What It Is, What It Was: Music Video as Art
What It Is, What It Was: Music Video as Art
"What It Is, What It Was: Music Video As Art" explores the capacity of
the music video, a popular and commercial form since the 1980s, to
transcend and transform the limits of the genre - repetitiveness, visual
eye candy, and the primacy of the singer performing their latest hit
single - and to make a short film that traffics in the melodic,
rhythmic, and lyrical structures of a song while extending the
experience of the viewer beyond the song and into a world-not-yet-seen.
The approximately forty videos that comprise the exhibition are at turns
compelling, beautiful, hypnotic, thought-provoking, dark, rich,
textured, layered, meaningful, or challenging. From the simple, and
simply achieved, poignancy of Gary Jules' "Mad World" to the kinetic
fusing of found elements in U2's "Window in the Skies" to the brilliant
decaying choreography of XX's "Islands," the videos in this exhibition
transcend the well-worn confines of the genre and reveal that artistic
vision and creativity thrives beyond the mass-media commercial universe
of MTV and VH1.
With the exception of the University of Maryland's Thanksgiving break from November 22 – November 25, the
exhibition will be open to the public through Saturday, December 14, 2012.
For more information, click here or contact John Shipman.