Response 10: A Lot of Closets and Clouds

I really enjoyed Michael Bell-Smith’s Trapped in the Closet All at Once. At first, I was really confused because there were so many things going on at the same time. It was difficult to differentiate the individual songs and images since they were all playing at the same time. For someone who listens to R. Kelly’s songs, this may not have been as difficult. But since I never listen to R. Kelly, I had a hard time keeping track of the barrage of images and sounds coming at me. It was like trying to listen to five conversations at the same time. But as the mixed music video neared its conclusion, I had stopped trying to listen for the individual songs and storylines. Instead, I was just listening to the conglomerate as a whole, and though I heard familiar phrases once in a while, I wasn’t paying attention to words anymore. The mixing of music and video became fun to listen to as a whole. It was particularly interesting to hear how R. Kelly’s styles were so similar across the five songs.

As much as I enjoyed Trapped in the Closet All at Once, I have trouble thinking of this as an art. It seems all Michael Bell-Smith did was to take five of someone else’s music videos and play them over each other. Although we’ve spent a lot of time looking at how appropriation artists take other artists’ works and implement them into their own, this particular piece doesn’t seem to have any extra thought put into it. If I took five music videos from a random artist and put them together, does that make me an artist? It just seems like Bell-Smith didn’t do very much work. But if we accept Sherri Irvin’s authorship arguments as true, then I guess Michael Bell-Smith could be a proper artist. After all, Trapped in the Closet All at Once isn’t too different from Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman.

I thought Super Mario Clouds was also an interesting work. Although Cory Arcangel probably did not do this project for art’s sake, the project is a work of appropriation. Arcangel took something designed by someone else and altered it to achieve another effect. Though it’s not a very exciting effect, it is quite different. And it IS an interesting idea. I would never have thought of erasing everything in Super Mario except for the clouds.