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Video Killed the Painting Star. Visual Arts and Video Clip Aesthetics
By F. Javier Panera
On August 1, 1981, MTV began its 24-hour music broadcasts with the video clip by the British band The Buggles: Video Killed the Radio Star directed by Russell Mulcahy. The title of that song, composed two years earlier, foretold of the approaching changes in the audiovisual language connected to pop music and, as we now know, nothing has been the same since. A staunch supporter of the record industry during its period of maximum expansion in the 1980s, the video clip has grown like an omnivorous monster with a tireless capacity to “cannibalize” ideas from movies, painting, video art, performance, comedy, fashion, advertising or the most innovative digital imaging.
Years have passed and both radio and television are still very much alive. Even though the customary environment for music videos is no longer television channels like MTV, but instead Internet sites such as YouTube, experience appears to demonstrate that new media never completely annihilate the former, although they do transform them - sometimes radically.
I make note of this, because both the title of the The Buggles’ song and mutations in the music industry over the last three decades could be placed in correspondence with the successive “deaths” and “resurrections” of painting throughout the 20th century. Likewise, it is timely to recall the almost apocalyptic words uttered by Nam June Paik on October 4, 1965, upon showing the first recorded video images on a TV monitor at the Cafe Au Go-Go in New York:
“… In the same way that collage has replaced oil painting, so will the cathode ray tube replace canvas…One day artists will work with condensers, resistances and semiconductors just as they work today with brushes, violins and scrap …” 1
BROKEN RHYTHMS AND CHROMATIC ALTERATIONS
Nam June Paik was one of the first to realize the enormous range of artistic possibilities that new media placed at the disposal of artists, and that sooner or later painting could not avoid the new order. As we know, pioneers of experimental video, like Stephen Beck, Woody Vasulka, Eric Siegel and Nam June Paik himself, introduced into their video images all types of interventions through magnets, feedbacks, colorizations, and video-synthesizer effects, thus reducing the degree of iconicity of the image, displaying the electronic and artificial nature of the televised story, even approaching a certain degree of post-pictorial abstraction. It is also telling to discover that Paik’s musical training was a determining factor in his understanding of video art, since the artist arrived at this medium after having experimented with electronic music in Cologne, under the influence of Stockhausen, John Cage and Fluxus. Furthermore, it is important to recall that in the 1980s, Paik frequently collaborated with pop stars like Ryuichi Sakamoto, Laurie Anderson, Peter Gabriel and David Bowie2 and on more than one occasion demonstrated his interest in the way MTV was popularizing video art3. This could help explain his direct influence on the aesthetics of the video clip of the 1980s, especially on “pictorial” works by frequent contributors to MTV’s initial phase like: David Mallet (Ashes to Ashes, David Bowie, 1980); Bruce Gowers (Bohemian Rhapsody, Queen, 1975); (Can You Feel It, The Jackson Five, 1980) and Russell Mulcahy (Video Killed the Radio Star, The Buggles, 1979).
Nam June Paik, Global Groove, (still) 1973. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York. http://www.eai.org
A look at Global Groove (1973), one of the most emblematic works created by this artist in the 1970s, allows us to discover how, by then, he used concepts like visual zapping, broken rhythms and chromatic alterations of the pseudo-pictorial images that would be so characteristic of many videos broadcasted by MTV in the 1980s. With its own aesthetics of psychedelic hallucination, Global Groove begins with a vibrating “proto-video clip” of the song Devil With a Blue Dress by Mitch Ryder & The Detroit Wheels in which a couple dancing to rock music is overlain by a whole arsenal of electronic, chromatic effects, achieved through the combination of a chroma and video synthesizer. Later, however, both the sound and the images are successively interrupted by Japanese advertising spots; fragments of performances by John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Allen Ginsberg; traditional Korean dances; deformed images of the American president Richard Nixon; and the emblematic image of Charlotte Moorman interpreting her famous TV Cello.
In this same context, in the 1980s and 1990s, the music video maintained a tense -but fruitful- relationship of negotiation, exchange and appropriation with video art. This corresponds to other pioneers like: Rybczynski4, William Wegman5, Warhol6, Robert Cahen, Chris Marker7, John Sanborn8, Joan Logue9, John Whitney10, Judith Barry11, Tony Oursler12 and Jem A. Cohen13, some of whom, apart from serving as a source of inspiration for dozens of music video creators, were also called to work in MTV’s advertising department or to direct video clips for record companies.
APPROPRIATION OF ART HISTORY
The treatment of the screen as a canvas, as anticipated by Nam June Paik, opened a whole new avenue of formal experimentation to video art and its bastard child, the video clip, that even today is helping to breathe life into to the kind of “lifeless entity” that painting has become. In fact, in the 1980s there were many painters who collaborated with music video creators or who directed their own videos. Furthermore, we should recall that within artistic trends, concurrent with the birth of MTV, there was a whole generation of artists -especially in the United States- who used strategies of eclecticism, citation, parody, allegorical appropriation and reinterpretation of images from the history of art and mass media, very similar to those we started seeing in video clips.
