Music makes people come together

The demarcation between visual art and commercial art is narrowing, as many visual artists such as Damien Hirst, Sam Taylor-Wood, Wolfgang Tillmans, Yayoi Kusama, Doug Aitken and the late Australian artist Jeremy Hynes have collaborated with musicians to create music videos.

Ms & Mr, for instance, have recently worked with the band Youth Group in producing the video for their latest single, Two Sides, which appears in this exhibition. Undoubtedly a work of Ms & Mr, it continues their idea of using old home-movie footage, in this case 1988 footage of a sister’s thirteenth birthday party interspersed with video of band members inhabiting the party.

With the advent of User Generated Content, websites such as MySpace and YouTube are now the forums in which contemporary music video is promoted, shared and uploaded – bypassing record companies and television networks. Like the democratised nature of punk in the early 1970s, music video may now be entering a period that is reacting to the highly polished essence of past music video, which has so captured the imagination of these artists.

 

 

Image above: Soda_Jerk, Astro Black: A History of Hip-Hop [Episode 1] [still] 2007. Digital video, duration 6:35 minutes, courtesy the artists

Image below: Christopher Bennie, Mothership, 2004. [video still/ detail] image courtesy the artist

 

 

When

Location

Museum of Art and Culture Lake Macquarie, 1A First Street, Booragul 2284  View in Google Maps