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Saturday, August 23, 2003

Watching, looking and performing

 


If video art is a young medium, it's a young medium getting knocked around on a playground by older, tougher mediums. It's usually an easy call to tell whether a work of is a painting or a sculpture (not always, but usually). It is often much harder to tell whether something is video art, filmmaking, or plain old video. If digital manipulation is used, it can be difficult to differentiate it from animation. Filmmaking and animation are established traditions with a rich repertoire of devices for holding a viewer's attention over time. Most of these devices are narrative. Video art tends to forgo them, which is why they seem overly long. Some of them seem overly long at the two-minute mark.

While I think they're legitimate pursuits and I want to see them succeed, video art and performance art have an identity problem that is going to be difficult to solve in the long term. Their overlap with film, theater, dance, and animation is so great that they will always be forced to rely on their devices to some extent. I suspect that they will only be useful as "forms" by hybridizing film, theater, dance, animation, sculpture, music, and the museum/gallery context to the point that no one is sure what else to call it, but that turns 'performance art' and 'video art' into default categories.

A lot of pressure would come off of video art if viewers could look at it like other art - walk up to it, check it out, form a response, and walk away. But since it's on a TV, people go into a different mode - they try to watch it. This is where the boredom comes in. The prolonged looking, which may not have been the point of the work in the first place, is not sustained.

It's telling that Matthew Barney, who comes out of the museum/gallery context, is now being characterized as a filmmaker, albeit a profoundly odd one. Ultimately, he will make what he makes and leave categorization to the historians, but if performance art, given a big budget and captured on film, becomes filmmaking, it says something negative about the robustness of performance art as a distinct form. It would also be tough to distinguish Barney's films, categorically, from video art in general, excepting the production methods. Video artists and performance artists may have to live with the fact that their work will always exist in a gray area.

--Franklin Einspruch writes artblog.net from Miami

permanent link  roberta 6:59 PM
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Friday, August 22, 2003

The fault, dear Brutus, is in the video

 
The video art will respond to our impatience because if it doesn't, who will watch it? I think the slowness of video art is a flaw, and I question that the flaw is in us, the viewer.

I concede that we, as viewers, are quite impatient, just like we, as drivers, these days, are insanely impatient. Ten years ago, drivers didn't used to run me down as I stepped off the curb. Now they do. I, too, am impatient behind the wheel.

But I am not impatient in front of a good painting. Just as good paintings hold my interest, so can good videos. I think the fault is in the videos. Videographers need to pep up the proceedings to some degree. But the art is young, and in this way, I have patience to wait until video artists figure out more about their medium and how to make it work.
permanent link  libby 8:47 PM
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Zoom, zoom, zoom

 


Libby, I love all the points you made about slow video art. My question has to do with the future. You mention your impatience with slow video art. That is my point exactly. 100 years from now, will we be less impatient because art will have changed to respond to our impatience? Will we have fast art in the future instead of slow art....and is that a bad thing?
permanent link  roberta 7:41 AM
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Thursday, August 21, 2003

Video time

 
Another thought on video--it is not quick at all. It forces you to stand there and look and look and look, and it doesn't always pay you back for your time.

I find myself growing impatient often during video installations. I miss the temporal payback that a commercial movie or a good documentary gives you--a storyline. Just think about those interminable Andy Warhol portrait movies.

permanent link  libby 8:56 PM
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Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Independence Mall's chicken coops

 
Whizzing by the newest addition going up near Independence Hall--the Liberty Bell pavilion (shown right)--I was saddened to notice that its shape reminded me of nothing other than a chicken coop.

I suppose the argument is that it matches the Visitors Center--which also looks like a chicken coop to me. Take a look here yourself (eastern side
shown, left).

Now the Visitors Center doesn't look like a chicken coop from the entrance way on Market Street. But all other views are, well, depressing, long, low, with a barely peaked roof. The cupola on top looks just plain silly.

And the endless western wall, with its lack of entrances and lack of variety, is depressing, unfriendly, even fortress-like, turning that block into a no-man's land. (see view of western wall, right.) It reminds me of the buildings Penn used to build to shut out West Philadelphia.

The Visitors Center feels like a rejection of Philadelphia's street traffic and hurly-burly, an attempt to isolate for the tourists--a la Williamsburg themepark--what has alway been and should remain part and parcel of a busy urban center.

It is the same mentality that tried to block off Chestnut Street in front of Independence Hall and keep the real people away. They might as well put up a sign that says, Only pastel-attired tourists with cameras and caps are welcome.

Yo, park planners and rangers. You're not telling the story of our history if you cut it off from the real life of the city, because those buildings were part of the city and the nation from the beginning--during rough times, too.

permanent link  libby 5:09 PM
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Slow video

 
Certainly the videos we're used to in our everyday lives are often mind-numbing meals on the run. And so are movies, for the most part. But just like there are great movies that make you think great thoughts, like John Sayles' work, there's plenty of art video that is contemplative. I am thinking of Shirin Neshat (above) for example. The images don't rush by in kung-fu movie style. They flow and they are evocative and dreamy.

Another video artist who comes to mind with his slow imagery is last year's darling, Jeremy Blake (image here). His abstract images push the viewer to participate, to contemplate, to make up what's happening. Even with real-world imagery, Neshat also forces you to make up what's happening. The strengths in both artists' work is in the evocative imagery and storytelling--open to interpretation and contemplation.


