Air Guitar: Art Reconsidering Rock Music

This item consists of two videos exhibited in a group, touring exhibition curated by Emma Mahony.

The exhibition ‘Air Guitar’ centred on visual artists’ fascination with the aesthetics and culture of rock music. One video I exhibited was ‘Hot Music’ (1994), a performance related work, which was previously shown in a programme at the Museum of Modern Art New York in 1998. In ‘Hot Music’ a mime is performed on an invisible drum kit, in time to a toy drum-machine, which is manipulated live. The spatial representation of sound-making and its relation to live performance features in many of my works.

The second film ‘Ronnie and Jimmy’ (2001) referenced both popular and political cinematic idioms and featured a number of artists (including Richard Wilson) as guest performers. The individual performers were disguised by the wearing of latex masks of ex-presidents of the United States. The two ‘presidents’ (Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter) engage in a kind of futile ‘Stake-out’ and discuss a range of topics, including terrorism and genre films, whilst breathing in helium. The disguised and processed dialogue together with the music, give the work an aura of derrangement. T

his video (made just prior to September 11, 2001) is an ambiguous and obscure meditation on the notion of good and evil, authority and criminality, official politics and terrorist movements. As with other works of mine, the incorporation of the making of the soundtrack into the final film is a distinct feature.

• http://www.chelsea.arts.ac.uk/17271.htm
• http://www.seandower.com/