English
Chris Cunningham is nowadays one of the most acclaimed young visual artists in the world due to the terrifying aesthetics of his videos like “All is full of love” done for the Icelandic singer Bjork, in this video two robot-girls fall in love with each other and try to have sex, and “Frozen”, in which he turned Madonna into a flock of crows and shadows.
He was born in 1970 in Reading, England. From a very young age, he fell in love with arts; first he started drawing, then doing sculptures and later photographing. He started his artistic career in the comic magazine “2000AD”, publishing works under the pseudonym of Chris Halls. Then, he participated in the creation of the special effects of “Alien 3”, “Alien: Resurrection” and “Judge Dredd”.
But the project that gave him world fame was the video clip of the song “Come to Daddy” by Aphex Twin, an acclaimed composer of electronic music. In this video Cunningham challenges the imagination of the spectators while building his aesthetics in the creation of videos with endless series of monstrous and misshapen figures, where horror and terror are very close to us, they are actually totally immersed in the reality we know. As it might be easy to suppose, at the beginning he provoked a scandal in the commercial video world and especially in MTV, where there was an esthetic uniformity that was ignored by Cunningham in a very clever way. The video shows six-year-old children with adult faces running in a psychedelic city and as they hit fences with metal bars, he synchronizes the blows with the music. In his videos recurrent images and effects can be found, like the extreme synchrony between sounds and images and the deformity of the bodies, which represents the horror that is always present, although we do not see it.
“Many people think my works are terrifying. Personally, I find them hilarious. Terrifying for me are, for example, the Spice Girls’ music videos.” Just like that, Cunningham defended his vision. It is very common to find in his videos a kind of monstrous parody of pop videos and their codes. For instance, in “Windowlicker” there is a group of super sexy girls with the Aphex Twin’s disturbing face, who is the author of this song. Cunningham is known by its hypochondria, which partly explains his interest in the weakness of the human body and its monstrousness. On the contrary, he cannot stand to see either a needle or a blood drop.
From the beginning his artistic production was linked to drugs. Especially between 1993 and 1994, Cunningham started taking acid and as a consequence he affirmed, “drugs can make your imagination fly, but they can also make you very paranoid”. A perfect example that illustrates this side effect is the video “Rubber Johnny” by Aphex Twin, which is the story of a boy who suffers from Hydrocephalus, whose pain is relieved only by drugs.
menschauser
On the 18th of June, Cunningham will perform in the Electronic Music Festival Sonar 2011. We recommend you to book your Barcelona accommodation so that you can attend this important event.
Translated by: Hans
