Art Review - February Issue - (Page 79)
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/mnt/data/www.nxtbook.com/fx/config_1.3/global.php on line 10 FILM AND
VIDEO FILM BEYOND VIDEO words MARTIN HERBERT WHY IS SO MUCH OF TODAY’ S
VIDEO ART ACCOMPANIED BY THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE DARK? to paraphrase
the notorious quip attributed to Barnett Newman, sculpture is what I bump
into when I’m backing up to look at a video. Case in point: the murky
electric sprawl of Nathaniel Mellors’s Hateball 2005 . Typically for
him, the British artist laid out manifold screens and projections,
simultaneously beaming forth abject soliloquies characterised by
discordant, broken language: a supposed giantess declaimed a mixture of
fascist demagoguery and gobbledegook; a Japanese musician inaccurately
recited lyrics by The Fall; and a seemingly Irish actor in a blood-soaked
skintight tunic acted out a Sylvester Stallone monologue from First Blood
1982 . Also typically, however, these were surrounded in the darkened
space by treacherous sculptural detritus: abject mannequins, random
swirling lights, spindly compound objects – the whole delivering a sense
of intractable mêlée. Fragmentation, distraction and confusion are,
indeed, the aims of Mellors’s art, in the interests of questioning the
socio-political function of language. Hateball was chiefly inspired by
the paranoid 1960s TV show The Prisoner. But he’s only one of a number
of contemporary artists subjecting video to radical expansion. In some
ways, admittedly, it’s not radical at all. Surely the most conflicted
and least self-contained of artistic mediums, video has long had its hands
in the pockets of other artistic approaches. It hustled forth under a
double shadow of dependency – as either a pragmatic bolt-on for
performance art or a format fighting an evil twin, since much early video
art sought to interrogate and redeem what it most closely resembled:
television, whether commercially broadcast or closed-circuit. Perhaps
it’s also apt that the first artform to emerge in the wake of shattered
modernist theories of purity and medium-specificity the date generally
given for its nascence is 1965, the year Sony debuted its Portapak should
have proved so enduringly promiscuous. When the mobile video camera’s
legendary first purchaser, Nam June Paik, collaborated with American
cellist Charlotte Moorman in productions ranging from cello-shaped stacks
of televisions to 1969’s attention-getting wearable media, TV Bra for
Living Sculpture, he wasn’t just aiming, as he averred, to ‘humanise
technology and the electronic medium’. The Korean artist/composer was
simultaneously pursuing the chimera of visualised music, and trespassing
upon sculptural and performative realms. When Bruce Nauman invited unwary
viewers into Live-Taped Video Corridor 1970 , his Foucault-flavoured
exploration of that lodestar of the nascent society of control, CCTV, he
hitched video to architectural intervention: audiences trundled down a
narrow ten-metre-long passage towards a live image of themselves on a
faraway monitor; LATELY I’VE FOUND THAT, since the filming camera was
behind them, their rear views miniaturised inexorably as they approached.
Not everyone has deigned to think outside the box. Consider Rebecca
Horn’s self-starring Berlin Exercises 1974–5 , insular narratives
acted out while wearing prostheses or adapted costumes: spidery finger
extensions; an outfit made of mirrors. Or, less well known, US artist Kim
Jones’s taped performances as ‘Mudman’, a genderless, shu ing
insectoid figure, tights over its face, mud caking its skin and a dense
structure of dried branches pinned to its back, who, since the mid-1970s,
has embodied the Vietnam-vet artist’s bleakly poetic conception of the
internal warring and primal fear underwriting the human condition.
Jones’s wooden props have wound up as standalone sculptures in
galleries, à la Matthew Barney. Erase the human figure from these
equations and you have video that encloses sculpture: an approach
traceable back to Marcel Duchamp’s early films and Maya Deren’s
Witch’s Cradle Outtakes 1943 , starring Duchamp’s string sculpture –
and perfected, of course, by Fischli and Weiss in The Way Things Go 1987 ,
their brilliant stream of cheapskate physics experiments doubling as a
philosophical inquiry into causality. Even after sit-down-viewer video
triumphed, crossbreeding persisted and persists – with sculpture in
particular; unsurprisingly since videos and monitors exist in space. Blow
up video so that it is, once again, part of a sculptural matrix, and you
arrive at the practices of several leading US artists who, from the late
1970s onwards, have treated all media with a punky practicality, including
Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy whose videos documented what was essentially
performance art, and were then embedded within sculptural installations ,
and, more programmatically, Tony Oursler. He or a performer would
monologue twitchily to camera, often rehearsing those mental
fragmentations the artist saw as a consequence of technology’s capacity
to rewire subjectivity; their anxious faces would then be video-projected
onto the balloon-like heads of cloth dummies, dumped on the gallery floor
or, occasionally, suspended in water-filled tanks. Collected in the
gallery, the result – while formally indebted, like sculptural video
installation in general, to Paik’s pioneering cross-media works such as
TV Garden 1974 , a tropical-electrical bower of potted palms and glowing
monitors – foreshadowed the kinds of flickering digital grottoes,
mixing high- and low-tech elements, increasingly prevalent today. It also
anticipated another contemporary facet of expanded video: that the very
psychological discomfort and uncertainty activated by the mongrelising of
media, playing on a latent animus to the vertigo of medium
non-specificity, might underscore the art’s concepts. Back to the
present: artists, Tony Oursler once lamented to me, thought video would
allow them to create their own TV channels, but instead part of video
art’s burden has been that of the potentially redemptive, or lacerating,
critical doppelganger of the idiot box – and certainly this seems true of
New York-based Israeli artist Tamy BenTor. While she ostensibly hews closer
to a conception of video as a functional mode of distribution for
performances, on tape at least she also performs live her work – equal
parts Cindy Sherman and ARTREVIEW p 78-83 Video 2 AR Feb07.indd 79 3/1/07
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue
Art Review - February Issue
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