Art Review - February Issue - (Page 82)

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Tumbling through Ben-Tor’s supercharged videos is a scabrous parade of lampooned character types – a wealthy white woman revelling in her supposed charitable acts while touring the world; a rabid German political extremist testifying splenetically against the American way; a selfregarding conceptual artist; a succession of dim-witted women pontificating about Hitler. At this point, some artworld mavens are predicting that television is where someone as evidently furious, fearless and needful of audience as Ben-Tor will end up; she may yet become an Ali G/Borat-style provocateur who’s less slyly selective in her targeting. Situated midway between Ben-Tor and Nathaniel Mellors, one might say, is another New York-based Israeli, Guy Ben-Ner. Synthesising Nauman’s studio-bound perambulations eg 1968’s Stamping in the Studio with situation-driven aspects of silent comedy, most of his videos have been shot in his poky New York apartment and privilege human ingenuity in dealing with confinement-cumdisplacement. But Ben-Ner nevertheless relies upon, and exemplifies, permeability between solid and pixelated media. In Treehouse Kit 2005 , Ben-Ner filmed himself as an ersatz Robinson Crusoe, in fake beard and shorts, making furniture out of parts of a tree ingeniously constructed from flat-packed segments of construct-it-yourself furniture. The tree itself, now repurposed as a sculptural symbol of growth and potentiality, was exhibited alongside the video. The tree in the gallery is a challenge. Was this a video featuring an artwork, or are you now looking at a prop? Here is the entryway to the corridor of uncertainty to which much ‘video plus’ tends to lead. My twitchiness in front of Christoph Draeger and Gary Breslin’s video installation Le Radeau de la Macumba 2004 wasn’t occasioned by its plot a bright burlesque of a horror movie, featuring a ruined modernist building, some gauche teens and a crew of zombies but because right in my sightline was a large-scale tableau featuring various ritualistic accoutrements ITREVIEW AR featured in the film. They shouldn’t be there, said a small interior voice – cavilling at static caused by the rogue presence of something halfway real breaking onto the channel to which the moving images had auto-tuned my mind. This is a video, that’s a stage set: there’s a category error. Comparably decentring are Runa Islam’s videosculptural amalgams, such as Director’s Cut Fool for Love 2001 , with its mixture of tricky, perspective-shifting deconstructive footage of a theatrical rehearsal and prop-like aspects scattered around the show; and her First Day of Spring 2005 , which is sometimes projected larger than the viewing screen so that parts of the image bounce around the room. In superficially similar recent installations by Angela Bulloch, such as Group of Seven One Absent Friend 2005 , viewers perambulate between multiple videos of figures performing ideas of imposed constriction, all projected onto and past sculptural cubes. It’s an approach that can, furthermore, be adopted retrospectively: when Anne Bean recently restaged and taped 30 of her performances from 1969 to 1974, she installed them in a jungle of solid props. Diversity aside, each of these environments privileges subjectivity and one’s sense of being a moving body in space: they jangle, prod and spike the habitual slow trance and denial of corporality that is the handmaiden of single-channel conveyance. The long-term objective of such polysemic production may be to make formal means utterly transparent, purely functional: that’s the sense you get from, say, Ward Shelley’s 2004 installation We Have Mice, which spliced performance, video and sculpture because each was a necessary element in the Brooklyn-based artist’s endurance-test Gesamtkunstwerk Shelley lived on-site for five weeks in a three-footwide crawl space, fashioning abject sculptures which subsequently filtered into the exhibition space, relaying his actions via a suspended tangle of CCTV monitors . Presently our telly-weaned mindsets foster certain hierarchies: that’s why we’re bumping into sculpture as we veer towards the screens. But if it is a collision that reawakens agitated consciousness, this may be no bad thing. p 78-83 Video 2 AR Feb07.indd 82 3/1/07 02:23:15  Warning : Unknown : The session id contains invalid characters, valid characters are only a-z, A-Z and 0-9 in Unknown on line 0 Warning : Unknown : Failed to write session data files . Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct /var/lib/php/session in Unknown on line 0

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Art Review - February Issue

Art Review - February Issue

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