Matthew Noel-Tod acknowledges that his 2003 video Atomic, the centerpiece of his current exhibit at Unit B Gallery, is not particularly aesthetically pleasing. A shot-by-shot re-creation of the 1980 Blondie video of the same name, it’s colorful and rhythmic but visually disjointed. What’s most fascinating about the video is the weird lifelessness of the performers (all recent graduates of an art school in Norwich, England, where Noel-Tod lives) and the odd disconnect between the rapid-fire imagery and the slower tempo of the accompanying music: instead of the Blondie song, the four-minute video repeats to a 90-minute score composed for F.W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic, Nosferatu, so the relationship of music to image keeps changing. “I think I solved the problem of showing looped videos in galleries,” Noel-Tod says. “The repetitions won’t seem quite as moronic.”
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Born in 1978, Noel-Tod was, in his own words, “really into Lego” as a boy; at eight his replica of a Harrods shopping bag made from the colored blocks netted him third prize in an art competition sponsored by the London department store. At 14, he had a “really strange” art teacher, who “professed that he was into LSD and the Beatles” but whose lessons simply required students to copy things like a CD cover and a perspective grid. “I much preferred my later art teacher who gave me free rein,” he says, “but by that time I think all I was interested in was copying.”
Current cinema, Noel-Tod says, is often a chain of references. “Tarantino references Scorsese who references Godard who references Minnelli, Griffith, and Hawks”–but when young filmmakers are influenced by Tarantino without knowing his sources, or those sources’ sources, the results are often disappointingly shallow. Noel-Tod says he’s “trying to deconstruct how these references and references to references can be used in making video art, trying to create what I hope is an intelligent dialogue between me creating a work and the works I’m referencing.”
