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março 22, 2005
Aguarelas a serem preparadas
A artista irlandesa Deirdre Mulrooney encontra-se a desenhar as aguarelas para os fundos do palco da Vertigo Tour//2005, segundo anunciou o Irish Times:
«[...] She is here painting abstract watercolours for U2's Vertigo tour, which begins in San Diego on Easter Monday. Outside the south-facing windows of the light, airy room, a bevy of whooper swans is taking flight from a boggy field.
Next week she will be in her other home, dwarfed by the skyscrapers of New York, working out dissolves for the paintings -- "coming off a Rothko vibe" -- as they are animated into a video to accompany U2's performance of "Yahweh," a song from their latest album.
The A4 watercolours spread out on her table will dwarf U2 when they end up on the huge screens the band uses.
This is Owens's fourth U2 collaboration -- she has been curating the screens since the visual assault of the Zoo TV tour, in 1992 -- and she is acutely aware of what is required to keep the audience focused. "The attention span is about a minute if the band is not on stage," she says. "You've got to be conscious that you're in a room with 30,000 people."
Having listened to "Yahweh" quite a few times -- "not to interpret it but to pick up on the emotional high and low of the journey of the song" -- today Owens is looking through books, making sketches and doing the paintings for the animated segments, "which will be on a loop, like a series of paragraphs." She makes three or four versions, she says: "a full piece, an abstract version and a shorter version."
Owens's relationship with U2 goes back almost 30 years, since her brief stint playing bass in the Boy Scoutz, a punk band managed by Steve Averill, who went on to design U2's album covers. "Let's not go there!" she cringes, burying her face in her hands.
[...]
Owens was with the band in France last summer, evolving ideas for the limited-edition Vertigo CD book while they were in their final two weeks of recording.
"We talked about making those pages very personal and having the band create the artwork themselves. I extracted the essences and got the concept, about the journey from fear to faith. I do the same for the tour: extract some essence of everybody's thoughts, take it to another level and give it a U2 feel."
As well as curating the screen imagery for the PopMart and Elevation tours, and collaborating on Zoo TV (it was Owens who customised those eccentric Trabants), her signature contribution has been political video content.
"The band and I share a subversive tendency towards political truth," she says. "It came out in a meeting that we all believe the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is one of the most important pieces of literature in the world. It's a text that has to be reignited in the minds of who and where we are right now, because we are paying such little regard to the concept."
So the full text went into the Vertigo book. Inspired by Tony Oursler's video-art piece The Influence Machine, which Owens saw in London in 2000, she is making the human-rights declaration a "three-dimensional image projected onto fog."
For Elevation, Owens created a scroll of names of people who died in the U.S. on September 11th, 2001. It was played at the Super Bowl, as were video segments about Charlton Heston's gun philosophy.
For Zoo TV she had an animated George Bush Sr. singing along to Queen's "We Will Rock You." For the Vertigo tour, her nine-and-a-half minute video inspired by the 1948 declaration, is scheduled for the encore break. Last week she put the finishing touches to its audio.[...]»
Publicado por U2Only às março 22, 2005 02:38 PM