Tuesday, August 24, 2010
Friday, August 6, 2010
"Why Video Art Sucks In 2010"
This rant was going to be titled, “Why Video Art Sucks In 2010”, but after finally attending the 17th Biennale of Sydney just three days before it ended, I can’t truthfully write a piece supporting that argument.
I’m not against art that is made using video in the same way that I’m not against art that is made from wool, clay, concrete or paint on canvas. But I have a few problems with the proliferation of video art and often with its technical qualities and sometimes with its presentation. I had been forewarned about the Cockatoo Island part of the Biennale and how much 4D work was featured. There was a lot of video art. Probably more than half of the pieces featured screens or projections of some kind. But I was surprised by how much patience I had for a medium that often I find revels in its own tedium. There were some stunning pieces, some confronting, some humourous and most of a polished production quality more akin at least to television if not more to indy cinema.
In the past I have often been uninterested by video pieces for very basic technical reasons. We are exposed to all forms of video entertainment, all of the time. We see commercials that have been made with huge budgets for huge companies all of the time. We are treated to incredible effects, graphics and production values regularly in our own home with little effort on our part. Investing our time in a gallery we might walk into a grainy, shaky, dark and repetitive visual that is supposed to be contemplative and meditative but is actually just boring and poorly made. Well that has often been my experience.
Cockatoo Island is a fantastic venue for exhibiting art. To stumble into dark rooms, walls decaying, rooves dripping and see pieces like Regina Jose Calindo’s ‘Confesion’, where a brutish man drags a young woman into a room not dissimilar to your surroundings then proceeds to repeatedly dunk the girl’s head into a drum full of water, before tossing her rag-doll like to the floor, the viewer cannot help but be shocked. Sure, this could be a scene from The Sopranos, but it’s a little more threatening simply because of the small dark room the viewer is both watching and watching from. And there is nothing more to this piece, it is brutally uncomplicated and doesn’t waste 20 minutes of an audience’s precious time in self indulgence.
Something less Horror and more Hollywood perhaps? Russian artists AES + F present a huge piece, installed in a large circular room, made up of nine projections, projecting three synchronised images around the room. The imagery is a fantastic animation of over 75,000 photographs and creates an epic re-telling of Petronius’ Satyricon, using Hollywood style gloss and bling with themes like beauty, shopping and consumerism, golf and leisure (La Coste included), opulence and excess, all set to a dramatic orchestral score. It is a technical masterpiece as well as a beautiful piece, it has a dark humour about it, is provocative and is just plain entertaining/fun to watch.
But let’s get back to some of the reasons ‘Why Video Art Sucks In 2010’. One problem with video art is the experience of viewing it. The viewer always walks into the middle of the piece. Why do these works always run continuously? Why are there not timed screenings so that we can all view the piece from start to end. At least on busy days and at least for the more significant works. Rather than walking into the middle of a piece with no understanding of what is happening, attempting to make sense and judge whether the work is interesting enough to devote time to, still being confused and devoting more time anyway in an attempt to make a more informed decision as to whether the piece is interesting enough to devote more time to, before it ends and was either not interesting enough to have devoted more than thirty seconds to, or was interesting enough that now you have to watch it again from the beginning.
Video art is directly comparative to film. Artists, art critics and intellectuals may argue this, but to the audience, not necessarily artists, art critics or intellectuals, comparison is inevitable, and justified. While art is art and film is film, film has explored most of the technical aspects of production such as camera operation, lighting and editing, as well as interpretive qualities such as narrative, storytelling and plot rigorously throughout its history, usually bound only by technology and the available funds for particular projects. Often video art seems completely ignorant of this well established history. Now, before you think, ‘But video art isn’t film or cinema, it’s Art!’, consider what film makers think when they are confronted with some video pieces. Some amateur film makers, film students and cinema critics are staggered by what passes for successful video art. From their perspective, the same nonsense would lose them their reputation.
Take Mark Wallinger, for example, an artist lucky enough to have two pieces in the Biennale. The first depicts a man on a hill inhaling from a helium filled balloon and ranting incoherently in the helium effected voice. Entering this midway into piece, I wish I hadn’t taken more than the suggested dosage of thirty seconds. Wallinger’s other work is a little more entertaining, because it has five separate television sized screens, displayed next to one another on plinths. It seemed to have no sound and showed slow motion clips of recreational activities such as para-sailing, flying foxes and kite flying. The clips have the quality of poorly made home videos, out of focus, shaky and poorly lit. The work attempts a cynical look at human behaviour but is just a series of poor footage of uninteresting subjects. Television continually provides us with this anyway, with more humour and better imagery.
