Chris Cunningham

From "flex" 2000.



Chris Cunningham has directed a view videos and commercials. The same curator (Yuko Hasegawa)who curated Pipilotti Rist into the the New York Digital Salon's tenth anniversary show Vectors in 2003. He chose Cunningham's video for Bjork's "All Is Full of Love":

"Chris Cunningham was born in Reading, England, in 1970. He now lives and works in London. Cunningham began as a teenage special effects expert, working on Alien III and Stanley Kubrick’s aborted AI project. With the help of digital technology, Cunningham reveals his extraordinary talents in the synchronization of sound and visual works that he mastered through MTV productions. His anatomical, inner analysis of human bodies and the expressions of their movement, combined with sound effects, provides visceral stimulation to viewers.

Cunningham’s obsession with anatomy is very specific. He began his career as an expert sculptor and model-maker for special effects; the theme of robots, or the genesis of new creatures, has been a consistent interest throughout his work.

All Is Full of Love is a music video created and directed by Cunningham in 1999 for Björk. This video is memorable for its stunning special effects and visual sophistication. A pure white robot is born on an assembly line. It opens Björk’s eyes and begins to sing All Is Full of Love. This video features Björk as a stunningly beautiful robot making love to a robot replica of herself. The image of the pair embracing on the assembly line represents not only the eroticism of lesbian love, but also the sensual relationship of love. After this video, Cunningham resigned from the music and commercial world and began working for the first time as a video artist."

(http://www.nydigitalsalon.org/10/artwork.php?nav=artists&artwork=66)

All Is Full Of Love (1999)



I also stumbled upon Cunningham's video for the Portishead song Only You. Apparently the technology used in this video was groundbreaking and now you can see it in cheesy hot tub commercials.


Only You (1998)



He has made other art films such as flex and Monkey Drummer and most recently the disturbing Rubber Johnny. Flex (2000) was an installation that Cunningham created for the Royal Acadamy of Art Apocalypse exhibition. This work features the music of Aphex Twin. Flex, is a video which aims to awaken one's senses through the sound of electronic music, unforgettable images of both sexual violence and breathtaking serenity.

Flex (2000)

Part one



Part two



This is an article I found online about flex and seems to best describe it.


Dublin: Chris Cunningham at 5th


Chris Cunningham: flex, 2001, video installation with sound; courtesy of
Anthony d'Offay Ltd, London who commissioned and produced flex

Sex and death sells. Apparently, this is something well-known in the commercial world of advertising but I am not sure what the logic is behind it (how could this be logical?). The human fascination with sex and death is well documented, however, and in the art world it was especially popular at the turn of the last century, in the era of the 'femme fatale'. In his book Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women, Patrick Bade puts this obsession down to the prevalence of syphilis among Bohemian artists, and the romantic spirit of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.1

In flex at the Guinness 5th Gallery, Chris Cunningham deals with a variation of this theme, concentrating on sex and violence. Perhaps it is my own romanticism surging forth, but while Cunningham's variation is scarier to me, I believe it wholly relevant to the turn of the millennium: terrorism, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and the ravages of AIDS form the backdrop to personal terror, as there is a growing awareness of abuse and the realisation that the 'enemy' is usually a trusted member of the community and/or family. Although I tend to be wary of exhibitions that come with a warning (as this one did), suspecting the artist and/or gallery of wanting to promote sensationalism, to be suspicious of flex would be to trivialise one of the most thought-provoking videos I have ever seen.

Before entering the gallery space, loud, electronic sound (created in collaboration with Richard D. James) is already heard. The video itself is projected onto a complete wall of the square gallery, so one is within a cinematic environment. There is a definite narrative too, so it is important to watch the complete video - which, while it emotionally may prove difficult, is visually stunning.

