The Year Punk Coats, Single Channel Video, TRT 3:00, 2005
Using footage from two videos, "1991: The Year Punk Broke" and "Nirvana: Live Sold Out Tonight" I have isolated clips of in particular Kurt Cobain when wearing a white lab coat. The adoption of the uniform of the lab tech or doctor provides a certain ironic beauty in the punk world, as a blank canvas to scrawl on and an inversion of medical/scientific authority. The use is all the more poignant in Cobain's case due to his history of medical issues and depression. Nirvana's song Lithium is given another layer when being sung by Cobain wearing a doctor's lab coat (not to mention lithium's use as both anti-depressant and battery power for many digital cameras and camcorders today).
A personal element to this video derives in the way in which many of these images and Nirvana in general provided a redefinition of gender possibilities in my formative years. The imagery of Cobain as a down to earth, masculine musician but also pushing boundaries not to their polar opposite but to some point in between allowed a sense of possibility of collapsing, or at least imploding, gender binaries. His was not an inversion (say, like Bowie or other glam rockers) but a collapsing of spaces of gender and sound.
This video was originally done in 2005 and is ideally projected onto the wall, but can be screened on a monitor as well.
The True Artist (Still) Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Zoloft Version), Digital Video, TRT 4:32, 2008
The True Artist (Still) Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Lunesta Version), Digital Video, TRT 4:32, 2008
