Kelly Clarkson's Karaoke Revolution

Music Video Review
Kelly Clarkson
"Walk Away"
Director: Joseph Kahn

In David Raposa's Pitchfork review of "Since U Been Gone," he described the hit track -- and its writer, Max Martin -- as having given Kelly Clarkson an image makoever. The song recasts her as a woman who's "diffident, defiant, and mad as hell." And it was an utterly catchy, innovative pop confection. But the video for "Since U Been Gone" was not nearly as inspired. In those one-note three minutes, Clarkson is supposed to be in her ex-boyfriend's apartment tearing up his and his new girlfriend's shit while they're away, acting as the agent dispensing bad karma to the boy who did her wrong. Not only was it difficult to figure out how she got into the apartment (if you had even figured out that that's where she was), but, more importantly, it didn't have the subtlety of the song itself. It was too bad-ass for its own good. Thus, as Clarkson tore open down pillows and snipped clothes into rags with a pair of scissors I'd ignore the video, but kept MTV Hits on just so I could hear that lyric of falling "for that stupid love song." My preferred method for listening -- and, let's face it, rocking -- to "Since U Been Gone" was and is to turn my iPod up and sing the fuck along.

And singing the fuck along is the very premise of "Walk Away." When we enter "Walk"'s video-time, it's 8:30 in the morning. A radio DJ announces that Kelly Clarkson is going to perform her hit single "Walk Away" for listeners all across "Radioland" (the announcer's description of his radiowaves). As one experiences every weekday, 8:30 is populated by those who are just getting ready for the day, and those who are already in the thick of morning. Throughout the course of the video, we catch glimpses of a girl who's getting up, a guy who's stuck in traffic, a mousy woman at work slipping her earbuds into her ears, a guy vacuuming his living room, a cop giving a fancy woman a ticket, a guy showering, shaggy-haired twins cleaning their kitchen, a busboy, a hairdresser, a waitress, a guy singing into the mirror of a public bathroom, and football jocks all hanging out in their locker room. The thing these individuals have in common is that they are all infected with the song, so much that they themselves break into song. And the pleasure in the video is seeing their diverse versions of getting down.

It's almost as though one day, Clarkson and/or Joseph Kahn were looking at the 10 East on a Wednesday morning and saw a number of commuters (myself included!) get down when I heard "Since U Been Gone" on the radio. Maybe Clarkson was thinking of her pre-American Idol days with aching nostalgia; like, say, if, like all girls who grew up in the `80s, she would sing to, say, "Like a Prayer" with abandon. And, speaking of Madonna, the video for "Walk Away" is, in a major way, the karaoke/lip-synching version of the video for Madonna's "Hung Up." Both videos have the elements of people rocking out to a diva, and cuts to the diva herself singing and shaking it. But what differentiates "Walk Away" is the line that Clarkson draws between her viewers and herself. While Madonna converges with her grooving audience, a kind of joint club circuit/Dance Dance Revolution/do-the-Hustle convention, Clarkson is officially a pop diva who brushes the sleepdust out of her fans' eyes, but stands apart from them. I suppose it's because there would be something admittedly weird if all the people featured in Clarkson's latest video met up with Clarkson and started singing along with her and a Karaoke Revolution revolution of her song.

Given its variation-on-a-theme quality, "Walk Away" is simply a super-fun video to watch. And it was well worth the risk of possibly being called a copy-cat. Perhaps one of the weirder emulations featured in the video is Kelly Clarkson-as-sex symbol. With midriff bare, sexy, lace-up boots hugging her calves, Clarkson swivels her hips, stands contrapasto, plays sassy, and even, towards the end of the video, gets upset at the director because he's being too difficult to work with. But it still feels weird to see America's most popular American Idol -- no, American Idol's sweetheart -- with the aim to scald. We've seen this side of Clarkson before, in leotard form, singing "Behind These Hazel Eyes." This side's got the same tight, ripped, shocking fashion statements (of which I am no fan), but it doesn't seem to have been emphasized in choreography before. And while it might fit the lyrics that Clarkson is singing, she doesn't yet feel comfortable in the role. But the delightful thing about the video, though, is that everyone else in it -- everyone who's singing along -- totally does. And the truth of it is, wouldn't we all agree that Madonna looks pretty ridiculous in "Lucky Star"?

The best picture I've seen all week!

Making It New?

