Extreme Culture: Music, Videos and Video Art at The Infinite Mix

The Infinite Mix: Contemporary Sound and Image
Hayward Gallery / The Vinyl Factory, at The Store, London
09.09.16 – 11.12.16

Music videos are extreme culture. It’s there in the numbers. Of the thirty members of YouTube’s billion-views club at the time of writing, one is a Russian children’s show and twenty-nine are music videos. There is now almost nothing you can do that will map your affect onto so many others as watching ‘See You Again’ by Wiz Khalifa, featuring Charlie Puth. But it isn’t just the enormity of the statistics. It’s the intensity of the viewer’s experience, the complete immersion in a space of cultural fantasy that doesn’t so much feel globalised as oceanic. On YouTube, and MTV before it, the synchronisation of mind and media is pushed to its precise, addictive limit. Everyone knows this.

Maybe it is inevitable, then, that for each of the video artists on show in The Infinite Mix the possibilities and techniques of the music video always hover in the background like a challenge, or a temptation. After all, this is an exhibition of sound as well as vision, curated by the Hayward Gallery’s Ralph Rugoff on the principle that ‘what you hear is just as important as what you see’. In fact, you often hear the works before seeing them. Snatches of music fade through the temporary partitions and bare, concrete hallways of the repurposed office block where the exhibition is set. You might catch a fragment of opera or jazz funk as you turn a corner and not find its origin until you’ve been through several more rooms.

But when you come face to face with each video, that drifting music falls into place. Each artist uses music to a different purpose, but one way or another, every piece achieves or gestures at that engrossing fusion between sound and image that has become cultural production’s nuclear option. As if to establish this as a possibility, the exhibition actually starts with a music video in the straightforward sense: Martin Creed’s Work No. 1701 ( 2013 ) is just ‘You Return’, four-and-a-half minutes of joyfully repetitive guitar pop from the artist’s musical side-project, accompanied by a simple video of people taking turns to cross a side street in New York, Abbey Road style. All the participants look to be mobility-impaired in some way, and the song’s jangly chords and clattering drums become a celebration of the idiosyncrasies of their movement, turning each laborious, unsteady gait into an everyday dance of pragmatism and willpower.

It’s true that Creed’s stripped-back approach amounts to a parody or détournement of the ableism and frenetic glitz of the pop video mainstream. But it is also a freeride on its infectious energy. The minimal performance that Creed captures, people simply crossing the road, doesn’t have much to do with the conspicuous consumption and fast cuts that make it into the billion-views club, but merely by being used in this way, as visual accompaniment to a song you want to hear, the mundane footage takes a new aspect. Common sense says music is an epiphenomenon, a factitious abstraction from the noisy incidents of real life. For Creed’s pedestrians, though, music has taken over from reality. For a moment, it is they who are the epiphenomenon. Whatever happens, whatever stumbles or flickers the camera picks up, it all gets gathered into the embrace of a pop song that needs a visual body and that, in return, can lend its aural soul out anywhere.This transaction between registers is at the heart of The Infinite Mix, an exhibition that shows that, for all the furore over the ‘post-Internet’ label, ‘post-MTV’ remains just as important a premise for video artists working today. From Kahlil Joseph’s visual re-edit of a Kendrick Lamar album, to Cameron Jamie’s grassroots dance film set to a Sonic Youth song, to Stan Douglas’s footage of a studio funk jam cut up so it seems to go on forever, you see everywhere the trace of the industry that has grown up to turn listening into watching. It isn’t that every artist here is in conscious dialogue with that industry. It’s simply that music videos have changed how the moving image works. Since the 1970s, film scholars have talked about music being diegetic or non-diegetic, existing inside or outside the fictional space of the film. But the music video is a whole different paradigm. The music is everywhere at once. Those discrete frames of reference that sequester representation from presence are suspended. The visible world stands in as visuals.

