The Art of Pop Video

In the 1980s and 1990s, owners of television sets had access to an amazing range of music videos. Musicians like Madonna, Michael Jackson, Peter Gabriel, the Pet Shop Boys, Björk, Daft Punk, or the White Stripes and directors like Michel Gondry, Chris Cunningham, David LaChapelle, Mark Romanek, or Jonathan Glazer overwhelmed music fans with their creative imaginations, also paving new ways for video art and film. Long before the music television network MTV launched on August 1, 1981 with the Buggles clip “Video Killed the Radio Star,” however, the pop video had been firmly established as a format for the dissemination of musical and aesthetic innovation. Today, visual artists such as Tom Dale, Christian Jankowsky, Erik van Lieshout, Michael Smith, or Wolfgang Tillmans increasingly draw on the form of the music video for their own work. With the spread of high speed internet access, more and more clips are made by amateurs. At the same time, many pop video directors, breaking free of television’s blandness diktat, are exploring polarizing issues such as teenage violence or politics, driving a new boom of the music video.
The Art of Pop Video displays the whole range of forms of expression in the music video, presents its filmic precursors, and ventures a glimpse into its future.
Essays by Michael P. Aust, Georg Elben, and Daniel Kothenschulte.
DVD featuring clips by: Kenneth Bager, 2x Björk, Blurred Vision, The Buggles, Cornelius, Marianne Faithfull, Fettes Brot, Lasse Gjertsen, Alex Gopher, Klonhertz, Manos de Topo, Noonday Underground, Paula, 2x Pet Shop Boys, Radiohead, Sensorama, Schneider TM, Nina Simone, Lyapsis Trubetskoy, and Zoot Woman.