After enjoying Annie Proulx's gentle evisceration of the Academy Awards in the Guardian, I hopped over to the Arts section and found this feature on Tom Hunter, a hip and institutionally validated British photographer, and his recent exhibition, "Living in Hell and Other Stories" at the National Gallery--the first exhibit at the venerable gallery ever to be devoted to a photographer. The Guardian slideshow gives us a glimpse and an earful of how Hunter composed his photographs, and his thoughts on the paintings (and only paintings) that inspired the photographs most recently on display.

Looking through Hunter's photographs, I wanted to only be captivated by their British ordinariness. But my overwhelming instinct was to wonder if the artist was getting so much attention for being so art historical. It was not just that the work reminded me of Sam Taylor-Wood, laced with a good bit of Richard Billingsworth, and maybe some Nan Goldin for good measure (in the group scenes), it was that Hunter had perpetrated a direct usurption of art history and its canonical images and artists. This made me suspicious. But, then again, perhaps usurption is too cruel a word; a better phrase would be excessive veneration. So, to get it right: Hunter is engaged with an excessive love for the old masters -- not that I blame him -- but one that requires his practice to be intimately, almost dealthly close, to theirs. It also means that Hunter can be celebrated straight-off with art historical panache... but does that mean that art history is, for him, a crutch?

There was something that broke with tradition when I looked up Hunter's CV. The photographs from "Living in Hell...", unlike the original masterpieces (at the time when they were first revealed and as they hang now), were displayed, in tact, in series, all around the globe at the same time (or around the same time between the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006); in London, Sheffield, New York and Durham, NC. Perhaps this infectious spread is not particular to Hunter's oeuvre, but it is certainly a sign of our times: the ease of display -- really, the immediacy and duplication of display -- is something artists must contend with fiercely, and with some degree of awareness. But his work still left me wondering: Where exactly will he go from there? Is he really so avant-garde or innovative? How can he break new ground with his photography--for his own sake in art history, and for the sake of art history as a whole?

The larger question of how one can make things new has been heavy on my mind lately. I don't simply mean twists and turns of the aesthetic language that's established and persists, or short detours from one art historical style to the next. Rather, how can -- or can -- one make something as startling, disruptive, and insane as "Mademoiselles d'Avignon" or "Le Dejeuner sur l'Herb" now, in the 21st century? Taking the question to task, Daniel Birnbaum, in February's Artforum, writes about Michel Majerus, whom he describes as "the key contribution--to what one might call painting in the expanded field." Majerus goes on: "His art had a specific kind of newness--not the lofty, if contested, 'originality of the avant-garde,' but the prepackaged newness of the latest cell-phone graphic or just-released sneaker from Nike." And he weaves a supple trio of final sentences: "The temporality of Majerus's work, I claimed a decade ago, is that of a floating, all-encompassing now, analogous perhaps to that of the World Wide Web. Both phenomena--Majerus's art and the Internet--were new to me then. Now, that now seems a long time ago."

Majerus, before his tragically early end, was undoubtedly making new things that included a new 21st century stylistic language, one that was steeped in an entirely new set of references--the Internet, cell phones, anime, sleek sneakers from Nike, etc. But--yes, but--even in Birnbaum's insistence on Majerus's newness (in all its many forms beyond painting), he includes a paragraph stuffed with artists who had clearly influenced Majerus--Rauschenberg, Rosenquist, Polke, Koons, Kippenberger--and the visual references were certainly not hard to guess. The contents of Majerus's combinations are themselves signs of our times, and they rendered exquistely, but the idea of such combination is not entirely Majerus's alone. It seems to rely on the work of the past. It is informed and set up by what past artists have pioneered and left wide open for play and use.

Both Majerus and Hunter's work is primarily in traditional media, photography and painting, where the invisible hand of art history is rampant, overpowering, nearly inescapable. Thus, the questions both artists' work leave me with are these: Can an entirely new artform, or way of seeing, be made within these traditional forms? And can we, as viewers, be shocked and startled by a contemporary art object that the way we see the world changes? Or is it best to leave this to increments, and slow-going change? How has the art market changed the way art is made? How have art schools altered it too? Indeed, not just art schools, but how does the contemporary culture of visual inundation effect the way art is processed? And, on a more personal note, when was the last time a work of art simply floored you?

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Tom Hunter at Yancey Richardson Gallery; James Lomax on "Living in Hell and Other Stories." More Michel Majerus at Manifesta 2; on Wikipedia; and at Deichtorhallen Hamburg.

I just got spam with the subject line "stupid moron." I promptly deleted it, but then regret set in. Was the hook of the subject that the contents of the email would point out an exemplary "stupid moron" or would I open the email and realize, "Yes! I am a 'stupid moron'!" ? I will never know.