In a nutshell: from darkness a beam of light illuminates the naked forms of a man and woman who are first seen in the protective spoon embrace; on separating they are both overwhelmed by violence to each other, and the video ends with the woman crawling back to the embrace of the man. The video is filmed in such a way that the human forms are 'other' in that the perspective is distorted and details are too defined. What one hears is a type of hyper-realism (movement, breathing, the meeting of flesh on flesh) and the familiar Hollywood notion of a space vacuum - the impossible sound of the hollow scraping of air... While the video seems to be black and white (as a viewer I found some irony here as I thought of Guinness commercials gone terribly, terribly wrong!), there are subtle hints of colour: the man's ear and the woman's lips are pink. Both the man and woman have very fit, muscular bodies and their interaction is predicated by the white light - at some points they seem to be interrogated, their actions and violence towards each other seem to be caused by this light. Here I considered the effect of the obelisk in 2001: A Space Odyssey, and with this in mind, it is no surprise that Cunningham has in fact worked with Stanley Kubrick. In art and literature 'the light' traditionally represents goodness and truth; in flex, while not necessarily malignant, the beam of light reveals nakedness and fear (like the apple of knowledge in the Garden of Eden).

Given time and space, I would be able to write a tome on Flex. Cunningham is an experienced maker of videos in the music industry who has brought his expertise and vision into the art world. Fabulous production and thoughtful work; no naval-gazing here, this is video as it should be.



Lorraine Whelan is an artist and writer based in Bray, Co. Wicklow.

Chris Cunningham: flex, Guinness 5th Gallery, November 2002 - January 2003

1Patrick Bade, Femme Fatale: Images of Evil and Fascinating Women, Mayflower Books, 1979



Article reproduced from CIRCA 103, Spring 2003, pp.72-73




The DVD for Rubber is Johnny accompanied with a book with graphic images that were refused to be published by some companies. The images are morphed and distorted parts of Cunningham's body. The book is considered an artist book by the company that produced the DVD. This video features the Aphex Twin song "Afx237 V7" from the album drukqs.

Rubber Johnny (2005)

Michel Gondry

When I started thinking about music videos my attention was directed toward Michel Gondry. He has some parallels to Pipilotti Rist. He was also in a band which he made videos for. I decided to search Youtube for some of his work and found this hypnotic video for the Chemical Brothers Star Guitar. I can't stop watching it....



I pulled this info from a director's website on Gondry.

...his works are marked with a child-like explorative eye. Like old-school hip-hop Gondry's works are his playground. He tells stories about people and their lives while questioning our definitions of reality. His characters are honest and human and his worlds playfully reflect the interaction between the worlds we live in: nature, society, and the mind.

The turning point in his career was Björk. As the story goes, the Icelandic woman saw a few of his videos, including his sixth video for his band Oui Oui, La Ville, and gave him a call. After some exchanging of ideas, they created her unforgettable solo debut, Human Behaviour.



That was 1993. Between then and now he has overall redefined the entire music video genre, save hip-hop and country videos. As each of his videos and ads (most of which he doesn't own, most produced through Partizan) is released, you see him rearranging old techniques into new patterns, finding new ways to tell stories with film, and having fun with his work.

Gondry has made many videos with Bjork. Here are a few:

Bachelorette (1997)



This video is beautiful and complex. The story starts to become a story within a story, then a story within a story and so on. It repeats itself over and over until the book goes back into the ground.


This is a video about a contraption that Gondry rigged inspired by a spinning paint machine from the seventies.



Hyperballad (1996)



I love the layers in this video. Gondry is blurring dreams with reality as he seems to do with a lot of his work. The Science of Sleep as well as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind. is a full length version of these ideas.


Army of Me (1995)





The Science of Sleep Trailer




Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Trailers






Now Gondry has moved from film and video into the gallery setting. Recently there has been a show in New York featuring work made by Gondry that is mostly inspired by past love affairs as well as his new movie "The Science of Sleep". The show is entitled "The Science of Sleep: An Exhibition of Sculpture and Creepy Pathological Little Gifts". It is intended to be a companion to the movie itself. The sets from the movie, including an elaborate, enormous cave that dominates one of the film’s several dream sequences, are replicated at the gallery space. An upstairs area, bathed in pink light, showcases the bra and other items under the working title “Coeur Michel.”

“These are all about an ex-girlfriend,” he said, as he took several curious-looking items from the box and placed them, one by one, on an oval conference table. “I made all these when she left me, two years ago.”

