Mixtapes and Mashups
Call it a mixtape, a found-footage-video-montage, or a post-structural re-authoring of appropriated semiotic tropes, the video mashup is an amusing and seductive thing. Videos we may recognize from TV, the Internet, and art movie houses get reworked here into something almost completely new and leave us reeling, struggling to reconcile the original meaning with the newly-minted version. Jesse McLean re-edits everything from televangelists to reality TV shows to understand how we watch ourselves in emotionally charged public situations in “The Bearing Witness Trilogy.” Romantic moments from many big screen movies are hypnotically spliced together in Nicolas Provost’s Gravity, bringing the clichés of Hollywood to ecstatic heights. Sterling Ruby brings out unexpectedly tender moments in Human Touch, culling scenes from hunting shows of hunter’s hands sweetly and bizarrely caressing the antlers of their prey. Cremaster 4 gets the TV movie treatment as Jon Routson cuts down Mathew Barney’s masterpiece to a lean thirthy three minutes plus commercial breaks. The YouTube rants and monologs of the unemployed, over medicated, and sexually confused are transformed into a connected and kinetic chorus in Natalie Bookchin’s series “Testament.” These mashups play with the notion that meaning in media is profoundly fluid and flexible. Here there is no reason to accept any version of a video as final.
Kate Bowen and David Oresick, Curators
Nicolas Provost, Gravity, 2007 6:33 min, courtesy of the Video Data Bank Jesse McLean, The Eternal Quarter Inch, 20088:50 min, courtesy of the Video Data Bank Natalie Bookchin, Laid Off, 20094:00 min, courtesy of the artist Jesse McLean, Somewhere only we know, 20095:00 min, courtesy of the Video Data Bank Natalie Bookchin, I Am Not, 20092:00 min, courtesy of the artist Jesse McLean, The Burning Blue, 20099:00 min, courtesy of the Video Data Bank Natalie Bookchin, My Meds, 20091:06 min, courtesy of the artist Sterling Ruby, Human Touch, 20011:56 min, courtesy of the Video Data Bank Jon Routson, Untitled (Cremaster 4), 200233:43 min, courtesy of Team Gallery