'2@,' which produces a critically positioned history of rock, in many ways is modeled thematically on Dan Graham's videotape "Rock My Religion," which for better or worse takes up a counter-discourse about the history of rock using a variety of documentary techniques in a punk aesthetic. While I don't want rock to be viewed as a proto-religion, I would like to put its history of production and reception in a critical context as a preparation for making the interests and concerns of a project like SWIPE legible. Hopefully, this begs the question of whether we are undertaking legitimate critical analysis, historiography, or advertising. Perhaps it is all three simultaneously, or perhaps any such assessment depends heavily on context, the viewer's prior knowledge of, and interest in, rock music.
Both '2@' and 'AD Vice,' were influenced by another historical model, Richard Serra's 'Television Delivers People.' These works borrow and extend some of the visual text techniques evident in 'Television Delivers People,' an early video art piece (1973) which uses the juxtaposition of scrolling text and a muzak soundtrack to describe the function of television as an institution from a bluntly Marxist perspective. While Serra's approach may have limits and gaps, it is also very direct and explicit. In 'AD Vice,' for example, I wanted to be equally direct and explicit about the subjective interpellations and confusions produced by making work with an imperative textual address derived mostly from advertising (or pop song lyrics.) In short to produce the following question: Is the text speaking directly to the viewer, or simply emitting permutations of the basest cliches?
The above question is related to SWIPE's "generic" attitude towards pop music practice. I'd say one of the central ideas connecting SWIPE to my other work is the view that working in multiple media is a strategy to make clear that cultural production has systemic features. In other words, the art world, Hollywood, mass advertising forms, and the music business may have many surface differences, but they also have many structural similarities and points of interpenetration today. (Principal among these is the fact that all these "different" activities are all conducted within a capitalist hegemony which is all about creating "meaningless" differences.) A few examples: a. the deployment of video imagery often supercedes musical interest in pop music, b. obscure pop music now appears in mainstream advertisements as a "sign of hipness," c. for many viewers it doesn't matter how absurd/retrograde the narrative of a film is, as long as it has a cool soundtrack, d. the constant mediated exhortation, or "subjective" desire to be (or rather, appear) different is the most ubiquitous form of comformity.
So, just as I've made videotapes and installations that reflect on the history and ideological implications of images, in my work with SWIPE I try to take a similar attitiude toward popular musical forms. SWIPE is a bad copy of a pop band that takes it's ideas from conceptual art and other theoretically informed practices. So far, the music practice strives for anonymity, then the video wants to give the generic music a critical context, definition, and another dissemination context. Here are the symptoms of my current work: A rock video that talks about rock history. A billboard that appropriates a culture hero for an unidentified product. A pop CD with no love songs, or very few decipherable lyrics. A rock video about how MTV and advertising discourses really are completely interchangable. What's the disease?
marc pierson.guitar vocal / drew spangler.drums bass / tony cokes.vocal text video / scott pagano.processing editing mix / TR.guitar
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