Perhaps the clearest marker of the influence of this music video paradigm is that The Infinite Mix is a hugely absorbing, entertaining exhibition. Video art has had a notoriously difficult relationship with entertainment. Even now, it struggles to shake off the endurance-test association inherited from early foundations such as Andy Warhol’s Sleep ( 1963 ) – a sequence of slow-moving shots of a man asleep, for five hours and twenty minutes. Yet in The Infinite Mix, you can see the subject of Warhol’s film, the poet John Giorno, as a spry and genial stage presence, now fragile-looking and white-haired but dapper in a tuxedo and bare feet, performing his masterpiece of catty elegy, THANX 4 NOTHING ( on my 70th birthday ). The film, by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, is accompanied only by a single, repeated guitar line and a brushed cymbal, but the effect is as entrancing, atmospheric and sad as Sleep was alienating and austere.

There is a complete lack of irony in Rondinone’s film that provokes a slight double take. Giorno’s poem is certainly tonally complex, layering up sarcasm and lament in a kind of beatific camp. But despite Rondinone’s jumps between takes and use of multiple screens, his filming of it feels like a pure tribute, with none of the ambivalent, critical distance between the space in front of and behind the camera that has become the counter-Hollywood norm. Elsewhere in The Infinite Mix this estrangement between subject and filmmaker is more in evidence, but it is offset by a sense of enthusiasm and excitement that cuts through the postmodern ifs and buts. Jeremy Deller and Cecilia Bengolea’s collaboration on Bom Bom’s Dream ( 2016 ) is less urgent than the exhibition’s best moments, its micro-documentary structure ( telling the true story of a Japanese dance-hall queen visiting Jamaica ) and surreal-naive DIY CGI sequences feeling a little familiar and tired. But the soundtrack gives Deller and Bengolea’s hazy structure an animation it would otherwise lack, in a couple of moments where the head-spinning riffs on globalised culture fuse into an irresistible blast of dance hall.

A number of works in the show share this dynamic, where a cerebral and ambivalent outline format is disrupted by an irrepressible current of pop sensibility bubbling up from beneath or outside. Elizabeth Price’s K ( 2015 ) starts off like a highbrow satire on the emotional labour market. A soundtrack of grating clanks and bangs accompanies images of a robotic production line, while a computer voice reads out a fictional promo for an elite group of professional mourners-for-hire called the Krystals. As it goes on, however, the visuals starts to be interrupted by flashes of black-and-white footage of girl bands or a music-hall singer, and although you never hear these clips, the clanking soundtrack gradually swells into a soaring passage of electro harmonies, before subsiding back into noise. Likewise, in Everything and More ( 2015 ), by Rachel Rose, a digitally distorted film of warehoused spaceflight equipment, with a voice-over from a former astronaut, is intermittently broken in on by images of the huge crowd at an EDM concert and ghostly fragments of an altered recording of Aretha Franklin. It’s like an experimental film channel that keeps getting interference from VH1.

The standout piece, however, is the one in which these overlapping modes of music video and video art are most fully and un-showily integrated. It is hard to describe Cyprien Gaillard’s Nightlife ( 2015 ) without simply repeating how stunningly, eerily, addictively beautiful it is. This is not a coincidence. For all the technical brilliance of its drone shots of fireworks over Berlin’s Olympiastadion, or the yellows and blacks of the stereoscopic flowers blowing in a courtyard at night, and for all the hidden logic of its string of locations – for example, the stadium where Jesse Owens won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics is followed by the oak tree in Cleveland that was his gift from the Nazi government – for all this, Nightlife works by making you forget all its subtle technical and discursive frameworks, and follow it on an unpeopled, night-time tour through a dream state of shadows and floodlights, where branches thrash like dancers in the wind and torch beams pick out wire fences against the invisible landscapes they guard. Loud enough to feel the vibrations, exactly seven and three-quarter bars of dub reggae play on repeat. Of all the artists in The Infinite Mix, it is Gaillard who has learnt the lesson of MTV, that the scenes and shapes that give visual accompaniment to a song themselves take on the quality of a song. That dancing and longing can be reverse-engineered back into the world is a fact open to exploitation by artists as well as record company execs. Gaillard’s is the last piece in the show, and you emerge from the basement car park where it is screened, still rubbing your eyes, unable to get the tune out of your head.