▽ THE ART OF POP VIDEO @ FACT

FACT’s highly anticipated, The Art of Pop Video,  professes itself as the UK’s first exhibition to discuss the popular music video as a site of credible artistic intervention. I, however, had found myself undeterred from questioning the exhibition’s acclaimed originality. Its conspicuous centralisation on popular culture made it appear, in my mind, a meagre sequel to Tate’s recent exhibition - Glam!; and although I deemed Glam! highly successful, the local art scene’s current predisposition towards popular culture has rendered me somewhat skeptical. As cynical as it sounds I feel as though institutions are adopting pop-orientated themes merely in a pursuit of widening their audiences, as opposed to revolutionising or ameliorating the local art scene in anyway. Nevertheless, in spite of my skepticism with regards to FACT’s intentions, I attended the exhibition completely open minded and vowed to reserve any degree of prejudice I possessed.

Upon entering the exhibition space I was instantly struck by one indisputable certainty - the television monitor had boldly replaced the canvas. This, I believed, was truly illuminating, as it embodied the fact that throughout history new media and various technologies have conspicuously altered art and the way in which we view it. Nevertheless, the idea of substituting the canvas was by no means a ground-breaking concept, as this year’s John Moore’s painting prize, for example, revealed a number of exhibiting artists who embraced this conspicuously; the best example having been, in my opinion, Laura Keeble’s I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, in which a compressed Cola can acted as the canvas.  Furthermore, endorsing in the television monitor as the medium through which art was experienced, clearly has its disadvantages and the broken monitor in the first gallery space, which I happened to discover, sadly exemplified this. The multitude of television monitors and projected videos also fabricated a visually and aurally overwhelming space, which some viewers may, as I did at times, find quite distractible. However, at the same time, this sensory overload in which the viewer is very much liable to succumbing to, conversely fabricates a very lively and accessible space that is without esotericism. The exhibition fundamentally consists of two gallery spaces, which are located on two different floors of the institution and I was somewhat irked to ascertain that both exhibit exactly the same thing – numerous television monitors and projections. Whilst I could accept one space consisting of videos, two I thought, was pointless, lacklustre and repetitive. Even though the exhibition is, of course, centered on pop videos, and it therefore makes sense to have a multitude of videos to watch, I believe the exhibition would have proved more successful if just one space consisted of videos and the other of perhaps visual art that discussed the intrinsic relationship between art and music videography.  Nevertheless, this did by no means lessen my appreciation of how videos were categorised into unanimously concurring themes. This successful curatorial feature evokes viewers to decipher links between the videos, and therefore laudably influences them to perceive them as possessing artistic value as opposed to being frivolous, kitsch and quintessentially pop. I particularly enjoyed the videos, which had been brought together under the theme of ‘abstraction’; deciphering such a seemingly obscure theme amongst pop videography was certainly thought-provoking and commendable.  

Interestingly, only one set of headphones is allocated to each television monitor throughout both exhibition spaces, and this notably endorses a more intimate viewing experience. In a visual sense of course, multiple viewers can still experience each video simultaneously but due to the headphones, viewers only fully experience each video consecutively.  Thus, the viewing experience becomes much more personalised to the viewer.  One acknowledges that they are, in the moment of experiencing each video, along with the allocated headphones, the only viewer who is acquiring the full experience and is properly immersed. This in due course, helps to fabricate a viewing experience evidently more personalised than if one was stood in front of a piece in which multiple viewers could fully interact simultaneously. For me personally, a notable degree of interest was evoked from how the generality of other viewers displayed an excellent level of attentiveness to the exhibited videos.  My incredulity towards the public’s commendable degree of attentiveness to the exhibition’s content, is merely consequential to the fact that people seldom bother to spend long amounts of time observing or focusing on one particular work of art. Furthermore, video installations very rarely get the attention and time they require.  Thus, when questioning why the viewing dynamics of this exhibition proved considerably different I came to the conclusion that it may be due to the musical element it possesses. Pop music is instantly satisfying and I think the instant appeal of it is what made the viewers more inclined to give time to each video. Certainly, if the videos had been without their pop music audio, and instead, just moving images, I doubt that people’s attention spans would have lasted as long. 

On the whole, my initial skepticism with regards to FACT’s intentions through endorsing in popular culture was slightly lessened by how the exhibition succinctly explored the impact that fine art has had on popular music videos. With New Order’s Blue Monday video, fascinatingly compared to a “Dadaesque series of images” I felt much more convinced that the exhibition was for arts sake, as opposed to purposefully increasing the institution’s audience.

