Mladen Bizumic’s Colonial Atmospheres at The Physics Room, Christchurch. 15 November - 15 December 2007.
Bizumic’s DVD installation here is a typical video work from this artist, with a haunting aural soundtrack and imagery that is dystopian in theme appropriated from Godard. The music though is a soundtrack Bzumic has now used twice, the first time in a work that’s part of the Chartwell Collection in AAG, a video called Hauturu – the Maori name for Little Barrier Island.
For this soundtrack Bizumic took an orchestral arrangement of The Rolling Stones’ standard Under My Thumb and slowed it right down. And it is absolutely gorgeous.
So gorgeous in fact that it dominates the experience in viewing both installations. Now many authors have been fascinated by the power music has over the human mind and the pleasure centre in the brain – prompting books on the subject for example by Oliver Sacks and Anthony Storr. The point I have raised about aural domination in Bizumic’s show I would also apply to the films of, say, Len Lye.
In most of Lye’s great films such as Particles In Space or Colour Cry he incorporated music taken from his large collection of jazz and blues 78s. I have always felt that in doing this Lye was admitting his visual material was insufficient by itself, and that he remedied the philosophical dilemma by making kinetic (and noisy) sculpture later on.
In Bizumic’s case, the Jagger-Richards song was recorded originally in March 1966, and the Godard film Weekend, released in 1967, so historically as source material the original image and melody do match. A clever pairing.
