Entering the MoMA's current exhibition, Looking at Music, John Lennon, his face six feet high, looks back out at you. The film is Yoko Ono's "Film No. 5" and it dates from 1968. Examining where rock music and the art world converged in the 60s-70s (nowadays you might just chalk it all up as marketing), it's nothing that hasn't been cobbled together before, but much like Lennon's blinking yet unbudging gaze, an ephemeral nature informs this handful of rooms.
Highlights include the smoke-created drawings of Otto Piene, Laurie Anderson's self-playing violin, Ono's own fragile perrformance pieces, written on wadded-up tissue paper. There's even a listening station where you can get dizzy to Steve Reich's epochal tape pieces, "Come Out" and "It's Gonna Rain."
While YouTube usurps a room of early music videos, such as the Beatles' "Penny Lane," David Bowie's "A Space Odyssey," and an entry from Captain Beeheart. But two videos in particular continue to loop in my head. First up is by new wave auteurs DEVO and their 1974 video for "Secret Agent Man."
This video, directed by Chuck Statler remains disquieting three decades on, the band (still in their blue-collar days, in matching factory jumpsuits) rock plastic masks as if in the midst of a bank heist. Kids at RISD to this day are still trying to unpack this unholy marriage of music, art, and video.
Our other favorite clip is from eternal weirdos, the Residents.
In this video for their album Third Reich'n'Roll, we have a TV playing bass and two giant porkchops smashing a swastika (no doubt because Hitler was a vegetarian) while the band deconstructs Wilson Pickett's foot-mover "Land of a Thousand Dances" and surf masterpiece "Wipeout." What it all means, we haven't the foggiest, but God bless such inanity. We stumbled out of the exhibit delightfully dazed.
While YouTube usurps a room of early music videos, such as the Beatles' "Penny Lane," David Bowie's "A Space Odyssey," and an entry from Captain Beeheart. But two videos in particular continue to loop in my head. First up is by new wave auteurs DEVO and their 1974 video for "Secret Agent Man."
This video, directed by Chuck Statler remains disquieting three decades on, the band (still in their blue-collar days, in matching factory jumpsuits) rock plastic masks as if in the midst of a bank heist. Kids at RISD to this day are still trying to unpack this unholy marriage of music, art, and video.
Our other favorite clip is from eternal weirdos, the Residents.
In this video for their album Third Reich'n'Roll, we have a TV playing bass and two giant porkchops smashing a swastika (no doubt because Hitler was a vegetarian) while the band deconstructs Wilson Pickett's foot-mover "Land of a Thousand Dances" and surf masterpiece "Wipeout." What it all means, we haven't the foggiest, but God bless such inanity. We stumbled out of the exhibit delightfully dazed.
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