GLASTONBURYOFTHEMIND

Sorry if I’m late catching up on this but Christian Marclay’s Video Quartet (2002 at The Tate Modern)? Surely its impossible to talk about essential rock n roll experiences in the Capitol without referencing this 13 minute mind blowing collision and cut up of desiccated images and sound from over 70 years of onscreen music making and musical drama? That music can be a looped Rita Hayworth (?), tip tip tapping her tap dancing feet in a semi circle with a widening smile as she lifts her shining skirt to reveal her pins. Or the sad haunted look of the lone little minstrel fella a plucking his geetar in Deliverance, Holly Hunter, of course, at The Piano, is that Daryl Hannah dazed and transported as she eases the soaring (sore-ing) echo from the cello cradled between her thighs? It’s certainly a dapper Cary Grant in dress suit approaching the ivories. Projected across a four-screened wall VQ can only be viewed in Tate Modern, or any other gallery that deigns to show it. Lots more should -Its an ace use of public space. Like all truly great works of rock n roll art it is at once disruptive and unifying, raiding the cultural archive to present a work that reconfigures the past in new, enlivening and inspiring ways. Marclay - an associate of avant gardeistas such as Sonic Youth and John Zorn -has previously made Guitar Drag and a pillow sculpture from the Beatles product. But its a shame if, because of its location and past associations, VQ is allowed to fester in an “art” ghetto. VQ is unfettered, a true joy, the sort of thing anyone with a sense of fun, energy and cultural wildness will rejoice in. I imagine, for instance, that “ver kids” untrammelled by the need to culturally place very reference will trip (or have been already tripping) their merry little heads off on it. Over a years work on a laptop produced this incredible mash up of, well, EVERYTHING. From Ingrid Bergman giving a brief la la la lee in Casablanca, to Hendrix searing over sonic mountaintops, Jack Nicholson, Thelonious Monk and forty or more other fingers caressing and careering over the ivories (there’s a dizzying sequence of piano pounding sliced and diced across the screens the fingering frenzy a peak of pure sex). There is Maria Callas, giving way to Marilyn Monroe, Janet Leigh’s psycho scream, Fred Astaire, Judy Garland, Josephine Baker, Pete Townshend, a lone blast of Dylan’s harmonica…. But even as you tick off the cultural reference points something else is taking hold the sweet, strange and spirit soaring music Marclay is making out of the sources. The totality of this work is immense and in its 13 minutes VQ has a way of concertina-ing time, you zing through so many epochs, sensations, buoyed by a fantastical rhythm. Its the sort of thing that requires a book - a second, third and 100th look - before you get to the bottom of it, which you never will of course, its like a great big cultural river an ever replenishing well spring. And musically, as a soundtrack, even without the visuals, it’s an astonishing achievement. But that disc aint for sale and its only in the Museum that it can be seen. It is a sonic visual Sensurround of the order of Warhol’s The Velvets Exploding Plastic Inevitable (as screened at the Liverpool Tate Psychedelic Exhibition across 3 white walls in an empty room). Only this embraces a much broader cultural canvas - a world of sound and visual wonder. And it’s only at The Tate, mate. Get ye to the gallery!!