Making Exhibitions On A Budget
You have to hand it to the Queensland Art Gallery. With all the excitement around "new media art" the plucky State gallery curators have put their heads together and have come up with Video Hits: Art and Music Video, an exhibition "of video art and contemporary music video which opens at the Queensland Art Galley from Saturday, February 21".
The exhibition sounds like a good one:
Splitting the exhibition into two parts, the QAG kicks off with some big names, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze . What agreat idea, we thought, getting these big names into the QAG by screening their clips on a big screen in the gallery's atrium...
Browsing Amazon recently we discovered that the QAG's exhibition isn't all its cracked up to be. All three of the headlining artists/video makers are actually appearing courtesy of the commercial release of their work on DVD, hitting the shelves in the UK & US in December 2003. Here's a typical review from DVD Confidential.
While we can completely understand the excitement of being able to see Windowlicker or that creepy clip with Bjork as a robot, building an entire exhibition around a commercial release is rather like going to the local Video Ezy, renting some movies and then calling it a "show".
Part two of the exhibition which starts on March 27, ropes in Wolgang Tillmans Pet Shop Boys clip Home and Dry, Doug Aitken’s clip for Fatboy Slim’s Rockafeller Skank and Damien Hirst’s notorious Country House clip for Blur.
Along with these artists are a rather rag-bagish bunch of work rounded up from "permanent collections" (most likely someone's personal collection) including Sadie Benning (Chicago), Candice Breitz, (Berlin), Tony Cokes (Rhode Island), Dick Donkeys Dawn (London), Art Jones (New York), Liisa Lounilla (Helsinki), Pipilotti Rist (Zurich/Los Angeles) and Annika Ström (Stockholm/Berlin).
We can only speculate on how the juxtaposition of bona fide music clips and the video pieces of these artists will work together - perhaps brilliantly, perhaps not at alln but we sincerely hope that the Pipilotti Rist video will be the piece screened at the Sydney Biennale a few years back that features Rist walking down the street in Zurich while absent-mindedly smashing the windows of parked cars with a flower - we don't know what it means but we like it!
Also on the bill are Australian artists, featuring the near-ubiquitous King Pins (it seems like everyone is trying to figure out a way to get them into a show), Kati Rule and Tony Schwensen. Thank god Schwensen got a gig - he must be mighty pissed after finally getting a gig in a commercial gallery only to have the place close down for good the next month.
The exhibition sounds like a good one:
"Video Hits’ includes more than 70 innovative screen-based works by international and local music video & film directors and artists, including clips for bands/performers such as Fatboy Slim, Björk, The Red Hot Chili Peppers and White Stripes. [...] The exhibition explores the parallels between contemporary art and music video production, in terms of form, content, technical sophistication and creative direction. It also reveals contemporary music video as an experimental, open medium, fast changing in its techniques and aesthetic possibilities."
Splitting the exhibition into two parts, the QAG kicks off with some big names, Chris Cunningham, Michel Gondry, and Spike Jonze . What agreat idea, we thought, getting these big names into the QAG by screening their clips on a big screen in the gallery's atrium...
Browsing Amazon recently we discovered that the QAG's exhibition isn't all its cracked up to be. All three of the headlining artists/video makers are actually appearing courtesy of the commercial release of their work on DVD, hitting the shelves in the UK & US in December 2003. Here's a typical review from DVD Confidential.
While we can completely understand the excitement of being able to see Windowlicker or that creepy clip with Bjork as a robot, building an entire exhibition around a commercial release is rather like going to the local Video Ezy, renting some movies and then calling it a "show".
Part two of the exhibition which starts on March 27, ropes in Wolgang Tillmans Pet Shop Boys clip Home and Dry, Doug Aitken’s clip for Fatboy Slim’s Rockafeller Skank and Damien Hirst’s notorious Country House clip for Blur.
Along with these artists are a rather rag-bagish bunch of work rounded up from "permanent collections" (most likely someone's personal collection) including Sadie Benning (Chicago), Candice Breitz, (Berlin), Tony Cokes (Rhode Island), Dick Donkeys Dawn (London), Art Jones (New York), Liisa Lounilla (Helsinki), Pipilotti Rist (Zurich/Los Angeles) and Annika Ström (Stockholm/Berlin).
We can only speculate on how the juxtaposition of bona fide music clips and the video pieces of these artists will work together - perhaps brilliantly, perhaps not at alln but we sincerely hope that the Pipilotti Rist video will be the piece screened at the Sydney Biennale a few years back that features Rist walking down the street in Zurich while absent-mindedly smashing the windows of parked cars with a flower - we don't know what it means but we like it!
Also on the bill are Australian artists, featuring the near-ubiquitous King Pins (it seems like everyone is trying to figure out a way to get them into a show), Kati Rule and Tony Schwensen. Thank god Schwensen got a gig - he must be mighty pissed after finally getting a gig in a commercial gallery only to have the place close down for good the next month.
Labels: exhibition, video art
This entry was posted
on Thursday, February 12, 2004 at 1:51 pm.
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