As claw71 suggests about interpretive artists versus actors:
“The secret to a quality bird flip is the emotion behind it. If only those interpretive art students took a few method acting courses.” Likewise, if only video artists took a few editing courses. Most video art could benefit from a little bit of editing, at least I thought. Again, the Biennale challenged my expectations, with many of the video pieces being less than ten minutes long. In another macabre piece, in a coldly lit room, two men sweat with concentration as they play table tennis with a naked woman as a net. The scene is futuristic and gloomy, the woman is sexualised, with faint lipstick kisses over parts of her body. The piece, around three minutes long, titled ‘Ping Pong’, by Abel Abidin, is edited with cuts between slow motion and extreme close-up as well as longer shots of the game taking place. It is a haunting work, well acted, neatly shot, deftly edited. A work both ambiguous and suggestive, while also succinct and direct. Again, this work benefits directly from its installation, inside an abandoned and run down dock shed.
So, I have few conclusions to make. I wanted to finish writing this with a clear point but am struggling to reach one. Video art especially lends itself to being exhibited in alternate spaces to art galleries. Cockatoo Island provides a perfect exhibition space and suggests that more unused city spaces such as laneways, carparks and inner city parks could provide more suitable homes for video pieces than The White Cube. The same goes for sound pieces. While the gallery provides us with a destination to contemplate art, these other unused spaces seem somehow more appropriate for viewing the types of 4D pieces we often encounter. It also suits the looped nature of the presentational format so favoured by these mediums.
This post was intended as a kind of unfair deconstruction of video art in 2010 using fairly loaded, one-sided examples. I was suitably impressed on my last trip to Cockatoo Island in 2008 that my expectations may have been higher this time around. Video art certainly seemed to take centre stage on the island, a fact I don’t greet with boundless enthusiasm. However, my experience has dictated that this post has become a supporting argument for 4D work, particularly in alternate exhibition destinations. The overall quality of most of the pieces of the 17th Biennale of Sydney has had me argue against myself, asserting the fact that video art certainly does not suck in 2010.
I’m not against art that is made using video in the same way that I’m not against art that is made from wool, clay, concrete or paint on canvas. But I have a few problems with the proliferation of video art and often with its technical qualities and sometimes with its presentation. I had been forewarned about the Cockatoo Island part of the Biennale and how much 4D work was featured. There was a lot of video art. Probably more than half of the pieces featured screens or projections of some kind. But I was surprised by how much patience I had for a medium that often I find revels in its own tedium. There were some stunning pieces, some confronting, some humourous and most of a polished production quality more akin at least to television if not more to indy cinema.
In the past I have often been uninterested by video pieces for very basic technical reasons. We are exposed to all forms of video entertainment, all of the time. We see commercials that have been made with huge budgets for huge companies all of the time. We are treated to incredible effects, graphics and production values regularly in our own home with little effort on our part. Investing our time in a gallery we might walk into a grainy, shaky, dark and repetitive visual that is supposed to be contemplative and meditative but is actually just boring and poorly made. Well that has often been my experience.
Cockatoo Island is a fantastic venue for exhibiting art. To stumble into dark rooms, walls decaying, rooves dripping and see pieces like Regina Jose Calindo’s ‘Confesion’, where a brutish man drags a young woman into a room not dissimilar to your surroundings then proceeds to repeatedly dunk the girl’s head into a drum full of water, before tossing her rag-doll like to the floor, the viewer cannot help but be shocked. Sure, this could be a scene from The Sopranos, but it’s a little more threatening simply because of the small dark room the viewer is both watching and watching from. And there is nothing more to this piece, it is brutally uncomplicated and doesn’t waste 20 minutes of an audience’s precious time in self indulgence.
Something less Horror and more Hollywood perhaps? Russian artists AES + F present a huge piece, installed in a large circular room, made up of nine projections, projecting three synchronised images around the room. The imagery is a fantastic animation of over 75,000 photographs and creates an epic re-telling of Petronius’ Satyricon, using Hollywood style gloss and bling with themes like beauty, shopping and consumerism, golf and leisure (La Coste included), opulence and excess, all set to a dramatic orchestral score. It is a technical masterpiece as well as a beautiful piece, it has a dark humour about it, is provocative and is just plain entertaining/fun to watch.