Gondry held up a bra with exaggeratedly uneven cups. “I made this because her breasts were two different sizes,” he said. He displayed a necklace constructed out of the tips of his fingernails. “She complained about my long nails,” he said, “so I added some chain and made them into jewelry.” There were pages taken from a French book and an English book that he had overlapped so that the resulting text spelled out his former girlfriend’s name. He had modified a Nike sneaker by inserting into it a doll that held in its hand a key to the apartment that he and his girlfriend once shared. He picked up a cartoonlike illustration that he had made of another girlfriend heading out the door of their apartment; he had mounted the image on a tree-shaped piece of cardboard that had been cut out of a composition notebook. “I still use the notebook with the tree part missing,” he said, as he stared rather forlornly at the remnants of his love. “It always reminds me of her.”

(http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/17/magazine/17gondry.html?
ex=1316145600&en=f532eeaa8352d658&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss)

This is a link to the New York Times article on Gondry, The Science of Sleep as well as the exhibition.

The Deitch Gallery where the show was held has a website that has a full installation view of the work.



Gondry is very interesting because a lot of his work is autobiographical eventhough he has created it for someone else. An example of this is the video that he made for the Radiohead song "Knives Out" which acts out the demise of a relationship Gondry was in at the time of the video.

Knives Out (2001)



You can't forget the childlike but complex videos that he has created (and the theme seems to eminate in his other works) Probably the best example of this is the video for Fell In Love With a Girl by the White Stripes.

Fell In Love With A Girl (2002)



Maybe the best way to describe Gondry's work is constructed reality or maybe even a new genre of Magical Realism.

Pipilotti Rist

I was also told that my spinning video reminded them of Pipilotti Rist's Ever Is Over All (1997). Rist won the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale in 1996. Michael Rush in his book Video Art describes this work as follows:

"In this richly coloured two projector installation, Rist juxtaposes the narrative of a smartly dressed young woman walking down the street holding a peculiar looking flower tipped stick on one screen with fluidly filmed shots of a country garden on the other. The two videos, blending into one another across the corner of two walls, are only four minutes long, but Rist puts them on a continuously running loop that suggests a seamless repetition of her compelling ( and funny) central image: the woman, in her blue chiffon dress and red shoes, suddenly wielding that strange looking flower, now revealed to be a meal club, and smashing car windows as she skips (in slow motion) down the street with a delighted grin on her face. A policeman is seen coming toward her from a distance but as he approaches, it turns out that he is a she, and she walks on by giving a 'go-girl!' smile to out protagonist, who continues her rampage. Sweet harmonies, written and sung by Rist herself, emanate from the soundtrack, pierced with the occasional loud bursts of the metal thrust on to the car windows.
Rist's strong sense of composition and sensitivity to colour (blues, oranges, rich reds) are reminiscent of her fellow countryman, Jean-Luc Godard, whose affinity for painterly camera shots Rist clearly shares. Like a petty thief out of a Godard mock gangster movie, Rist's minor fleon is undeniably appealing, but, unlike Godard's heroes, she's a woman. Rist possesses a subversive elegance; a well-controlled craftiness that it equally at home with humour as with biting political commentary."
(Rush, Michael. Video Art. Thames and Hudson: London, 2003)

The MoMA website describes the work as:

"Ever Is Over All envelops viewers in two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. In one a roving camera focuses on red flowers in a field of lush vegetation. The spellbinding lull this imagery creates harmonizes with the projection to its left, which features a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries. As the vandal gains momentum with each gleeful strike of her wand, an approaching police officer smiles in approval, introducing comic tension into this whimsical and anarchistic scene."
(http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=
O%3ATA%3AE%3AT3%7CA%3ATA%3AE%3AT3&page_number=18&template_id=
1&sort_order=1)

I found a video clip on youtube that shows the installation at the MoMA along with a Bill Viola installation.




