![]() ![]() Here’s hoping Bell-Smith will make a sequel with the other 10 chapters. The idea and execution are so simple and brilliant as to come off as almost self-evident (alternately, I wonder if Kelly just didn’t plan it that way). As the visual field moves from palimpsest to whiteout, so too does the audiotrack transform, kecak-like, from discernable speech into a buzzing monsoon of indecipherable chatter, melisma runs, and huge swells of nonverbal emotionality. Bell-Smith’s condensation of Kelly’s soap opera reduces the series’ increasingly labyrinthine narrative to pure affect, in a sense exposing R&B’s McLuhanian truth that the medium is the message. As explained by its title, the piece exploits the identical backing track used throughout Kelly’s magnum opus, introducing a new audio and video layer with each successive repeat of the bass hook until all 12 chapters are going at once. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet Synced and Played Simultaneously. The chart-topper, however, is undoubtedly Michael Bell-Smith’s dizzying 2005 piece, Chapters 1-12 of R. Media arts curator Rudolf Frieling has played DJ with the archive, going from Steina’s 1970-78 violin-powered video-drone to Cory Arcangel’s hilarious crotch-centric re-edit of footage of Simon and Garfunkel’s 1984 Central Park reunion concert. Next to Bruce Conner’s Ray Charles-and-found-footage shotgun wedding Three Screen Ray (2006), in the other media gallery, you’ll see a series of music-related or somehow “musical” single channel video works (cannily titled “The Singles Collection”). ![]() ![]() While everything is certainly worth a gander, below are some pieces worth more than your while. There is a lot to take in across the museum’s related exhibits, from the “Anniversary Show” centerpiece to the small retrospectives devoted to specific artists that SFMOMA has fostered relationships with over the years. VISUAL ART Have you heard? SFMOMA turned 75. ![]()
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