysis. That would be like saying you read a bitingly perceptive piece in Time. Or on a blog.
Post-1990, video clips had become the most normalised form of self-conscious media production – hence their synchronism with journalists, commentators, curators, academics. Video clips pre-1990 encapsulated the collapsed affectedness of Pop music attempting to 'imagine' itself. From the 1970s and through the 1980s – arcing up to and past the golden dawn of MTV – video clips 'put on' imagery, fusing it into sparkling and unweilding audiovisual chimera. The result was always embarrassing, inappropriate, unsuited. In other words, perfect in its audiovisual discordance. It was never hip, never slick, never fashionable. The beauty of that epoch's video clips lies in their failure to forward any visual discourse short of drawing attention to itself. In this regard, they were and remain perfect pills created by media obsessed in directing all energy back towards itself.
Pop music is endlessly derided by the literati of all persuasions because of Pop's supposed imbalance in being too much fake imagery and not enough 'real/true/natural' music. As if Bob Dylan is at all any more profound than Debbie Gibson. (He isn't.) For pop music will always retain a phenomenological aura in its sonic composure. Through innate novelty, distorted production and ungainly presentation, the sono-musical detailing of any pop song – irrespective of your taste – will vibrate with a distinct dimensional voice. Like all sound, like all music, its identity is encoded at the level of where sound becomes 'unlinguistic': where it speaks in tongues and shimmers like an acousmatic mirage. Time renders all Pop historical, and therein it calls back to our present with even greater clarity and clearer semiotic sheen than in its contemporaneous apparition. This is the core magic of Pop music: its molecular grain enables it to transcend its coverage and in the process be greater than itself.
The 1970s and 1980s video clips sadly misperceived this power of Pop. They were born by the imperative to weld market-driven image to a sound that already had greater force than mere ocular dressing. As such, video clips – true to the complete historical compendia of visual discourse and its attendant analyses – parasitically thrived on the energy of their songs. Quivering, shaking, exploding and spurting in time to the orgiastic pulsations of their songs' rhythms and tones, the early video clip functioned like reverse-karaoke: miming itself to suggest that its presence of image is responsible for the transference of its sound. (It isn't.)
In an era where bling still glints with gaudy sting, where nature and folk idioms are caricatured with the grossest projections of humanist desperation, where fin-de-siecle phantasmagoria pathetically directs digital simulations in the name of inventiveness, the video clip now is perfectly simpatico with all televisual enterprise and franchise. Fluorescent is accordingly out of date, pathetic, deluded, artless. Fluorescent is Plastic Bertrand against the Fairlight video synthesiser. The Human League atop wobbly Perspex platforms on Top Of The Pops. The Sweet filmed on 16mm through star filters. Gary Glitter shot on video in the kitchen. It is make-up with sweat. Thighs with muscle. Chromo-keyed space. Supersonic sound. It is the Frankensteinian impossibility of aligning sound and image, spectacularised as a solipsistic performance, writhing in the Glam tradition. Some might conject it's a video clip. It isn't.