23 August,2012 11:26 AM IST | | Dhara Vora
Many of us would have made collages, after much trial and error, as children for class projects or video montages for a friend's birthday. But imagine a montage that Tate in UK exhibits twice due to public demand.
The video montages by two such acclaimed artists Christian Marclay and Tracey Moffatt will be showcased at Mumbai Art Room starting tomorrow. The technique of video montage just like a paper collage is the art of cutting and putting together pieces from different videos to create something new.
Both the videos being exhibited have used snippets from Hollywood movies and have turned them into pieces of art. The work of Swiss-American visual artist and composer Marclay, who is based in New York and London is titled Telephones (1995).
"The video begins with different telephones being dialled, ringing and then people answering the phone. The combination of dialogue that follows is quite humorous. This video has several Hollywood stars such as Sean Connery and Humphrey Bogart in conversation," says Susan Hapgood from the gallery.
The second montage by Moffatt in association with experimental filmmaker Gary Hillberg is called Doomed and is a mix of disaster scenes such as floods, earthquakes and explosions taken from various Hollywood movies. "Though both are montages, the techniques used in the videos and the end result is very different. While Marclay's work is more of a narration, Moffatt and Hillberg's piece is about spectacular natural disasters in movies.
The technique of collage fascinates me and that's why I thought of bringing the works of these brilliant international artists here," says Hapgood. Also, while Telephones retains the original sound of the clips as it lends to the plot, Moffatt has put in an altogether different soundtrack in her montage. Since montages involve the use of works by other artists and performers Hapgood has also put up, at the exhibition, legal requirements that one needs to be aware of when making montages.