Fluorescent
was initally developed as a suite of 'post-glam' music tracks. There
was no clear purpose for the project until the invitation to submit
for the Contemporary Art Projects space at the Art Gallery of New South
Wales. The idea then expanded into a 'video-clip' project - but one
specificially in opposition to the commonplace notion that 'video clips
are art'.
Fluorescent's image veneer comes from the first 'neo-image'
phase of rock music - Glam. Glam rock - as ocularly debauched and texturally
grotesque as it was - was a pre-punk statement of the perverse primacy
of image in music. Its most fascinating aspect is how roughly hewn and
motley its visual surface was: the make-up was always dotted with sweat;
hair was never perfect; and bodies were far from the poMo-classical
form they became in late 90s video iconography.
Fluorescent's video production was thus inspired by
UK-TV's "Top of the Pops" shows where performers were alienated
within the mouldy yet garishly lit environs of British TV studios and
their already-antiquated effects machinery. It is from
these tacky yet delirious commitments to 'son-image' in the 70s that
the MTV-effect of first wave music videos are birthed. The Fluorescent
project is an excavation of these origins of pop audiovisuality, from
which a deconstructed staging is rigged and upon which a thoroughly
'plastique' personna is paraded.
Tracing Glam's incendiary arc, the vulgar collapse of gender and identity
form another major aspect of Fluorescent. In keeping
with Philip Brophy's ongoing dissolution of anything to do with bodily
constructs and forms, Fluorescent presents him as
a pancaked amobea of polysexualilty: somewhere between a Takarazuka
rock god (as only the infamous Japanese all-women theatre troupe
can do) and and an inverted drag-aroke of Plastic Bertrand (the
bizarre ground zero nexus of Punk, Glam and Synth Pop).
