Since August, I’ve been making regular visits to Thermostat:
Video and the Pacific Northwest, a 90-minute loop of short videos
by 17 artists that’s projected, large, in the public-living-room
area on the third floor of the Seattle Art Museum. I’ve become
attached to it, preoccupied with its preoccupation: music and
landscape.
In one video, the camera runs along the silvery contours of drum
stands, follows the sinuous line of electrical cords, rides over knobs
on a mixing board—the landscape is the physical manifestation of
a rock band, and not just any band, but the Rolling Stones, recording
their hit “Sympathy for the Devil.” Jean-Luc Godard tried to make a
film of this process, but the producers took the film in another
direction, focusing instead on the end product of the song; by
inserting contemporary footage of a band rehearsing along with some
from the Stones’ session, the artist duo Hadley + Maxwell restore
Godard’s intention to make a study of music not only in time but in
space, in objects. The song, interrupted by the cuts, is never able
to settle into a rhythm or to finish, and the faces of the performers
are not seen. A certain physicality and open-endedness comes back into
the otherwise fixed, overly familiar song.
In dance, music is the landscape for the bodies. But when the
dancer is a surfboard alone in the surf, as in Shannon Oksanen’s
sepia-toned video Vanishing Point, and the sound is the grooving
roil of a surf guitar, it’s hard to say which came first. One seems
like nothing without the other; together they are a symbol for lonely,
restless freedom. Likewise, Kevin Schmidt’s plugged-in solo guitar
performance of “Stairway to Heaven” on the beach (his Marshall amp is
hooked up to a generator next to him on a wagon) is proof of the unity
in symbolism between certain scenes and certain songs.
There’s music in almost every video, replacing spoken language
with abstraction. A wash of sound provides a soft sonic padding to
the explosive fight between girls in Jeremy Shaw’s voyeuristic 7
Minutes. Anne Mathern’s intense, unsmiling lip-synch of the Italian
song “Come Stai” references stage performance, but she’s on a pickup
truck, riding across the countryside, being punished by wind.
In films, music can be a human overlay on what would otherwise be
inert nature. But Thermostat—named for the human-made
automatic weather-controller—mixes and remixes the terms of the
movie soundtrack, the music video, and the art video using landscape as
a base. Ron Tran mic’d a bunch of instruments lying flat on a pier
arranged like a band: snares in back, guitars in front, tambourine and
keyboard in the middle. He covered the instruments with bird food;
pigeons come and play a “set” with their pecking. The video is
called The Peckers. That’s the band name. 
