Old love in song: in death

In his arresting work, Old love in song: in death 2004, TV Moore appears against a black, smoky background like an apparition, singing a mash-up of the Latin requiem Pie Jesu and Almeda Riddle’s folk song, ‘I love my little rooster’. Dressed in military style clothing and ghoulish make-up, Moore’s character has been likened by several commentators to the ghost of a communard or a sailor.

The critic Andrew Frost has written eloquently of Moore’s haunting video self-portrait, stating: ‘With the soft hum of traffic outside the studio on the soundtrack, Old love song in song: in death achieved a remarkable distillation of the contemporary and the archaic, evoking the ageless concerns of life and mortality while acknowledging the artifice of its own creation’ [1].

1. Andrew Frost, ‘TV Moore’, http://scanlines.net/person/tv-moore accessed 5 Jul 2019, http://scanlines.net/person/tv-moore accessed 08 July 2019