Gazing at St. Vincent: "Cheerleader"
Confession: I have loved Ms. Annie Clark since she entered my music library and experience by chance on myspace in 2006 and then booking a roadtrip with friends to Minneapolis to see her shortly after.
This video teases good intellectual and visual buttons for me -- issues with space, the gaze, object, power, identity. I like the feel of her recent music videos from Strange Mercy - what does it for me is the unsettling, aesthetic violence in her videos that pairs with her unusual musical arrangements and thrashing guitars - that's the voice I hear.
St. Vincent: "Cheerleader"
Hiro Murai talks about turning Annie Clark into a Godzilla-sized museum piece.
By Jenn Pelly , February 27, 2012
Excerpts and my commentary:
HM: Shooting videos with lots of effects is like shooting a bunch of puzzle pieces. A lot of the video is Annie laying face down on this pedestal, against the green screen, with no other content. And then there were two buff stagehand guys hovering above her, pulling her up with a rope.
Object and sexuality - I think of the idea/concept of a pristine state - as projected as gigantic, gorgeous Annie who becomes hard stone sculpture. What about this and what do I mean? Well, it's like individually we make sense of our own situation. We have our own unique experience and perspective on our surroundings and what happens to us as does another person. To remove of this is like to suspend expectation and anticipation - instead there is just space and Annie and between understanding in relation to the green screen and everything else -- it can be anything else. Annie Clark in this video, in a way takes on the representation of ideal and the potential.
I want to connect this concept I'm referring to - the pristine state to the way people view environments and our landscape. Often landscape is reminiscent of woman's body (painting, portraits, experience, historically). I want to bring it to the area where we use and how we use language to describe, control, shape our understanding of it. This I see as a way to discussions into how 'we' might objectify, 'other', colonize, what (I) or (you) are looking at.
I view and define the ideal in this context as the thing that rejects - by looking and by defining - a viewer destroys a bit of it's essence and natural being, though one might not intend to. Annie as musician, as woman, as a person recognized by strangers.
(Watch the magnificent ending).
There's a really complex mathematical equation that tells you what the relative speed should be, based on the scale of your subject.
Fascinating!
HM: I love museums, but I always thought there was something funny about a group of strangers silently staring at works of inanimate objects together. Each person is having a very personal and maybe even emotional experience, but it's in the confines of an extremely quiet and sterile room. From a visual standpoint, I liked the idea of setting a video in a space that was like a blank slate.
On Looking & Not Looking
It's an interesting way that curators - their role as helping to direct (my) attention. It's a controlled kind of looking but also a space that (I) or as a visitor can contest and will interrogate in the way I interact or choose not to or without awareness how I ignore or how far or close I am from the object.
Watch the video.
This video teases good intellectual and visual buttons for me -- issues with space, the gaze, object, power, identity. I like the feel of her recent music videos from Strange Mercy - what does it for me is the unsettling, aesthetic violence in her videos that pairs with her unusual musical arrangements and thrashing guitars - that's the voice I hear.
St. Vincent: "Cheerleader"
Hiro Murai talks about turning Annie Clark into a Godzilla-sized museum piece.
By Jenn Pelly , February 27, 2012
Click to viewExcerpts and my commentary:
HM: Shooting videos with lots of effects is like shooting a bunch of puzzle pieces. A lot of the video is Annie laying face down on this pedestal, against the green screen, with no other content. And then there were two buff stagehand guys hovering above her, pulling her up with a rope.
Object and sexuality - I think of the idea/concept of a pristine state - as projected as gigantic, gorgeous Annie who becomes hard stone sculpture. What about this and what do I mean? Well, it's like individually we make sense of our own situation. We have our own unique experience and perspective on our surroundings and what happens to us as does another person. To remove of this is like to suspend expectation and anticipation - instead there is just space and Annie and between understanding in relation to the green screen and everything else -- it can be anything else. Annie Clark in this video, in a way takes on the representation of ideal and the potential.
I want to connect this concept I'm referring to - the pristine state to the way people view environments and our landscape. Often landscape is reminiscent of woman's body (painting, portraits, experience, historically). I want to bring it to the area where we use and how we use language to describe, control, shape our understanding of it. This I see as a way to discussions into how 'we' might objectify, 'other', colonize, what (I) or (you) are looking at.
I view and define the ideal in this context as the thing that rejects - by looking and by defining - a viewer destroys a bit of it's essence and natural being, though one might not intend to. Annie as musician, as woman, as a person recognized by strangers.
(Watch the magnificent ending).
There's a really complex mathematical equation that tells you what the relative speed should be, based on the scale of your subject.
Fascinating!
HM: I love museums, but I always thought there was something funny about a group of strangers silently staring at works of inanimate objects together. Each person is having a very personal and maybe even emotional experience, but it's in the confines of an extremely quiet and sterile room. From a visual standpoint, I liked the idea of setting a video in a space that was like a blank slate.
On Looking & Not Looking
It's an interesting way that curators - their role as helping to direct (my) attention. It's a controlled kind of looking but also a space that (I) or as a visitor can contest and will interrogate in the way I interact or choose not to or without awareness how I ignore or how far or close I am from the object.
Watch the video.