![]() Music videos are open forms, and as each analyst charts his or her path through the video, we can get a sense of a personal perspective (and readers can then more carefully track their own trajectories as well). (This might include looking at a dance gesture against a harmonic shift and an edit, and asking how these might relate to one another.) A collective approach is probably the best way to understand a clip and the genre, and also adds some benefits. It’s not only due to, as Ann Kaplan has observed, that music videos straddle a border between advertising and art, but that the analyst must also feel comfortable with addressing the music, the image (including the moving bodies, cinematography and editing), the lyrics, and the relation among them. We can imagine why there’s been such a paucity of music-video scholarship. This colloquy may be the first multi-perspective, in-depth look at a music video. Our argument is threefold: (1) the aesthetics of the APESHIT music video builds on and contributes to the Afrosurrealist artistic tradition, engaging with contemporary Blackness via the strange and absurd (2) the music video itself creates performance art that intervenes in and extends beyond the Louvre and audiovisually re-curates its exhibitions (3) The Carters can be seen as celebrity ‘critical organic catalysts’ whose Afrosurrealist intervention targeted at the colonial legacies of museums activates a critical relationship with these museal spaces traditionally constructed as White spaces. We argue that The Carters embrace the role of the public intellectual-activist - assumed to be within the remit of the Western, White, liberal intellectual for centuries. Against the backdrop of calls for decolonizing archives and public institutions such as the university and the museum, and arguing for the political potential of APESHIT, this article makes a case for the music video as an act of resistance against the enduring ‘coloniality of power' in the European museum and elsewhere in the public sphere. (A red sash tied around a white swatch of fabric that covers the lower part of her body has also been cut.) The unknown sitter stares out in the video, taking up the full screen, her hair wrapped in a turban, her eyes angled slightly to her right as she shows one golden hoop earring (a pose that brings to mind Kerry James Marshall’s Untitled (Painter), 2009).This article offers a reading of the APESHIT music video by the duo The Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) as an Afrosurrealist intervention in the White space of the Louvre. ![]() The video crops Benoist’s portrait so that the servant’s exposed breast is no longer visible. ![]() Kadish, a scholar on French slavery, has written that, while some have read the woman in Benoist’s painting as an allegory for the republic (she is surrounded by the tricolor) or noted her resolute gaze, the art historian Griselda Pollock has compared the image to that of a scene in a slave auction, and the art historian Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby has written that its offensive title, which dehumanizes the sitter, “exercises a form of mastery or subordination: the sitter is robbed, like a slave, of her person’s property.” Possibly showing a servant brought to France from the Antilles by Benoist’s brother-in-law, it was painted in 1800, after the abolition of slavery by France but just as Napoleon was working to reinstate it in the nation’s colonies.ĭoris Y. Perhaps the most intriguing inclusion is a close-up shot of Marie-Guillemine Benoist’s Portrait of a Negress (1800) near the end of the video. Occasionally the lyrics and paintings cleverly sync up, too, as when Beyoncé sings, “Sippin’ my favorite alcohol/Got me so lit I need Tylenol” while details of wine being generously poured in Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana (1563) flash on screen. 2600 B.C.), the Venus de Milo (101 B.C.), The Winged Victory of Samothrace (190 B.C.), and David’s Coronation of Napoleon (1805–07), their movements and poses sometimes loosely mirroring those of figures in the artworks. ![]() The leading couple and their accompanying dancers also spend time with iconic works like the Great Sphinx of Tanis (ca. Jacques-Louis David’s Coronation of Napoleon (1805–07).
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