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.
