'Dis-ease' - a New Generation of Video Art from the Rijksakademie Archives at Bank Gallery
by Peter Machen
Video art is something of a problem child. Stuck between the rarefied space of the gallery and the epic achievements of a century of cinema, it is a medium that seems so full of potential but which seldom delivers substantial dividends.
This is partially due to the fact that the video artist has to work harder than the filmmaker. Removed from the formalism of cinema and television, and away from the commitment of the couch and the movie theatre - the video art viewer can usually walk away - video art's context immediately makes it a more challenging format. Then there is the fact that the infinite possibilities of the medium suck resources frame by frame. And most importantly, the notion of pace, so central to cinema, has to be entirely renegotiated.
Video art has also, until recent years, been restrained by that most banal of all objects, the cathode ray tube television. In our lounges, the television disappears and we see only the picture. In the gallery, the physicality of the television predominates and often overwhelms the contents of the screen. Context is indeed everything.
But the happy advent of flat screen TV and high quality digital projectors is changing things. The medium is rapidly establishing itself in terms of the quality, accessibility and affordability of the technology. Now the broad spectrum of video artists needs to catch up with this trend.
Then there is the question of how one separates video art from film, other than referring to its context. The obvious answer is to not make that separation, but it is a separation that very much exists; more now than in an earlier time before video, when films were just films. Think of Warhol's almost infinitely slow studies of grit and glam; they are far closer to contemporary notions of video art than cinema. And another problem that video art confronts is that it exists in the face of so much profoundly good cinema that has no problem qualifying as the finest of fine art.
All of which comes to the surface when thinking about the Bank Gallery show 'Dis-ease', which features a collection of works by contemporary video artists from around the world. The works are all from the Amsterdam's Rijksakademie's archive and curated by artist Greg Streak, who recently spent a two month residency there.
Some of the works are breathtaking. Some are simply banal. And a few are rubbish. A singular failing that runs through most of the weaker work is that the artists don't understand the medium in which they're working, let alone have any command of it.
Most video artists choose quite wisely not to tell stories. Of those that do, most fail. An example of such thwarted ambition in 'Dis-ease' includes Michael Blum's pointless Ciao Ghatoul, in which a man is so annoyed with a cat that he drives it across the city and deposits it on the left bank. Another is Chiara Pirito's Elisir which tells the story of a green stone that appears and disappears in various locations around a city. According to the catalogue, Elisir is 'an investigation into the recesses of human bitterness', but really it's just a piece of vacuous, ill-considered visual drivel with the kind of second rate production values we associate with day-time TV.
Another glaring fault of much contemporary video art is the use of the sledgehammer where even a Hollywood director might invoke a dash of subtlety. Jap, for example, tackles Japanese stereotypes head-on, and while there is a little complexity in its uncomfortable humour, the work fails because it functions exclusively on this level.
But then, like daffodils in a razed forest, 'Dis-ease' contains several minor masterpieces. In Eric Olofsen's In Places a body falls, in frame-by-frame slow-motion, onto a city made of foam, and bounces equally slowly out of the city, and back again, as it comes to rest. It's such a simple idea, visually striking and overflowing with a multiplicity of meanings. While the work is beautifully executed, it's the idea underpinning it that so enchants.
Another piece that manages to be both cinematic and function as a work of fine art on visual and conceptual levels is Pegasus' Dance by Fernando Sanchez Castillo. This work documents a ballet choreographed for two water-spewing riot trucks. The result is humorously moving, visually stunning, highly intelligent, and politically cogent. Eye candy and mind candy.
In Meiya Lin's Sadness, a young woman sits against a blank wall. The scene shifts subtly from black and white to colour as she applies lipstick and then smears it across her face. Beautifully executed and self-contained, it could be an extract from a thousand different narratives.
Then there is Zachary Formwalt's The Witness ,which looks at a particular set of images found on the United States Department of Defence website together with some accompanying text. In his filmed use of the internet, combined with his narration, Formwalt presents a revolutionary use of media that feels genuinely new.
Finally, there is the delightful work of the show's feature artist, Kuang-Yu Tsui whose exploration of absurdity in an urban world is provocative and mostly beautiful. He uses repetition to great effect, as he moves around various cities, indulging in pranks such as aiming tenpin bowling balls at flocks of pigeons and walking around in a suit with water spurting out in all directions. I particularly liked the sequence in which he has a quick, absurdly casual vomit in a variety of locations.
Interestingly, the works that most resonated with me, with the except of Kuang-Yu Tsui's, were almost all executed within a single, relatively static frame, echoing the conventions of painting and photography more than of film. And, like the bulk of the video art that I've seen, many of the more successful works presented in 'Dis-ease' played with notions of time, frames speeded up, reversed, slowed down, turned inside out. The least successful works don't even know that time exists, and didn't seem to care that there might be a viewer.
But if the contents of 'Dis-ease' were not consistently compelling, their presentation at Bank Gallery was an object lesson in the exhibition of video art. The quality of the gallery's projector is splendid, even the blurriest, most pixellated images somehow maintaining a clarity on the giant screen, the familiar RGB flicker of most projectors completely absent. Sound was something of a problem though, bouncing around the concrete corrugations of the building; but in truth, sound was seldom an integral element of the work on display, which is a telling omission at a formal level. We tend to think of film and television as primarily visual, but remove the sound and they are very, very different media.
If 'Dis-ease' is truly representative of the current global generation of video artists - and I kind of hope it's not - then it represents an artistic community that has yet to get to grips with the capabilities of its medium. And I really think that it is a medium that needs to be more excited about itself. Think of the short films of early cinema, the frenetic joy and wonder they contained in a time when film truly was amazing because it was a brand new human experience. If video art as a genre could embody just a fraction of that enthusiasm, things could really begin progressing.
Peter Machen is a freelance writer and film critic
Opens: June 19
Closes: July 17
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