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Indepth Arts News:
"Philip Brophy: Fluorescent"
2004-02-14 until 2004-03-18
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Sydney, ,
AU Australia
Forget David Bowie, Gary Glitter and T-Rex, the era of manufactured Glam rock comes to the Art Gallery of New South Wales from February 14. FLUORESCENT, the latest creation from sound artist Philip Brophy, pays homage to the androgynous, multi-sexual Glam aesthetic with a mock music installation. FLUORESCENT is a multi-screen video mixed in surround-sound, which highlights the hyperbolic performative aspects of the narcissistic video-clip, with Brophy inventing himself as a luridly reconstituted being vibrating with Glam's essential fakeness and plasticity.
His performance portrays a transmogrified sexual monster, roaming and prancing across a videosonic platform, energized by a pulsating 'fat' sound seething with a hunger for the bright, the shiny and the loud.
The Gallery's contemporary project space is turned into virtual stage where the audience is bombarded with imagery and music, synchronized to Brophy's movements as he struts across 3 giant screens singing lyrics that exemplify Glam rock's tensile, self-invented, volatile and restless nature.
FLUORESCENT is part of the larger music project by Brophy, which has typified much of his musical interests and critical writing (Hope You Die Before I Get Old, catalogue essay for the exhibition Hype; Pale Glitter - Fat Sound, catalogue essay for the exhibition None More Blacker). In Brophy's thesis, Glam is the shining black hole of Rock 'n' Roll's grotesque theatricality.
The idea for making a mock video clip came after Brophy produced and directed Give me Liberty for the band Honeysmack. Having been a legitimate record producer gave rise to the simple pondering: in an era in which we strive for the 'real', why not produce a video for a wholly fake 'recording artist'.
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