Sound And Vision: John McNaughton
In the article series Sound and Vision we take a look at music videos from notable directors. This week: The Resident's Floyd, directed by John McNaughton.
John McNaughton has been working on the periphery of the mainstream with films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, Wild Things and Mad Dog and Glory, but I have the impression he rather would fly somewhat under the radar and be part of the counterculture. This impression harkens back partly to passion projects like the Rebel Highway-episode Girls in Prison, a deliciously raunchy romp in the exploitation-genre, like Wild Things is too. But it also is because of his film Condo Painting, a documentary about George Condo, the counterculture painter and artists whose style is immediately recognizable.
Condo Painting is very much a plea for letting your freak flag fly, and a who's who of American counterculture. Jack Kerouac's poems feature heavily, and William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg even show up in extended scenes of them engaging in conversations with George Condo or helping him paint. The soundtrack is filled with interesting figures from outside of the mainstream, or just on the periphery of it, like Tom Waits, Dj Spooky and especially The Residents.
The Residents are an outfit known for their secrecy: there have never been clear confirmations about the identity of the band members, they perform in masks (most notably giant eyeball-masks), and they have a wild and diverse discography. Around the same time they made Condo Painting they re-released their 1980's fan favorite Commercial Album. The Commercial Album consisted of exactly 40 1-minute songs inspired by pop music. They even featured as adverts, because as a release-strategy/ art-project The Residents released the songs by buying up radio advertisement space and letting the whole album play out in commercials over the course of three days. Some of the music does sound like jingles or advertisements, deliberately insipid while other songs are more eerie.
While re-releasing the Commercial Album, they also asked a group of friendly artists to make a short promo with each song. One of the artists was Dutch artist Rosto A.D, who would later work with The Residents and the aforementioned Tom Waits on the children's film The Monster of Nix. The biggest name on the Commercial DVD was by far John McNaughton though.
The music video for Floyd is quite eerie. Floyd had been featured in a video before, directed by Jeff Economy, of which I can't find a confirmed version online. The one John McNaughton directed is readily available, though. It is an unnerving video, where a selection of trinkets (a devil, a pin-up-girl, a skeleton) are juxtaposed with photography and paintings, including ones by George Condo. The imagery is heavily religious, deliberately kitsch, and has a dark undercurrent. Given that there is barely any information online about the meaning of the piece, or the origin of the trinkets and photographs, for me it is hard to confirm what it is trying to convey.
The Residents are interesting that way: there is a lot of lore and background information out there (including a lot of cheeky deliberate misinformation), yet for some of their projects not a lot of context can be found. Their art is enigmatic, leaving something like Floyd to mostly stand on its own, which makes it even more head scratch-inducing. The relationship between John McNaughton and The Residents probably started out with Condo Painting, but I can't say for sure, because of the scant nature of the information that is online. It was up to me to connect the dots between Condo Painting and Floyd, which is all you need to know to grasp the obscurity of both pieces. I think both John McNaughton and The Residents would prefer it that way, though. Both in their own way straddling the line between mainstream- and counterculture, making works that are deliberately obfuscating or obscure. Commercial it ain't.
