Looking At Music
Long before MTV, multi-media artists combined musical concepts with visuals. The 1960s and early 70's marked a nation high on the Apollo launch and promises of limitless technological innovations. Artists depicted this exuberance using newly available portable video equipment to capture the "here and now" presenting it in a futuristic backdrop. Musicians found themselves at the forefront of this interdisciplinary experimentation. Looking At Music, an exhibit on the second floor of MOMA gives some good examples like Yoko Ono's 1968 slow motion (51 min.) montage of John Lennon's face and David Bowie's abstract Space Oddity from 1972. Recorded and released to coincide with the first moon landing, this film tells the story of Major Tom, an astronaut who becomes lost in space. These dynamic cross-pollinations of music, video, and installation gave birth to "mixed media" art as we know it. The exhibits really allow you to delve into the origins of artists like Bowie, Devo, and lesser known Captain Beefheart. Bowie began playing saxophone at age thirteen and worked as a commercial artist before studying mime and later playing in bands. In 1969 he co-founded the experimental Beckenham Arts Lab in South London which hosted poetry readings, light shows, theatrical and dance performances, and puppet shows. Devo, formed in Akron, Ohio, in 1973 by Bob Casale, Gerald Casale, Bob Lewis, Rod Reisman, and Fred Weber, stood for de-evolution: the concept that instead of evolving, humankind is regressing. An inventive singer and harmonica player, Captain Beefheart performed with The Magic Band from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s producing unusual fusions of changing time signatures and surreal lyrics.