These ever-shifting subject positions are echoed by director Ricky Saiz’s swirling, trippy camera work. We’re looking at the Carters, and the dancers, but the paintings and sculptures also form a kind of upstage audience. Also by incorporating black dancers into the Museum, the question of who is looking at whom continually circles, never coming to rest. ‘But this’ crows contemporary art magazine frieze, ‘is the strongest statement yet by the Carters which considers the art historical canon, and the placement of people of colour within it.’ Īrt historian Dr James Smalls has written this ‘video is an unapologetic visual and sonic manifesto about spaces, power, and control … It is about establishing a new order in which black bodies seize and command cultural and physical spaces from which they have traditionally been excluded and are typically marginalized.’Īpeshit certainly shows the Carters in full control of their own narrative. Beyoncé has filmed in the Louvre before, and Jay-Z’s 2013 video for his single ‘Picasso Baby’ was filmed at New York’s Pace Gallery. The result is what has been described as ‘another heart stopping moment for pop culture …’ It is not the first time the Carters have used the art museum as a location. Time constraints meant they leant heavily on the creative improvisatory strengths of ‘it’ director Ricky Saiz, and Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui both of whom they’d worked with previously. The Apeshit clip was put together on the hop, with Bey and Jay only filming in the Louvre for two days. As an aside I’m giving the song its full spelling, not the coy Apes**t which is how you find it on Google. What do Beyoncé and Jay-Z have to do with art history, theory and criticism? actually quite a bit, since as ‘the Carters’ they filmed the video for their latest single Apeshit in the Louvre Museum in Paris in May this year and in it, the paintings that form the visuals function not merely as wallpaper but as keys to the meaning of the song.
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