Montreal gallery offers the art of music video

Music videos may have been born as a way to promote a singer or band's newest single, but a Montreal gallery is looking at the medium as a form of video art.

TheMuse d'art contemporain has opened an art exhibition entitled Music Video, as part of its Projections series.

The exhibit features 26 video clips by the likes of Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry andZbigniew Rybczynski, curated into a 90-minute program by Louise Ismert, the museum's multimedia events co-ordinator.

"The music video directors have expanded the field of visual arts," Ismert told CBC News.

"Working between music and film, between television and advertising, they have come [up] with new ways of doing things, new ways of doing film, and new images fantastic images and that's why it's so interesting to have a closer look."

Though the exhibit's main focus is the evolution of music videos during the past 20 years, the earliest selection being shown comes from 1975: Queen's iconic video for Bohemian Rhapsody, directed by Bruce Gowers.

The video for the rock anthem was shot in about four hours with a budget of less than $10,000. Some consider the Bohemian Rhapsody video which features special effects and was created to promote the single the very first music video clip.

As the music video genre evolved, however, they become increasingly sophisticated and expensive, with some requiring guest stars, massive crews and costing in the millions to produce.

Some have moved to feature films

Also, a measure of the genre's success can be seen in the fact that several of the most well-known and acclaimed music video directors have crossed over into making feature films, including SpikeJonze and Michel Gondry two directors featured in the Montreal exhibit (Jonze for the Fatboy Slim video for Weapon of Choice, Gondry for Fell in Love with a Girl by the White Stripes and Kylie Minogue's Come Into My World).

"When you take the music video out of its context of a music station like MuchMusic and apply it to a fine arts context like a museum in Montreal you realize that these are greats works of art," said former MuchMusic VJ Kim Clarke Champniss.

"The directors have a wonderful vision going on and they do stand alone as individual pieces of art."

In addition to works by Jonathan Glazer (1996 Radiohead video for Street Spirit), Steve Barron (1985 a-ha video for Take on Me) and Zbigniew Rybczynski (1986 video for John Lennon's Imagine), the exhibit includes Malajube's video for Montreal -40 C, directed by Montrealer Louis-Philippe Eno.

"I didn't think it would ever happen to be in a museum at first, andthe Muse d'art contemporain [at that]," said Eno, who added that he is honoured to be included among the other acclaimed directors.

"It makes you see that you're not just doing something that is going to be on air for [just] two or three months."

The Music Video exhibit continues at Montreal's Muse d'art contemporain until Oct. 11.