I especially like this description of Rist's work by Yuko Hasegawa who curated this work into the New York Digital Salon's tenth anniversary show Vectors in 2003:

"Rist positively describes the negative aspects of femininity, which have been rejected by women themselves. She articulates her ideas with weightless images of love, death, everyday life, and fiction. Her unique style is a product of the pliant, sensual relationship between music and video art. Rist is also a band member and has designed the stage sets. Her video installation inspires body awareness in the audience as a totally new experience, different from large video clips shown on a huge screen. In Ever Is Over All, a young woman in a light blue dress merrily walks along the street with a huge, colorful, long-stemmed tropical flower in her hand. She smashes the flower into the windows of parked cars as she passes them. The combination of violent urban fantasy, romantic music, and destructive sound suggests the birth of a sophisticated visual language, expressing the direct, realistic senses of the MTV generation."
(http://www.nydigitalsalon.org/10/artwork.php?artwork=59)

This last quote especially inspired me to reconsider music videos as works of art. I can understand why music videos have not quite made it to the realm of fine art. Just think of all the bad music videos out there. But then there are a few gems that really do cross the line of music video to video art.

"Ever is Over All" (1997)--one of Rist's best-known video installations, first presented at the 1997 Biennale di Venezia--is a crucial work in the understanding of this dialectic. The two-screen video projection stages a young woman walking carelessly down a sidewalk to the sound of soft female humming mixed with sounds of birds singing over a percussive beat. Wearing a light blue dress and a pair of shiny red shoes, smiling and leaping about in slow motion to the rhythm of the music, the female character is a contemporary enactment of the Hollywood musical genre. Everything here is about lightness, girlish femininity, the astonishing ability to walk like a dancer and the use of the screen as a buffer suspending any form of social or psychological contradiction. And yet, she is a hooligan, regularly slowing down her pace as she smashes windshields of parked cars with the metallic flower she holds firmly in her hands. The singularity of this work comes from the unresolved tensions it provokes: femininity is embraced, yet a feminist gesture of empowerment emerges from within; the enchantment of popular culture unfolds through the deployment of the musical score and the lush technical effects of the second screen, yet the video clip does not deliver expected stereotypes. In other words, this may well be a musical fantasy--a blocking out of unwanted conflicts that realizes the subject's desire [1]--but criticality, nevertheless, sets in. If this is so, it is because of Rist's insightful understanding of fantasy not as a site for the fulfillment of desire but as what Slavoj Zizek calls the scene of desire--the very scenario through which "the subject is constituted as desiring," insofar as desire is understood as something that is always in process and continuously reconstructed. [2] When vandalism occurs, fantasy starts to shift into yet another reconstruction. This moment of shift is a moment of redefining femininity.

(http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_3_28/ai_68660257)

Rist is also a musician and was part of a band called Les Reines Prochaines (The Next Queens) from 1988 to 1994 which is most likely the reason why music is so prominant in her work. In I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986), Rist uses the language of video as well as popular music to talk about the female image in popular culture:
"Rist's classic video takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop's repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Footage of the artist chanting the piece's title (a line adapted from The Beatles' song Happiness is a Warm Gun) is replayed at high and low speeds, with obscuring video effects, blurring into an almost painterly procession of images. Rist's manipulation renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll. Through obsessive mimesis Rist exhausts any possible legibility of the words, only to finally deliver John Lennon singing the "real" song."
(http://www.eai.org/eai/tape.jsp?itemID=8833)



I was a little annoyed with the video at first but now I think that it is intentionally annoying. It expresses Rist's annoyance of the portrayal of women in popular culture at the time this video was produced. She looks like some kind of weird puppet with her breasts hanging out. Is this how Rist believed women were being portrayed in popular culture at the time of this video? I think so. I think that this is still relevant today but the video itself has become dated and may come off as a little cheesy because of the quality. It's so video-y.

This website is an awesome resource for art videos (it's called the avant garde youtube: www.ubu.com

Here is the link to Rist's work on ubu: http://www.ubu.com/film/rist.html

Music videos....

After I created my video for The Birds, I had someone ask me if it was like a music video. I started thinking about music videos and wondering if they were art. I had seen a video for Radiohead's No Surprises a couple of weeks earlier and it made me really excited about making videos.

This video was directed by Grant Gee. I love it for it's visual simplicity but has a lot of underlying meaning. It is a refreshing break from the flashy and fast music videos we are often subjected to. Grant Gee is quoting saying that the video is: "the perfect image of anxiety and helplessness in the face of technology." Thom Yorke is literally drowning from the mundane world described in this sad song.

Ernesto Neto

These look familiar....