chris cunningham - all is full of love
All Is Full of Love, 1999
35mm displayed as single-channel DVD projection; stereo audio
4 mins; colour
Collection: Anthony D'Offay Gallery
Courtesy: Anthony D'Offay Gallery and the artist
contents: essay | artist's bio | artist's statement
Through a body of work that presents cinematic visions as grotesque as they are beautiful, prodigious English artist Chris Cunningham has created a unique reputation in contemporary moving image art. He began his creative career as a teenage special effects artist for films such as Aliens 3 and Hardware, but it his series of extraordinary music videos for artists such as Richard D James (Aphex Twin) and Björk that have garnered him worldwide acclaim. In his music clips and recent video installations, shape-shifting forms inhabit distorted, nightmarish landscapes that exist at the meeting point between the realms of the organic and the technological. In works such as Come to Daddy and Windowlicker for Aphex Twin, and Come on My Selector for Squarepusher, Cunningham creates haunting and hallucinatory narratives, while the elusive dreamscapes of Drowned for Madonna and All is Full of Love are the fantasies of an artist as intrigued with human sensuality as he is with technology. Cunningham possesses a distinctive ability to simultaneously seduce and repel viewers through his dark, monstrous digital worlds and, although he has worked with uniquely identifiable artists like Björk and Madonna, his visual and creative innovation has come to transcend the products and people that his work promotes.
Described by Cunningham as the 'kama sutra meets industrial robotics', All is Full of Love, his music video for Icelandic singer Björk, reveals a landscape in which the cold beauty of technology melds sexually and sensuously with the organic world. In a stark minimal space, two large industrial-looking robots slowly piece together porcelain-like white steel into an elegant female form. This constructed artificial intelligence, which bears the elven face of Björk, begins to sing of an all-encompassing love, as a second identical robot is revealed. Though incomplete, these robotic forms begin exploring their human anatomy through touches and caresses, and they slowly intertwine into the single abstract form of an erotic and loving embrace. Integrating digital compositing and elaborate model-making, this subtle and beautiful work was Cunningham's last before withdrawing from the commercial world. It is, in the context of the Transfigure exhibition, a striking vision of technological transcendence made possible through the energy of sexuality and emotion. The presence of love, in this cold world, allows a spark of warmth to flow between these icy, beautiful, robotic forms.
1970 - Born, lives and works in England
Born in 1970, prodigious English artist Chris Cunningham first worked as a teenage special effects designer for filmmakers such as David Fincher and Stanley Kubrick. He began attracting international attention with a series of music videos made in the late 90s for artists including Madonna, Squarepusher and Portishead. His ongoing collaborations with Aphex Twin and Björk have resulted in music clips and short films that have attracted awards and been exhibited in museums and film festivals worldwide.
His first video installation work, Flex, was shown as part of Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art at the Royal Academy of Art in 2000, and went on to feature at the 2001 Biennale de Venezia. His film and video work has been the subject of major retrospectives at the ICA, London, and as part of Resfest 2002. Recently, Palm Pictures released a DVD collection of selected film and video works by Cunningham.
He has just completed two new video works, Monkey Drummer and Drukqs, while currently developing two feature film projects, including an adaptation of William Gibson's Neuromancer.
Website link
http://www.director-file.com/cunningham
As a teenager I had quite an obsession with industrial robotics and electronic music. I always thought it would be nice to mix that aesthetic of robotic fetishism with something completely conflicting. All Is Full of Love is so much about romance and sexuality that I thought it might be interesting to push those ideas together with a sort of cold technology, and see if we could make it work...
I did technical drawings for the designs of the robots and the Björk androids and then had a model maker friend of mine build every thing as static props. There are actually no functioning robots in the video at all. Anything that moves is a computer graphic. The robotic arms that come in from the sides were two props on steel rods that we had two men push into frame. The actual moving part on the robots was a tilting mechanism that was crudely cable-controlled. All of the additional moving parts were tiny little CG elements that we added in post at Glassworks in London.
Probst, C. 'Amorous Androids', American Cinematographer, February 2000
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