To the editors:
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Rosenbaum finds fault for not including Fischinger, McLaren, Soundies and Scopitones. In the first two instances, the inclusion of contemporary examples of visual music is ignored by Rosenbaum, but this line of analysis just barely begins to beg the real question. Why not include Busby Berkeley musicals, Richard Lester Beatles films, Bugs Bunny cartoons, Monkees episodes, Snader Telescriptions or opera? All have their historical significance. The reason is that this is a survey of 100 videos–intended to actually be viewed by an audience in standard program blocks rather than listed as titles–focusing on the history, present and future of music video as a specific cultural category related to media art. For the sake of argument and critical inquiry that history can be usefully pinpointed as beginning in the media art world with Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray, the first collage film cut to a pop song, made in 1961, and beginning in the audio art world with The Residents’ Vileness Fats project, initiated in 1972, the first audio-visual concept work by recording artists shot on video. These are useful demarcations because they yield coherent formal distinctions that define the principal tributaries of music video per se, delineate aspects of the form that constitute artistic practice and result in the inclusion of most of the good work of which I am aware.
Most of his suggested alternatives are inferior to similar work included in the show, would dilute the curatorial agenda or would simply constitute another show. He thinks there should be a Julien Temple video, without mentioning which one; the most experimental clip by this fairly mainstream director is Bowie’s Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, and there are a half-dozen more interesting and historically significant Bowie clips including the three presented in Art of Music Video. He singles out Harry Smith’s work as a telling omission; Smith’s work is great, but to call it “musically oriented” and therefore indispensable is not only ridiculously reductive, but applying this standard also opens up for inclusion a huge body of merely related experimental and narrative film and television that couldn’t possibly make for a coherent or manageable overview of music video. He finds that there are so few non-American videos that “these appear to have sneaked in by mistake.” Rosenbaum should have been guided by his own admission that his “acquaintance with non-American music videos” is “minimal” and shouldn’t have pretended he had any idea what nationalities were represented, because here he is laughably wrong. Nearly one-third of the music videos involve a recording artist or director from another country (often both are), and many of them are English, precisely the “omission” he singles out. In any case, music video is, for better or worse, substantially grounded in the American record industry. Having nailed this territory down, maybe next time around I’ll structure part of the presentation as an international sampler. But since when is it a significant criticism of a given selection of work that another selection of work would also be interesting? The festival makes no claim to being totally comprehensive, just the most comprehensive such survey organized by a museum, and it is. Rosenbaum’s “guilt-by-dissociation” strategy is an example of the lack of meaningful comparative perspective mentioned above. The overview that would lend integrality to his observations is simply missing.
This is the first letter I have ever written to a publication in response to a negative review of an exhibition with which I was affiliated. I appreciate the Reader’s independence and integrity, and I have respected Rosenbaum’s writing, but this review absolutely demanded a response.
