Vinyl II

End credits title

Still

Vinyl II is a 2000 short film by artist and musician Stephen Prina.

Watch on Vimeo (21:04)

Watch on UbuWeb (21:11)

Background

"Prina's Vinyl II is a 21-minute, 16-mm film shot in the Getty galleries. [...] the film focuses on the relationship between works in the Getty collection by two artists known for dramatically illuminated night scenes: Georges de La Tour (The Musicians' Brawl, 1625-30) and Gerrit van Honthorst (Christ Crowned with Thorns, circa 1620)."

"The work’s title is a reference to Andy Warhol’s film Vinyl (1965), itself loosely based upon Anthony Burgess’s book A Clockwork Orange. [...] The film features both a vocal performance and score by the artist, accompanied by a group of musicians and shot in the galleries of the J. Paul Getty Center in Los Angeles, where it was originally commissioned as part of the ‘Departures’ show in 2000."

The performance was filmed October 4, 1999.

Paintings

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  Christ Crowned with Thorns by Gerrit van Honthorst, 1620
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  The Musicians' Brawl by Georges de La Tour, 1625

Production stills

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Soundtrack

The soundtrack features three takes. The third take appears in the film.

Vinyl II
Soundtrack album by Stephen Prina
Released	2000
Recorded	October 4, 1999
Studio
Label	Cortical Foundation
/

Lyrics

A musette, fiddle, and a flute A hurdy-gurdy player who seems blinded A fine bunch, yes, I love them all Yet there's a reminder of what is missing A candle flame, a twist of smoke A hand illuminated from behind So that it glows within ?

What's wrong, Georges? It's impossible Without translucent page and opacity To shield a lantern's fire complete And drive it deep into tenebrosity The night, the night, where is the night? The long dark night of neglect The hidden and the manifest light

I'm out of my head! Where is the hand? When is the mind body and flame?

Other recordings

A condensed version of the piece appears on Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice (2011).

Credits

• Script, Score and Direction: Stephen Prina
• Producers: David Hollander and Jennifer Lane

Performers

• Security officer: Ken Bagley
• French horn: Kirsten Barrow
• Violin II: Daphne Chen
• Violoncello: Guenevere Measham
• Voice: Stephen Prina
• Viola: Kate Reddish
• Violin I: Melissa Reiner
• Security supervisor: Joseph Younan

Technical

• Director of photography: David Hollander
• Camera operator: Van Carlson
• Camera assistant: Darren Rydstrom
• Dolly grip: Michael Hall
• Sound recordist: Gary Todd
• Still photographer: Jennifer Lane
• Re-recording mixer: Mark Fishman
• Negative cutter: Angela Chou
• Titles: Pacific Title/Mirage
• Production assistant: Zachary Sniderman

Exhibitions/screenings

	Date	City	Venue	Notes
	February 29 - May 7, 2000	Los Angeles	J. Paul Getty Museum
	2001	Santa Fe	Site Santa Fe
	2001	Basel	Kunsthalle Basel
	May 27, 2001	Prague	Galerie Jiri Svestka
	2001	Los Angeles	University of Southern California
	November 24, 2001	Seoul	PMK Gallery
	2002	Cologne	Theater der Welt
	2002	Berlin	Die Kraft der Negation
	Fall 2002	Las Vegas	University of Nevada, Las Vegas
	2004	London	The Screen on the Green
	September 29 - October 31, 2004	London	Cubitt
	December 10, 2004	Cambridge	Carpenter Center
	2006	New York	Whitney Museum of American Art
	2008	Berlin	Kino Arsenal
	May 3, 2009	Cambridge	Harvard Film Archive
	June 21, 2008	London	Tate Modern
	2011	Vienna	Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wein
	May 30, 2011	Cologne	University of Music and Dance Cologne
	March 21, 2014	Los Angeles	Hammer Museum
	November 16, 2016	Vienna	Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wein
	July 9, 2020	Mexico City	Museo Tamayo	digital screening
	September 17, 2022	Berlin	Fahrbereitschaft

Retrospectives

Stephen Prina, 2000 (translated)

I think all art is didactic. [...] From a work of art emanates an attitude towards certain kinds of subjects, towards a formal arrangement that is to some extent parallel to the organizations we find in the social sphere. It seems to me that art always works that way. It formulates more or less explicitly proposals on how social orders might be reorganized. Such is the didactic function of art, I think. In my movie (Vinyl II), for example, I'm not trying to make people learn things about Georges de La Tour. I use it more as a detour to get something else. I don't think this film is about Georges de La Tour or Honthorst or even about the painting itself or the museum itself. Rather, it has to do with the policy of our movement as spectators through the museum. This is why I tried to produce such a strict and formalizing movement of the camera through the museum. It is a movement parallel to that which we carry out when we walk in a museum. We see some things while others escape us. We either have an attraction for something or we don't. This is at the heart of all inclusion or exclusion procedures. [...]

Stephen Prina, 2016

For a long time, I kept the works quite separate. Even within my visual art practice I thought that I wanted to dig my heels in and establish the parameters of what, for example, a photo project could be, or what a drawing or painting project could be. I wanted to keep these things quite separate. I didn’t want to make hybrids per se. It was the same with the music. Then I came in contact with the book In Search of Wagner by Theodor Adorno, and that very clearly articulates the tendency towards the Gesamtkunstwerk – the total artwork. Adorno very well articulated my inchoate thoughts. That was something that I followed in my practice for some time. It wasn’t until 2000 when I was commissioned to make an artwork for the Getty Museum, I told them I would like to make a music film, and that was the first project where there was this full integration of the visual and the musical.

Reviews

Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty

2000

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  pg.44
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  pg.45

Artforum International

May 2000

Tom Holert

Harvard Crimson

December 17, 2004

Julian M. Rose

[...] The first part of the event was a screening of one of Prina’s short films, Vinyl II in the Carpenter Center auditorium. Filmed at the Getty museum in Los Angeles (it was originally commissioned by the museum), Vinyl II could almost be described as a kind of extremely slow-paced music video. The bulk of the film depicts a group of musicians playing a score written by Prina himself while sitting in two of the Getty’s galleries, punctuated with shots of the baroque paintings hanging on the gallery walls. Most of the students I talked to afterward found the film’s lack of recognizable narrative or meaning to be thoroughly confusing. [...]

Artforum

December 17, 2004

Larissa Harris

[...] As the crowd filed into the Harvard Film Archive screening room, talk ran from art-worldly banter about the recent Miami Beach fair (“I told myself to enjoy it and I did!”) to topical chat regarding Art History Department star Yve-Alain Bois’s imminent departure for one of those plum posts at the Institute for Advanced Study—the Princeton-affiliated ne plus ultra of American academe where Kirk Varnedoe held a professorship after leaving MoMA. Spectacle trumped speculation at 11:10, when Vinyl II, 2000, Prina’s marvelous 18-minute 35-mm Russian Ark-at-the-Getty, began to unspool onscreen. The film is an extended, real-time “reveal” in which the camera pans out from a Baroque painting to a quartet of lady musicians playing a bland Prina chamber tune, then cruises through a wall to the next gallery, where the artist himself (in a neat red short-sleeve garbage-man suit) accompanies the same quartet, innocent as a choirboy, his honeyed voice out of synch and sometimes barely audible—hilariously rousing entertainment. [...]

Los Angeles Review of Books

May 16, 2014

Laura Fried

Museo Tamayo

July 9, 2020