▽ THE UNIVERSAL ADDRESSABILITY OF DUMB THINGS @ THE BLUECOAT

It has recently occurred to me that the unconventional and the bizarre are in fact common interests of Liverpool’s current wealth of exhibitions. Whilst Glam! The performance of Style at Tate,  focuses on the garish pop culture of the seventies,  Mark Leckey’s The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things at the Bluecoat, boldly celebrates the absurd and the whimsical. The past few weeks have brought about a notable amount of unorthodox art happenings  - everything from an large, projection of Mark Bolan’s face in the Albert Dock, to an enormous, inflatable cat arriving at the Bluecoat. Likewise, it is also worth mentioning the lurid dress made entirely of hair that has recently appeared in the Walker.  I have somewhat endorsed in this apparent trend of jovial, light-hearted art currently taking over the local art scene and I find it rather refreshing if anything, as one must admit, we can at times take art too seriously, intellectualising it too much, or trying to advocate political or social change through it. Sadly, this can often take the fun out of art and make it significantly less accessible. On that note, I must say that I attended Leckey’s exhibition with great enthusiasm. 

The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, curated by Turner prize-winning artist Mark Leckey, explores how our relationship with artworks and commonplace objects is being transformed by the augmenting rise of new technologies.

Upon initially encountering the exhibition, if anything, I felt it recalled aspects of Dadaism, and this sadly made me question its originality. Usually, I would not be bothered by seeing something that had clearly been done before, but I as I felt the exhibition was in some ways trying to pose as new and different it bothered me slightly. The exhibition’s clear rejection of reason and logic, but clear embracing of absurdity adhered closely to Dadaist ideologies.  Although I admit the fundamental concept of the exhibition was rather unique and thought provoking, the notions, which were evoked by the artworks and the displays, were seemingly unoriginal. As the exhibition was built on a concept that was apparently unique I felt it had made a promise to its viewers to give them something a bit more original than a revival of Dadaism. 

Dwight Mackintosh’s Untitled was one of my favourite pieces of the exhibition.  This was consequential to the fact that it reminded me a lot of Jean Michel Basquiat of whom I happen to be a big fan of. Its raw, expressionistic style and primitive looking figure made me immediately think of Basquiat. Apparently, Mackintosh’s drawings can be recognised by their ‘x-ray’ views of the human body, and this is really evocative to consider, when one acknowledges the fact that Basquiat was also inclined towards this in his own work, as he was a noted enthusiast of the classic anatomical study Gray’s Anatomy.  The title of this piece also struck me as an uncanny reference to Basquiat, as a great wealth of his work was ‘untitled’. Furthermore, when I had ascertained that Mackintosh had spent fifty-five years in mental institutions the piece seemed to develop more layers to it; the expressive, flowing lines seemed to now have more meaning and emotion underneath them. It certainly is a coincidence that Basquiat was also a tortured soul and he created work of a similar style to Mackintosh. A few steps away from Dwight’s piece was Transmission of a Blinderator by Joey the Mechanical Boy. Its close proximity to Dwight’s piece was really thought-provoking, as the artist of this painting was actually an autistic child who believed that he could only function as a machine. It seemed an excellent piece of curation had been implemented, as both artists had a mental illness or disorder. Similarly, Dwight apparently had a fascination with machinery,  and there was evidence of this in Untitled; therefore, fascination with machinery was yet another evident parallel.

There were lots of machine imagery pieces placed around this area of the exhibition and most, if not all the artists were male. It was therefore as though gender was being discussed on an underlying level. Machines are thought of as stereotypically masculine objects, but our common inclination to denote these sort of objects as intrinsically male is a mere societal construction. It is as though the curation of the two aforementioned pieces was trying to adhere to common societal beliefs regarding gender, and I did not enjoy this. Even though I had appreciated the other links that had been made between the two aforementioned artists’ I did not enjoy the formation of cliché male imagery. 

Gender discourse through the means of curation seemed to continue in the nearby space, where images of the female body were displayed in close proximity to one another. John Tenniel’s Pygmalion and the statue, a piece, which denotes the pure ideal of Victorian womanhood was placed right next to Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton’s, Studies in Perception, yet another image of the female nude. A startling contrast between how women were represented in the exhibitionand how the male identity was defined unsettled me. Women had been represented by nude figures, merely as objects of the male gaze, were as machines – objects that epitomise modernity and productivity, represented men. Even though I thought it was just as demeaning for masculine stereotypes to be played up to, it was the contrast between the male and female imagery that bothered me the most, as it was extremely stereotypical. If new technologies have in fact transformed our relationship with art and objects, like this exhibition claims, then why does it recall stereotypical images of both genders through art and objects that have existed long before the arrival of technology? Personally, I feel it seems something of a contradiction.

Before attending the exhibition I had not expected to leave thinking about gender representation. It seemed to me, that despite the vast amount of unserious pieces of art on display, the curation still managed to put me in a serious and critical mood. Nevertheless, this certainly did not deter me from enjoying other aspects of the exhibition, as there was without doubt a great deal of interesting pieces on display that were refreshing in all of their light-heartedness and occasionally humorous nature.