Although both Neshat's and Blake's pacing are slow, slowness doesn't seem to be the critical factor. Someone who moves quickly through his storytelling with quick-cut editing, yet still leaves room for contemplation, is William Kentridge (left). The drawings, with their surreal touches, open to question why Kentridge has chosen the look and method that he's chosen, why he's gone to a cartoon-making technique for the most serious of subjects, why he uses erasers and not fresh paper for each frame, and why he doesn't use cels.

So I wouldn't bemoan the loss of contemplation just yet. Just as there are images for quick digestion, so there are videos for quick digestion. And just like images are not all necessarily art, the same can be said for videos.

Which is not to say that quick-take videos don't delight or can't be meaty. But a lot of them are shallow and stick to the brain as long as a wink. I say bring on the videos. Some will be great. The rest are just another piece of the popular culture.
permanent link  libby 4:36 PM
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Video killed the radio but will it save art?

 

Art used to be a slow thing requiring you to look and reflect. Video art breaks the mold turning art into something faster and more transient.

Here’s a question. Is video art the future of art for a culture that doesn’t want to slow down and reflect? [see images from Times Square where they now project movies with subtitles [like "Mission to Mars" seen here] on the Sony screen]

We get our news from headlines just like we get our traffic reports and the weather. It’s all the same when you’re in a hurry.

Is the future of art going to be video “headlines,” little chunks of art served up like sushi? And how bad would that be?

It seems that video art has the potential to be a kind of democratic art, art of the people, in the future. I mean, if education is the great democratizer, they don’t teach much real, old-fashioned art (painting, drawing, clay work) in school anymore. They do seem to teach computers and media stuff. It’s required. And while I haven’t heard of classes that teach video technology in elementary and secondary schools, teachers, in my experience, encourage students to use video in homework projects. And many kids with access to the equipment do. [How about that izone camera for child-friendly introduction to picture-taking? see image]

So kids -- many of whom haven’t been exposed much to traditional art materials -- are likely to be familiar with the technology of computers and other electronic media.

Will this familiarity breed contempt or will it perhaps lead to more people trying their hand at making art via electronic means? Will the next Picasso be a young woman whose video art you can download from the internet and project on a wall in your living room?

permanent link  roberta 9:48 AM
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Tuesday, August 19, 2003

Seurat and the Island of Grande Shoppers

 

The subways were running...the power was back on and Stella and I were off to New York again last weekend. Art was where we found it -- in the street, in Times Square and in Central Park. Soho on a Saturday afternoon was a zoo, people flocking in and out of stores (the Apple store was a particular draw); blocks and blocks of vendors, some licensed, others not; and the New York-sized crowds shuffling along, oggling each other, eating on the fly, everybody hustling, bustling. [see images of Espo's nice truck at Spring and Wooster.]

If Seurat were here today, he wouldn't go to Central Park to make his picture of the leisure time activities of the urbanites. He'd go to Soho and turn any street corner into an island of humanity at its leisure all waiting for the "walk" sign to come on. We are leisure-time shoppers now, not picnickers.

A young woman had an easel set up on West Broadway. She was working on a hard-edged abstract painting and had a few finished works for sale. The paintings were nothing special and I wondered about the mind-set that could block out the passing scene and work on something so austere. Why would you...and how could you were my questions.


A kid had a small army of clay figures set up on the hood of his car. [see image of another retail army -- fur-clad dolls in a window on Houston.] They were nice, little caricatures in clay but he wasn’t doing any business. In fact nobody seemed to be selling except the digital photography vendors who'd take your picture and print it out for a couple bucks.

We were with my sister, Cate, who lives in the neighborhood, and she kept getting more and more alarmed as we passed by this, that and another store that had closed. Bad economy, lots of window shopping.

We went into the Diesel Denim Gallery to feed Stella’s jeans obsession and, don't laugh, Diesel has an art program. [In fact, read a review of a previous show at the store by New Museum curator Erin Barnett] Amidst the blue jeans and dressing rooms was video art by John Slepian (West Coast artist who recently was in PS 1's studio program) playing on a half-dozen monitors, some of them locked up in glass display cases. The imagery was body/blobs, hairy and orificial... kind of creepy but endearing, in a sci-fi-lab-experiment-gone-wrong kind of way. [see image of Slepian's "the Spectator 2.0"] Reception for the artist Sept. 3, 8 pm-10 pm, all you videophiles, and the work will be up until sept. 21. Diesel Denim Gallery is at 88 Greene St. 212-966-5593.

Speaking of video art, I wanted to see Jeremy Blake’s video, “Cowboy Waltz,” playing in Times Square in a Creative Time project called “The 59th minute.” (i.e. the piece runs the last minute of each hour). But I flubbed the arrival time and after spending fifteen, mind-numbing minutes in Times Square at 9 pm Saturday night, Jeremy Blake lost out. Video art doesn’t stand a chance in this environment. Art doesn't stand a chance. Has any art in Times Square ever held its own?

Finally, making our way uptown the next day, we saw Wim Delvoy’s big steam shovel sculpture, “Caterpillar” in Central Park at 59th St. [see images] A thing of rusty, lacey beauty, it had Eiffel Tower charm, although I was a little underwhelmed by it. I wanted it to be bigger, loonier...to talk to me. It was just another conceptual object looking for a reason to be there. Enough street art, time for the bus home and for the soaking rain that held off until we were safely enroute.




permanent link  roberta 8:02 AM
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