There are very well-known painters, such as Larry Pittman, Kim McConnel, and above all, David Salle whose great paintings presented as diptychs and triptychs -as if they were divided screens- reflect the chaotic and promiscuous repertoire of images consumed by viewers of channels like NBC or MTV. Also worthy of note is the case of Robert Longo, -also connected to the New York No Wave scene as a musician in the band Menthol Wars, together with Richard Prince- who has directed video clips for bands as disparate as World Saxophone Quartet (1982); Megadeth, Peace Sells (1986); REM, The One in Love (1987) or New Order for whom he made his best -and most pictorial- music video, Bizarre LoveTriangle (1988). We can also add Keith Haring, who did the costumes and body painting for Grace Jones in the video clip I’m not Perfect (but I’m Perfect for you) (1986) and Basquiat, protagonist of the movie musical about New York’s Postpunk scene, Dowtown 81, directed by Edo Bertoglio.
On more than one occasion, it has been pointed out that thanks to “borrowing” from artistic practices like painting, photography, photomontage, performance, experimental cinema and video art itself, this genre has sought a kind of “legitimate” space in the realm of so-called “high art.” The truth is that there would be artists like Man Ray, J. P. Witkin, Giorgio de Chirico, Bacon or Magritte, and styles like Dadaist photomontage, or expressionist and surrealist cinema, that would be referenced -to not say looted- endlessly. However, it should also be recognized that since the 1980s, we have witnessed a multidirectional process of promiscuous circulation of images that, both in the sphere of art and in mass culture, feed off each other.14
In 1991 the Hindu director, Tarsem, won the coveted Video of the Year award at the MTV Music Awards with the video clip for the song Losing My Religion by R.E.M, an aesthetic succession of stills, conceived as “moving paintings,” full of literal references to the history of sacred art (especially to Caravaggio), but also to filmmakers like Tarkowski and Derek Jarman, although it appears that the general concept of the video was based on the short story by Gabriel García Márquez: “Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes” (A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings).
In 1994 Mark Romanek directed Closer for Nine Inch Nails, a sinister and claustrophobic video with a pictorial texture and impeccable settings full of citations and “reconstructions” of paintings and photographs by various painters and photographers of the 20th century. These include Francis Bacon, Rudolf Hausner, Paul Saudek and above all Joel-Peter Witkin, whose vanitas find their nemesis in several of the video’s “moving paintings.”
Mark Romanek himself -who, as we shall see, uses an extensive repertoire of pictorial references in almost all his video clips- continues with the same strategies of reconstruction/deconstruction of moving paintings in the complex -and even more Neo-Baroque- Bedtime Story (1995) for Madonna, -who had already demonstrated in the 1980s her incredible ability to usurp the identities of other artists and make them her own.15 Bedtime Story is full of references to the hermetic and surrealistic universe of painters little known by the public at large, such as: Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini or Remedios Varo, from whose paintings film remakes are made and to which are added various shots “stolen” from the film Sayat Nova (1968) by the Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov.
Francis Bacon is another of the most revisited artists in music videos of the last two decades. Over and over again, the tormented and powerful character of his paintings has seduced creators, who at times have tried to literally transfer the existential and geometrically unstable world of his paintings to music videos. One of the most interesting examples, because of the way in which the digitally edited images have been reconciled with respect to the original paintings, is the video clip of the song Lotus (1998) by R.E.M, directed by the French creator Stéphane Sednaoui. It is a striking exercise in style in which Michael Stipe becomes the protagonist in one of the most famous paintings by this British artist, in which we confront many of the disturbing anatomical studies in space realized by this artist in the 1950s and 1960s, including his different versions of the portrait of Innocent X by Velázquez or his terrifying paintings of disfigured faces and naked bodies in decay. Another interesting example is Dead Man Walking (1997) by David Bowie, directed by the Italian Canadian, Floria Sigismondi, in which we find references to Bacon’s famous flayed oxen, which also appear in the previously cited Closer by Nine Inch Nails.
The same director, who has become popular because of her biopic on The Runaways, in 2001 created one of her best works: Megalomaniac, for Incubus. It is a video full of animations with more or less literal references to German art from the period between the wars and most especially to the photomontages of Heartfield, Hanna Höch and Max Ernst, and to surrealistic painters like Magritte. It cannibalizes the latter’s shocking painting Pleasure, in which a little girl is shown devouring a bird.