But let’s get back to some of the reasons ‘Why Video Art Sucks In 2010’. One problem with video art is the experience of viewing it. The viewer always walks into the middle of the piece. Why do these works always run continuously? Why are there not timed screenings so that we can all view the piece from start to end. At least on busy days and at least for the more significant works. Rather than walking into the middle of a piece with no understanding of what is happening, attempting to make sense and judge whether the work is interesting enough to devote time to, still being confused and devoting more time anyway in an attempt to make a more informed decision as to whether the piece is interesting enough to devote more time to, before it ends and was either not interesting enough to have devoted more than thirty seconds to, or was interesting enough that now you have to watch it again from the beginning.
Video art is directly comparative to film. Artists, art critics and intellectuals may argue this, but to the audience, not necessarily artists, art critics or intellectuals, comparison is inevitable, and justified. While art is art and film is film, film has explored most of the technical aspects of production such as camera operation, lighting and editing, as well as interpretive qualities such as narrative, storytelling and plot rigorously throughout its history, usually bound only by technology and the available funds for particular projects. Often video art seems completely ignorant of this well established history. Now, before you think, ‘But video art isn’t film or cinema, it’s Art!’, consider what film makers think when they are confronted with some video pieces. Some amateur film makers, film students and cinema critics are staggered by what passes for successful video art. From their perspective, the same nonsense would lose them their reputation.
Take Mark Wallinger, for example, an artist lucky enough to have two pieces in the Biennale. The first depicts a man on a hill inhaling from a helium filled balloon and ranting incoherently in the helium effected voice. Entering this midway into piece, I wish I hadn’t taken more than the suggested dosage of thirty seconds. Wallinger’s other work is a little more entertaining, because it has five separate television sized screens, displayed next to one another on plinths. It seemed to have no sound and showed slow motion clips of recreational activities such as para-sailing, flying foxes and kite flying. The clips have the quality of poorly made home videos, out of focus, shaky and poorly lit. The work attempts a cynical look at human behaviour but is just a series of poor footage of uninteresting subjects. Television continually provides us with this anyway, with more humour and better imagery.
As claw71 suggests about interpretive artists versus actors:
“The secret to a quality bird flip is the emotion behind it. If only those interpretive art students took a few method acting courses.” Likewise, if only video artists took a few editing courses. Most video art could benefit from a little bit of editing, at least I thought. Again, the Biennale challenged my expectations, with many of the video pieces being less than ten minutes long. In another macabre piece, in a coldly lit room, two men sweat with concentration as they play table tennis with a naked woman as a net. The scene is futuristic and gloomy, the woman is sexualised, with faint lipstick kisses over parts of her body. The piece, around three minutes long, titled ‘Ping Pong’, by Abel Abidin, is edited with cuts between slow motion and extreme close-up as well as longer shots of the game taking place. It is a haunting work, well acted, neatly shot, deftly edited. A work both ambiguous and suggestive, while also succinct and direct. Again, this work benefits directly from its installation, inside an abandoned and run down dock shed.
So, I have few conclusions to make. I wanted to finish writing this with a clear point but am struggling to reach one. Video art especially lends itself to being exhibited in alternate spaces to art galleries. Cockatoo Island provides a perfect exhibition space and suggests that more unused city spaces such as laneways, carparks and inner city parks could provide more suitable homes for video pieces than The White Cube. The same goes for sound pieces. While the gallery provides us with a destination to contemplate art, these other unused spaces seem somehow more appropriate for viewing the types of 4D pieces we often encounter. It also suits the looped nature of the presentational format so favoured by these mediums.
This post was intended as a kind of unfair deconstruction of video art in 2010 using fairly loaded, one-sided examples. I was suitably impressed on my last trip to Cockatoo Island in 2008 that my expectations may have been higher this time around. Video art certainly seemed to take centre stage on the island, a fact I don’t greet with boundless enthusiasm. However, my experience has dictated that this post has become a supporting argument for 4D work, particularly in alternate exhibition destinations. The overall quality of most of the pieces of the 17th Biennale of Sydney has had me argue against myself, asserting the fact that video art certainly does not suck in 2010.
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