Unit 10 - Week 1 (Visit to galleries & Research of Video Artist)

My next module is Video Art Installation. So I visited the Infinite Mix located in the Hayward gallery. Hayward Gallery is one of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries. Different installations caught my eye and inspired my own ideas for my own installation with the current theme of "memory". One installation that caught my eye was Ugo Rondinone - THANX 4 NOTHING which features legendary beat poet John Giorno. In this poem written on his 70th birthday,

Giorno looks back at his life – and the people and events that shaped it – with humour and compassion. Performing in a tuxedo and bare feet on an empty stage as well as in a brightly-lit TV studio, Giorno gives thanks to ‘everyone for everything,’ before speaking frankly on the death of friends and lovers, sex, betrayal and his frequent periods of depression.

Rondinone’s carefully choreographed multi-screen installation – which features long shots, intimate close ups and passages of high-speed editing – keeps pace with Giorno’s theatrical delivery and draws attention to the poem’s many rhetorical twists and turns.

I found this installation piece incredibly immersive because it was displayed on all 4 walls but each wall had a projection from a different POV. Also on the floor there were smaller tv's scattered around the room also projecting different angles of John Giorno.

Hannah Black is another video artist which I am getting inspiration from. Hannah's short, snappy meditations on pop culture may at first glance seem like cute bits of celebrity – her Team Jolie (2013) video, for example, explores the way love rivals Jennifer Aniston and Angelina Jolie are perceived in popular culture – but you only need to peruse this intimidatingly smart British artist/writer’s articles for The New Inquiry to see how much theory and philosophy go into her ideas.

A standout piece is her film My Bodies (2014), which assembles audio clips of black female recording artists (Rihanna, Beyonce, Whitney, Ciara ) singing the phrase “my body” and lays them over a montage of images of wealthy white men (Black describes Googling the words “CEO” and “executive” to source the images). The images are so close up the viewer almost gets lost in their pores, creating a surreal, disjointed commentary on traditional biases surrounding race and gender.