▽ 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.