Issue 89 / June 2018

SAY
THE FINAL
“If you don’t want
to be a consumer
then don’t merely
consume. If you have
something you want
to say then say it”
With Childish Gambino’s
latest video offering a
searing critique on racial
tensions in the USA, the
importance of using film
as both a medium for
conversation and an art form
in itself is brought into sharp
focus. Laura Brown asks,
‘What are you watching?’
In 1968, as students and workers revolted in Paris, the New
Wave of French filmmakers was capturing it, cultivating its visual
identity and cultural significance. The ability of film to capture
and encapsulate a moment has never been doubted. Its artistic
and didactic cousin, video art, rarely gets the same recognition,
although the same is true of it. From Handsworth Songs in 1986
to Davidson’s Jail Tape Videofreex from 1971, video art has an
ability to convey the emotion of a moment, to move from simple
documentation and to convey complex power plays and the agency
of providing your own perspective.
In our highly mediated and politicised culture it has seemed
strange that video art has not had more of a moment. But, like
those who have never heard of Idles, Cabbage or Nadine Shah and
croak that Billy Bragg remains the only politically engaged singersongwriter
reflecting the mood of the time, perhaps we’ve not been
looking in the right place.
Enter Donald Glover with This Is America, and the latest video to
make us consider perhaps this medium is finally reconnecting with
its punk and counter-cultural foundation. Donald Glover, aka Childish
Gambino, is not the first major musical artist to use video to define a
political position. Beyoncé combined the personal and the political on
Lemonade; the Formation video is rife with political imagery.
Here’s the rub with video art, though: powerful imagery does
not equate to video art. In the same way that every film is not a
masterpiece, it is about pointing a finger. Childish Gambino points a
lot of fingers at society, Beyoncé’s power is within herself. This does
not reduce its impact, or its imagery. Both have been swallowed
by popular culture, inevitably, but This Is America asks serious
questions about black identity, black agency and society.
If you want to see a video that looks at the agency of black
women watch Erykah Badu’s Window Seat video, in which she
slowly disrobes as she walks along the streets. It seems like a nod
to Pipilotti Rist’s feminist video Ever Is Over All, as a woman in a
pretty and dainty blue dress walks in a carefree way along the street
smashing a car window while being watched by a smiling police
officer. At the end of Badu’s video she is shot and lies stricken on the
pavement. No carefree swing to her arms, no smiling police officer
behind her nodding as she swings a bat.
This year’s Turner Prize nominations are all filmmakers and are
each distinctly political. Luke Willis Thompson’s shortlisted work
does raise a question about what we’re talking about. Autoportrait is
a film about Diamond Reynolds, the partner of Philando Castile. On
Facebook, she broadcast the aftermath of the shooting of Castile by
a police officer in Minnesota. The work is two four-minute takes of
Reynolds; she is composed, reflective, shot from above and below.
The artist has said she is a collaborator in the work; that it gives her
a chance to be something other than a player in a violent scene on a
horrific day. He argues he gives her agency. Does he? In the awful,
awful Facebook video she has huge agency in picking up her phone
and filming something that otherwise would have been anonymous.
She demanded a voice, because the only alternative narrative without
her picking up her camera would have painted her very differently. In
Thompson’s work she is silent, speechless, almost detached. Who’s
giving who agency in this work? Is Reynolds giving the artist the
freedom and the ability to talk about it, or is her portraying her like
one of Deana Lawson’s goddesses? She’s being defined through the
lens of another, rather than her own lens. I have no answer.
Agency is important. At the root of video art was agency, that
visual culture and popular culture were being blended by consumers
and advertising. Once popular culture swallows something it can
lose its nuance, beiging it out so it offends no one and appeals to
all, with broad brushstrokes to gloss over big ideas in a way that
everyone has to agree with, but doesn’t really say anything. Video
art was (is?) counter-cultural because it puts the camera in the hand
of one who is seen as a consumer, acknowledges their power and
role as a consumer but provides an alternative narrative.
As we all become advertising subsets and databanks, we have
the power to use our Instagram stories to say something… different.
MC Nelson’s By The River premiered at FACT earlier this year.
Like a generation of artists he blends his role as a musician, artist
and filmmaker and the visual identity of his music seems just as
important as the lyrics. As a young black man in Liverpool his songs
reflect his voice, his view, his perspective. He is very much in control.
His videos don’t feel like an added form of marketing content (you’ve
got to have a video, lad, if you’re gonna get those shares!) but
instead a new layer of proposed interpretation. If you’re trying to say
something with words but can’t think of the right one, or you want to
add impact or a little extra to what you said, our visual culture is fine
with you adding an image or video to say it better than you can.
Video art is ripe for reinvention. It is ripe for artists using visual
ideas to cut through the wealth of imagery we scroll through every
hour, every day, blue light bleaching our ideas.
And it doesn’t all have to be good. Saying every work of video
art has to have the same emotional punch as an Apichatpong
Weerasethakul is as unhelpful as saying every painting has to be
as evocative as a Rubens. Really good art is rare in every medium.
Video art is incredibly accessible, which is what makes it incredibly
strong, but it’s also its biggest threat. Childish Gambino’s This Is
America is a sucker punch. Think what you like about it, but you’re
thinking. And thought is vital. The hot-take factory might tell you
your opinion has to be fully formed immediately. It doesn’t. Give
yourself time.
Agency is important, because if anything will break us free of
our inertia it’s about reflecting on where our power truly lies. If you
don’t want to be a consumer then don’t merely consume. If you
have something you want to say then say it. It doesn’t have to be
right first time round. Video art offers a strong platform to do that,
especially if it interrupts our constant scroll and disrupts our endless
appetite for new content.
Words: Laura Brown / @MsLaura_Brown
Photography: Alex Knight
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