Kanye West's Video With Steve McQueen Owes Much to John and Yoko's "Rape" Piece
As so often happens these days, the big art story of the moment is, in fact, really a celebrity story.
I'm talking about super-rapper Kanye West's team-up with video art maestro-turned-Oscar-winner Steve McQueen for the new video, All Day/I Feel Like That. The resulting nine-minute opus, presented as a video installation, got a four-day run at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (it closes today).
What makes this more than the most basic of music-video premises is West's relationship to the camera. Sometimes it swivels away from him, forcing him to chase it to center himself in the frame; sometimes it comes at him, forcing him to dodge.
As the rollicking All Day segues into the more morose I Feel Like That, the rapper sinks to the floor in seeming exhaustion, the camera still hovering over him, as if in a kind of triumph.
There is a precedent that comes to mind here. The relationship between camera and subject here calls to mind John Lennon/Yoko Ono's Rape (1969), for which the duo had a cameraman pursue a young woman through the streets of London. At first she tries to engage the camera to find out what's going on, then to escape it, and then at last, as it chases her into her apartment, she breaks down utterly.
By: Ben Davis
Source: Artnet News
