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"... teases out the often arbitrary, yet sensationally omnipresent relationship between sound and image that defines popular cultural landscapes."Sean Lowry, Broadsheet Vol.36 No.1, Adelaide, 2007
"Brophy's pop star is riotously rough, favouring pancake makeup over airbrushing and swagger over choreography."
Russell Storer, 2006 Singapore Biennale catalogue
"... takes genre-hopping to a new and bizarre level (...) trashes accepted notions of cultural and sexual identity."
Mark Chipperfieeld , Sydney Morning Herald, October 11th 2006
"The overall effect is of loud, vulgar, theatrical fun, and many viewers burst into spontaneous laughter at the sight of Brophy’s gyrating, larger than life form."
Daniel Edwards, Realtime No. 60, Sydney, 2004
Link to complete online PDF review
Sean Lowry, Broadsheet Vol.36 No.1, Adelaide, 2007"Philip Brophy's Fluorescent is a music video, starring the artist himself as the embodiment of a Glam Rock hero: that sexually slippery icon who turned macho hard rock on its head in the early 1970s and never looked back. For Glam was about the future: a glittering, tin-foil future of space travel and fluid identity, where anyone could fly to the moon or be a star, as long as you had the right outfits. Glam's celebration of surface image formed the precursor to the explosion of music video in the early 1980s, a form that experienced a brief flowering of intense, raw-edged creativity before sinking into a generic soup of expensive effects and glossy marketing campaigns. In the spirit of this early moment, Brophy's pop star is riotously rough, favouring pancake makeup over airbrushing and swagger over choreography. Driven by throbbing surround sound and split across three screens, Fluorescent plays with the crucial yet awkward relationship between music and image. Featuring both the full mix and remixed versions of the song, the work severs this connection at several points when the sound drops out as the video performance continues, throwing a focus onto the elaborate artificiality of Brophy's act and the constructedness of our aural and visual perceptions. A widely published writer and theorist on sound and cinema as well as a filmmaker and sound artist, Brophy encourages one to 'think with one's ears' when watching a film to appreciate the sensory and psychological properties of sound, which transcends its generally conceived supporting role to the image. Fluorescent also derives from Brophy's long-held fascination with genre-busting cultural forms - Japanese Manga, horror films, Glam Rock, pornography - as well as their insidious influence, seeping into and transfiguring so-called 'high art' and popular culture alike. Each form stretches or dissolves the body in one way or another, reducing it to an amorphous, polysexual entity that defies easy categorisation and forces a reconsideration of our own drives and mortality. From his early short films such as Salt Saliva Sperm and Sweat (1987) to his horror feature Body Melt (1993) to his ongoing series of pop video 'interventions' in Evaporated Music (2000- ) - in which the music track is replaced with a series of sound effects, leaving the singer to flail unsupported within the video narrative - Brophy has pulled the body apart to reveal its bare, brutal essence, removed from comfort and civility. He shows us the body as an abject, desiring machine, yet with its own horrific beauty. "
Russell Storer, 2006 Singapore Biennale catalogue
"No one could accuse the (Singapore) biennale curators of playing it safe. At Tanglin Camp, on the city's outskirts, the Melbourne artist Philip Brophy takes genre-hopping to a new and bizarre level in his hilarious music video Fluorescent. The artist camps it up as a "polysexual" glam rocker who trashes accepted notions of cultural and sexual identity - and demands justice, tongue firmly in cheek, for the convicted pedophile Gary Glitter.
Mark Chipperfieeld , Sydney Morning Herald, October 11th 2006
"An eternal present, an absence of memory and a dissociation of words, symbols and images from meaning: these are the symptoms of the ‘schizophrenic’ social condition diagnosed by Frederic Jameson in his 1983 essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (Hal Foster ed, The Anti-Aesthetic, Bay Press, Seattle, 1983). Twenty years on Jameson’s diagnosis has even more credence, so it is no surprise to find (a) recent installation (...) at the Art Gallery of New South Wales responding to this aspect of contemporary experience (...). Sound artist, filmmaker and writer Philip Brophy pays homage to the androgynous theatricality of early 70s glam rock with Fluorescent, comprising a circle of 5 speakers in front of 3 simultaneous video projections. Ever-changing lines of colour play across the screens, bringing to mind the video clip for Plastic Bertrand’s 1978 pop classic Ca plane pour moi. Brophy periodically appears out of this swirling matrix sporting spiked hair, thigh-high shiny vinyl boots and a ball-hugging leotard. He mouths a few risque lines before disappearing, until the backing band kicks in on his fourth appearance and he performs a specially-penned glam rock anthem. The various tracks that comprise the song are separated across the ring of 5 highly directional speakers, which means the song sounds quite different depending on where you stand in the circle. The extreme separation between the sonic components of the soundtrack highlights the self-consciously manufactured nature of Brophy’s “Fluorescent” persona. The overall effect is of loud, vulgar, theatrical fun, and many viewers burst into spontaneous laughter at the sight of Brophy’s gyrating, larger than life form. Glam was always about celebrating the brash disposability of pop culture and the performative aspects of identity. In this sense, Brophy’s work doesn’t do anything that glam itself didn’t do in the early 70s. But he takes familiar iconography and places it in a gallery setting, creating resonances beyond the world of popular music. Glam here is no longer a knowing reconfiguration of existing images from the realm of popular culture, but rather a trope unto itself that has entered the infinite matrix of images comprising contemporary experience. Brophy’s joyful performance celebrates the arbitrary recycling of the past and the freedom of employing symbols and icons divorced from their original context and meaning. Fluorescent (... is one side ...) of the postmodern coin. Brophy’s work celebrates the notion of self as nothing but the endless recycling of symbols and styles already in circulation. (...) .
Daniel Edwards, Realtime No. 60, Sydney, 2004
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