Vinyl II

Vinyl II is a 2000 short film by Stephen Prina.

Background

Prina's Vinyl II is a 21-minute, 16-mm film shot in the Getty galleries. Featuring an original score and a performance by the artist, 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).

^[2]

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. Prina’s film, however, revolves around two Baroque paintings [...] 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.

Christ Crowned with Thorns by Gerrit van Honthorst, 1620
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?

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^[4]	Los Angeles	J. Paul Getty Museum
2001^[5]^[6]^[7]	Santa Fe	Site Santa Fe
2001	Basel	Kunsthalle Basel
May 27, 2001^[8]	Prague	Galerie Jiri Svestka
2001	Los Angeles	University of Southern California
November 24, 2001^[9]	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^[10]	London	Cubitt
December 10, 2004^[11]^[12]^[13]	Cambridge	Carpenter Center
2006	New York	Whitney Museum of American Art
2008	Berlin	Kino Arsenal
May 3, 2009^[14]^[15]	Cambridge	Harvard Film Archive
June 21, 2008^[16]	London	Tate Modern
2011	Vienna	Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wein
May 30, 2011^[17]	Cologne	University of Music and Dance Cologne
March 21, 2014^[18]	Los Angeles	Hammer Museum
November 16, 2016^[19]	Vienna	Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wein
July 9, 2020^[20]	Mexico City	Museo Tamayo	digital screening
September 17, 2022^[21]	Berlin	Fahrbereitschaft

Retrospectives

Stephen Prina, April 2000^[22] (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. [...]

Reviews

Departures: 11 Artists at the Getty

2000^[23]

pg.44
pg.45

Artforum International

May 2000^[24]^[25]

Tom Holert

Harvard Crimson

December 17, 2004^[26]

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^[27]

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^[28]

Laura Fried

Museo Tamayo

July 9, 2020^[29]

References

[1] ttps://www.tfaoi.org/aa/1aa/1aa429.htm

[2] ttps://www.cubittartists.org.uk/stephen-prina-vinyl-ii

[3] ttps://spruethmagers.com/artists/stephen-prina/

[4] ttps://www.tfaoi.org/aa/1aa/1aa429.htm

[5] ttps://sitesantafe.org/microsites/beaumonde/latimes2.html

[6] ttps://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/200108/beau-monde-toward-a-redeemed-cosmopolitanism-1692

[7] ttp://www.artnet.com/magazine/features/drohojowska-philp/drohojowska-philp7-16-01.asp

[8] ttps://english.radio.cz/pragues-jiri-svestka-gallery-presents-american-conceptual-film-8045176

[9] ttps://www.pkmgallery.com/exhibitions/stephen-prina/press-release

[10] ttps://www.cubittartists.org.uk/stephen-prina-vinyl-ii

[11] ttps://archive.org/details/sim_boston-phoenix_december-10-16-2004_33_50/page/n47/mode/1up?q=%22vinyl+ii%22

[12] ttps://archive.org/details/sim_boston-phoenix_december-3-9-2004_33_49/page/n66/mode/1up?q=%22vinyl+ii%22

[13] ttps://archive.org/details/improperbostonia2004unse/page/n2633/mode/1up?q=%22vinyl+ii%22

[14] ttps://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/two-films-by-stephen-prina

[15] ttps://www.krakowwitkingallery.com/exhibitions/stephen-prina-the-way-he-always-wanted-it/

[16] ttps://fadmagazine.com/2008/06/17/stephen-prina-on-bruce-goff/

[17] ttps://koelnischerkunstverein.de/en/archiviert/carte-blanche-fur-stephen-prina/

[18] ttps://hammer.ucla.edu/programs-events/2014/03/stephen-prina

[19] ttps://www.mumok.at/en/events/stranded-schwimmen-zwei-vogel-2

[20] ttps://www.museotamayo.org/conoce/vinyl-ii-de-stephen-prina

[21] ttps://deeds.news/2022/08/fahrbereitschaft-zeigt-something-in-the-air-mit-rodney-graham-pierre-huyghe-and-anri-sala-02-09-29-10-2022/?lang=en

[22] ttps://nicolasexertier.blogspot.com/2014/05/stephen-prina-monochrome-painting.html

[23] ttps://archive.org/details/departures11arti0000lyon/page/44/mode/2up

[24] ttps://www.artforum.com/print/200005/stephen-prina-flaming-feature-453

[25] ttps://www.thefreelibrary.com/FLAMING+FEATURE-a065649370

[26] ttps://www.thecrimson.com/article/2004/12/17/a-night-and-a-day-with/

[27] ttps://www.artforum.com/diary/larissa-harris-on-stephen-prina-s-retrospection-under-duress-reprise-8066

[28] ttps://lareviewofbooks.org/article/expanding-criticality/

[29] ttps://www.museotamayo.org/conoce/vinyl-ii-de-stephen-prina

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