when you travel through europe you go to a lot of museums and galleries. i tried to avoid as many old stuffy places as i could (i’m looking at you, louvre) & sought out ‘modern art’ museums where possible. what is modern art? a lot of things it turns out. sometimes its progressive, multimedia, forward-thinking. other times its just giant slabs of rusty metal curved into shit boring shapes. needless to say, as someone born after 1980, i’m more interested in things that are interactive, pop-culture focused. things that appeal to my characteristically short attention span. i don’t really dig big slabs of colors, or metal boxes, or giant slabs of rusty metal carved into shit boring shapes.

so something that stood out to me in contrast was christian marclay’s “video quartet”. it seems kind of pointless to talk about here on internet-world, as its not something you can view in any format online. its a video installation currently set up at the tate modern, in london, so its kind of hard for you to get an idea of it unless you can get yourself down to the tate. for most of us that would involve an airfare worth a couple of thousand dollars. anyway, its a great concept - four side-by-side projector screens play visual samples from musical parts of films from the last 50 years. meryl streep ‘playing’ the violin gets mashed up against richard dreyfuss’ kids orchestra from “mr hollands opus” while audrey hepburn sings moon river over the top - all side by side. marclay has been fusing music into modern art for decades. some of his earlier work included reassembling the fragments of shattered vinyl into weird new (still playable, apparently) pieces - like a very tangible audio version of burrough’s cutups.

“video quartet” was put together at home using final cut pro, no professional video editing equipment required. i think i could definitely live with being commissioned to spend a few months editing together musical snippets from the history of western cinema. where’s my pen, i’ll get started on my grant application…

as much as i enjoyed it, in the end i wanted more from it then it could give me, & i was left feeling a little disappointed. i think as someone who tracked the rise and eh of bootleg/mashups when that happened a few years ago, and hearing the best that movement had to offer in terms of the interesting and unexpected juxtaposition of sounds & messages never intended to gel with one another, i definitely could see a potential for the creation of ‘new meaning’ that was kind of lacking in “video quartet”. the little snippets of ‘musical cinema’ are so evocative, but didn’t really seem effectively matched to each other. it also wanted for real ‘musicality’ - rarely is rhythm established in the piece, repetition of musical/visual elements is used only sparingly, and there is little attempt to blend musical elements together to create ‘new music’ - anyway, i was left thinking that it was a cool idea that might have been better executed. kind of like “babylon 5.”