Music Videos As Art

March 8th, 2010

evening-hymns

Scott Cudmore is a music video optimist. Cudmore is a video director and curator of “They Shoot Videos, Don’t They?” an exhibit of little seen music videos and music related film as picked by Cudmore. It is an ambitious project that relies on the idea that people are still interested in seeing experimental videos produced for little known artists in a world where the format is changing so rapidly. “Music videos used to be a marketing tool for artists and it still may be for acts like Jay-Z. But now it is like an extension of the art form,” Cudmore said Thursday night 107 Shaw Gallery, an art gallery in Toronto.

In this edition, the fourth in the series, the few small TV’s hung around the room air videos for Caribou’s “Odessa,” directed by Video Marsh and Wooden Sky’s “A Documentary in Pieces: Part 7” directed by Scott Cudmore himself, among others videos.

But music videos have adapted. As they were shown less and less on television, people started hitting up the web to check out new or classic videos. Cudmore thinks because the medium has moved more online, it has allowed artists and directors even from the mainstream to be more experimental and cites Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” and Jay-Z’s “On to the Next One” as examples. “Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ video is such a simple concept but so unconventional at the same time,” he said. “It took the performance video and made it simple, never flashy and it becomes almost avant garde as a result.”

Jonas Bonnetta of Evening Hymns played double duty at the show. Bonnetta performed an improvised set made of bits and pieces of recorded music in front of a video of the sunrise he shot with Cudmore. The videos is beautifully simplistic and even the most subtle movement of a bird flying past becomes an epic moment in the film.

Bonnetta says that since he released the album, Spirit Guides, he has thought a lot about the relevancy of music videos in our time. “When videos moved to online it became another way to show your band. You can do it inexpensively and it’s a soft way to talk about your band,” Bonnetta says. “They are definitely more relevant now.”

Cudmore relies on people with an attitude like Bonnetta’s to keep the show running. He also needs them to keep artists coming to him to direct his simple videos while people are rushing to the theatres to check out 3-D adventure films. But he laughed with Lana Mauro, the director of the gallery, that they will keep doing these shows until they get a rock thrown through the window begging them to stop.

Photo by Meghan Rennie

Check out an exclusive video of Jonas Bonnetta’s sound check:

Tags: Evening Hymns, Jonas Bonnetta, Scott Cudmore, They Shoot Videos Don't They?