CHRIS CUNNINGHAM AND THE ART VIDEO Summary :
1. The Art Video
2. Chris Cunningham
3. The Clip Video Universe
4. Publicity and short movies
5. Music Producer Warning. Welcome to the strange world of Chris Cunningham. It’s time to make a choice. You can leave now and you’ll never have to see what we are about to show you. Or, you can stay, stuck on your chair and live with us a new risky experience. Open up your eyes and ears, we are starting.
The Art Video was born in 1960 with Fluxus. Fluxus isn’t also an artistic movement, it’s a state of mind. We can give to this movement this definition : “art must be life”. Fluxus encouraged a "do-it-yourself" aesthetic, and valued simplicity over complexity, a kind of anti- art. It’s a combination of different arts. Fluxus artists have been active in Neo-Dada noise music and visual art as well as literature, urban planning, architecture, design and video. Then, Art Video take different forms like event, performance art, happening, or an installation which change space. In fact, provocated shows set a disorder. The most important art-video artists are :
-Nam Jun Paik -Bill Viola
(Name Jun Paik)
With new technologies, appeared a new technic witch can change reality: 3D projection on buildings
(video extract Projection on buildings)
Projection on buildings change our perception in creating illusion.
Chris Cunningham is an english music video film director and a video artist. At first, he learned painting and sculpture and then, he gets specialized in creation of silicone’s models and special effects. He worked like assistant for american science fiction movies. He has participate at the creation of Alien’s creature. In 1994, he worked with Stanley Kubrick for his robotics creation on the project Artificiel Intelligence for his robotics characters. Finally, Kubrick called Spielberg the director of this film and he became the producer. At the same time, Cunningham realized his videoclip Second Bad Vilbel for the english group of music, Autechre.
(video extract Second Bad Vilbel)
Chris Cunningham dedicated principally his work to directed video clip and he worked with famous musicians like Björk, Portishead and even Madonna for her song “Frozen”. Video clip become with him an entire cinematographic genre. He conceives his video like films, playing with a perfect synchronization between image and sound.
(Videos, Portishead Only you, 1997)
Cunningham has directed a handful of commercials for companies including Gucci, PlayStation, Levis, Telecom Italia, Nissan and Orange.
(extraits video Statistics Nissan, Levi’s Original) But, it’s with his work on the Sony commercial for Playstation that he created the interrogation on a mutating society. Indeed, he used many special effects to choc the spectator’s sensibility. For this spot called Mental Wealth, he used the faces of three different women to create a new one “so weird” without any cultural origin. This emblematic distorted face it’s a good representation of his work on mutation, one of the most important concept for Cunningham.
(Mental Wealth, Sony)
In 2005, Cunningham released the short film Rubber Johnny as a DVD accompanied by a book of photographs and drawings. Rubber Johnny, a six-minute experimental short film cut to a soundtrack by Richard David James best known under the pseudonym Aphex Twin, remixed by Cunningham, was shot between 2001 and 2004. This electronic musician is considered as “the most inventive and influential figure in contemporary electronic music" by The Guardian newspaper,
(video extract Rubber Johnny)
Since 1997, the tow artist work together. Of this collaboration, a work as funny as scary was born. Thanks to Aphex twin special music and concept, Cunningham could express himself and developed his new representation of the human body. He gets interested in nude bodies and strange situations, out of time and out of space. So, we are going to show you an extract from the film called “Flex”, witch is a collaboration between A. Twin and C. Cunningham.
(video extract Flex, 2000)
To describe the film, we can say that from darkness a beam of light illuminates the naked forms of a man and woman who are first seen in the protective spoon embrace. On separating they are both overwhelmed by violence to each other, and the video ends with the woman crawling back to the embrace of the man. The video is filmed in such a way that the human forms are 'other' in that the perspective is distorted and details are too defined.
In 2005, Cunningham took a sabbatical from filmmaking to learn about music production and recording and develop his own music projects.
In 2005, Cunningham played a 45 minutes audio visual piece performed live in Tokyo and Osaka at Japan’s first electronic music event “Electraglide”. This performance evolved into Chris Cunningham Live, a 55 minutes long performance piece combining original and remixed music and film.
(Osaka summer sonic= Aphex Twin live set.)
To conclude, we can say that Chris Cunningham is considered as one of the most influenced figures of Art Video and video clip. He has created is own universe with his particularly perception of human body, time, space and mutation. The originality of his abstract films are typical of his philosophy and his approach of art. His weird creations make people uncomfortable because they appeared to us as an other, a stranger as realistic as disturbing. They look like us but at the same time they horrified us. Bibliographies :
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Cunningham http://www.director-file.com/cunningham/ http://www.arte.tv/fr/Echappees-culturelles/tracks/a-z/2706082.html