A NEW PARADIGM: AN IMAGE OF AN IMAGE
Dozens of examples such as those I have just cited mark a new paradigm, accelerated with the advent of the Internet, in which one could say that nothing is precisely painting, nor precisely video,… but rather, simply an image; or better yet “an image of another image.” In this context, the very history of the music video becomes an object of remakes, tributes, parodies and plagiaries to a comparable degree as happens with the history of cinema or the history of art. The video of the song Country House (1995) by the Brit pop band, Blur, -directed by Damien Hirst- introduces a parody of the video clip of Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen (Bruce Gowers, 1975) in the final scenes. In 2003, the photographer David La Chapelle directed I’m Glad for Jennifer López. It is a music video that repeats -shot by shot- the most memorable sequences from the movie Flashdance (1983) by Adrian Lyne, following a strategy equivalent to that utilized two years before by Gus Van Sant in his literal remake of Psycho by Hitchcock. This is not to mention the endless looting of the history of audiovisual culture reproduced -practically shot by shot- in the video clips of Lady Gaga, like Bad Romance (Francis Lawrence, 2009) or Telephone (Jonas Akerlund, 2010). In summary, the video clip does nothing more than redefine images that were already found in the mind of the spectator. The citations, signs and references to which we allude, are understood by a wide public, but especially by those who have been educated in “pop discourse,” without the spectator necessarily being aware of their most profound connotations and implications. These references, which often appear in a frenetic, surreptitious and even subliminal way, have the ability to unleash a “wave of associations of ideas” that implies the possibility that a familiar, although different, interpretation exists each time the video clip is consumed. In this way a new relationship is established with the spectator based on the knowledge, or simple intuition, of the different generic codes of cultural exchange and the sensation of participating in a game of deciphering private jokes that favors identification with the artist.
NOTES
1. See, “Nam June Paik, Videa, Vidiot, Videology”, in New Artists Video. A Critical Anthology. Gregory Battcock (ed.) New York: E.P. Dutton, 1978.
2. They were all part of the project: “Good Morning Mr. Orwell,” a satellite television program conceived by Nam June Paik that was retransmitted on New Year’s Day 1984, the result of the collaboration between New York’s WNET TV and Paris’ Centre Pompidou.
3. In an interview conducted by the Brazilian artist Eduardo Kac in 1988, Paik declared: “MTV is not the only focus in the matter of sound and image, but it is an interesting solution that has contributed much to the development of “visual music” and video art itself. I believe that Laurie Anderson’s work, for example, is very important, because she bridges the gap between “low culture” and “high culture”.(…) Musicians like David Bowie or David Byrne are well-informed people, with solid artistic backgrounds (…). They admire Marcel Duchamp and other important artiA visual artist can speak with them at the same intellectual level, since they were visual artists before becoming professional musicians (…)But there is no reason for them to create high art, anyway.”. Originally published in O Globo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 10, 1988.
4. Zbigniew Rybzcynski has directed dozens of videos, including: Art of Noise (Close to the Edit, 1984); Accept (Midnight Mover, 1985); Simple Minds (All the Things She Said, 1986); Propaganda (P. Machinery, 1984); Alan Parsons Project (Stereotomy, 1987); Pet Shop Boys (Opportunities, 1986); Lou Reed (The Original Wrapper, 1986) and Supertramp (I’m Beggin’ You, 1987).
5. William Wegman, directed Blue Monday ‘88 (1989) for New Order.
6. Andy Warhol created the innovative Hello Again for The Cars in 1984 in collaboration with Dan Munroe and Misfit for Curiosity Killed the Cat in 1986 and, through The Factory, various works for artists like the Italian, Loredana Berte and the Spaniard, Miguel Bosé, for whom he also designed album covers. He also created various television shows for MTV.
7. Chris Marker directed in 1990 the video for the song Getting Away with It for Electronic, a band made up of members of New Order, The Smiths and the Pet Shop Boys.
8. John Sanborn directed among others: Act III (from The Photographer, 1983) for Phillip Glass Ensemble in collaboration with Dean Winkler; Endicott (1985) for Kid Creole and the Coconuts; Heartbeat (1985) for King Crimson; Hands and Knees (1987) for Sammy Hagar, as well as works for Grace Jones, Phillip Glass, Adrian Belew, etc.
9. Joan Logue is the author of a magnificent video clip (inspired by the iconography of Magritte) from the song Rene and Georgette (1983) by Paul Simon.
10. John Whitney is one of the pioneers of computer art and was responsible for Hard Woman (1986) by Mick Jagger, the first music video created entirely on the computer.
11. Judith Barry created in 1982 various “Ten Second Films” conceived as compressed stories that were used as “break bumpers” between different MTV programs. In 1986, the same artist directed, together with Richard Kern, Death Valley 69 for Sonic Youth.
12. Tony Oursler directed Song for Karen for Sonic Youth in 1990.
13. Jem A. Cohen is the author of various videos for REM, notably Talk About the Passion (1989); E-Bow The Letter (1989); Country Feedback (1991) and Nightswimming (1995) and alternative rock bands like Fugazi, Butthole Surfers or Blonde Redhead.
14. Thus, we will find artists like Dara Birnbaum, (Fire, 1982, MTV; Artbreak, MTV Networks, 1987); Rybczynski, (Imagine, 1985); Pipilotti Rist (Sip my Ocean, 1996) or Cory Arcangel (Sweet 16, 2006) -to cite examples from different decades- who appropriate famous songs from the history of rock and insert them within pieces of video art, not to mention more problematic cases like that of Jenny Holzer who in 1992 denounced to the media that the video clips of the song The Fly by U2 (1991) and Right Now by Van Halen (1992) plagiarized her famous truisms.
15. In the 1980s, in the course of a year, Madonna was able to transform herself into Marilyn Monroe, Bette Davis, Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo, adding layers of personality from each one of them to her own identity.
