I’d be shocked if five percent of the student population knew anything about Art Jones. Furthermore, I’d be shocked if any percentage of the student population knew Art Jones was going to be showing his new piece, “Transmitting Live From Babylon,” in downtown Buffalo on Wednesday night.
That’s why I wasn’t surprised when I arrived at the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and found the place empty. I don’t mean kind of empty like PJ’s on a Friday night. I mean empty as in 50 available seats out of 50 total. I would call it a thin crowd, but there wasn’t a crowd.
Hallwalls is an interesting place. First of all, don’t be fooled by the address. It’s listed at 700 Main Street, but it’s actually 698. It was a bit awkward when I walked into 700 Main Street, an apartment building. Secondly, aside from a small logo on the door and an inconspicuous sign along the side of the building, it doesn’t exactly advertise itself. It wasn’t until I walked past it twice that I found the place. Finally, once inside, it was about 400 degrees. Some would call it cozy, but “cozy” to me doesn’t mean sweating through your clothes.
If you log onto the Hallwalls website (www.hallwalls.org), you can find a brief description of Art Jones and this new collage. It describes “Transmitting Live From Babylon” as such: “a live audio-visual mix performed with sampled news and commercial footage, text and original digital video and animation accompanied by an experimental dub, hip-hop, and electronic noise soundtrack.”
The description lost me at “Babylon.” However, the show did a bit of clarifying, and I can attempt to paraphrase the description: “Transmitting Live From Babylon” is Fahrenheit 9/11 with the volume off, on mushrooms, with a rap soundtrack. Sure, the place was hot, and there were only eight other people in attendance, but the video collage was immensely enjoyable.
What was brilliant about the show was whatever Mr. Jones’ political views are, they weren’t entirely evident in the collage. The theme was “War and Money,” two topics that have become increasingly important given recent events, but unlike Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, he didn’t skew the facts. What Art Jones did was take real events, real footage, and make a video scrapbook.
Mr. Jones was subtle at times, while at others his message rang loud and clear. The collage began with a stock ticker running along the bottom of the screen, accompanied by scenes of pop-culture violence at the top. For example, a clip of a boxing match was at the top of the screen, and the bottom of the screen was informing the audience that the Dow Jones was up. Not subtle, but accompanied by the music in the background, it was the most original piece of work I have ever seen.
Yet, Jones was at his strongest when his message was subtle. There was some pretty profound footage of two soldiers walking around in a house in Iraq. One of the soldiers was playing with an automatic weapon, twirling it around his hand and pretending to shoot the camera with a big smile on his face. The other soldier was picking up various objects in the house, and though we never got a great view of what he picked up, one can only assume that it was valuable.
The message of war and money works on two levels in this one scene. Is our country paying tons of money and piling up huge debts to, uh, let a couple of soldiers play with guns in a foreign house? We can argue all day about why we went to war, whether it is necessary and whatnot, but the message Mr. Jones seems to be conveying is that our money can be put to better use.
Just to be clear, this wasn’t a documentary. It was a long music video, with occasional audio clips from unbiased political commentators. It wasn’t flawless, either. There were four or five scenes that simply showed a colorful skeleton dancing to the soundtrack, which seemed unnecessary. There were four different skeletons, and each one had a characteristic that distinguished them. The orange one donned a cowboy hat; the white one carried an automatic weapon; the green skeleton was clearly the best dancer; and the other one—well, forgive me for forgetting the color as it was quite… er… well-endowed. If that makes any kind of sense to anyone, please get back to me.
Art Jones has been experimenting with audio/visual media for a long time. His last trip to Buffalo was in 1992, which could help to explain the low turnout. He is from the Bronx, and performs frequently in and between New York and Chicago, which is where his biggest fan base is located. I met with him after the show, shook his hand, complimented his work, and he thanked me for coming. Regrettably, I didn’t thank him for coming. It takes a lot of balls to come to a city you are thirteen years removed from and put on a great video collage in a small, low-key venue, which despite the heat in the beginning turned out to be a perfect place to screen a video collage like this. It’s a shame nobody was there to watch.
