The evolution will be televised
By Hamish Coney,
Artists are returning reality to the video clip
[Art]
New Zealand artist Clinton Watkins’ mesmerising Cont Ship #1 is an elegant, tautly-constructed video work consisting of a fully-laden container ship moving in real time across the viewer’s frame of vision. It lasts just a few minutes. On first viewing it provokes a range of wonder, puzzlement and outright confusion. Is it a documentary? Where’s the narrative? The deadpan point-and-shoot style and the monumental ordinariness of the scene ask the viewer to construct a whole range of meanings.
The future of art is coming to a gallery near you. Would you be surprised to hear (and see) that it looks a lot like TV? The convergence of cheap and accessible video capture and editing technology and a new generation of artists completely immersed in broadcast media means the moving image is not just the lingua franca of the cyberworld and the struggling-to-keep-up ‘real’ world, but also the art world.
Wander around any art gallery these days and you’ll see plenty of ‘TV’ art. This projected video art is disarming for the traditional art punter still struggling to come to terms with new digital photography, installation and impenetrable conceptual art. Of the four finalists in the 2006 Walters Prize, Phil Dadson and Stella Brennan’s works contained a video component, and Peter Robinson and Francis Upritchard created large-scale installations that push the boundaries of sculpture as we know it.
“Once we believed the camera never lies but now that idea is under threat. Video art is a response to the ‘black arts’ of the mainstream media”
On a recent visit to the City Gallery in Wellington I encountered not one painting. The three major exhibitions consisted of a retrospective of New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart and the works of Australian installation artist Hany Armanious and Finnish video artist Salla Tykkä.
Tykkä’s work is a great entry point for those seeking to understand the grip that video art has for both makers and art consumers in 2007. She combines old movie scores from luminaries such as Ennio Morricone with cinematic but dialogue-less moments—for example, a young girl watching a lasso demonstration or the writhing drama of underwater hockey.
Or consider Tykkä’s Power, recently shown at AUT University’s St Paul Gallery. It’s a work of genuine oddness but with real heft. A slight young girl is immersed in a boxing sparring session with a much larger and more powerful man. You are waiting for her to have her block knocked off. The sense of unease is compounded by the fact she is topless. Half the size of her combatant, near-naked and outmatched, this young woman becomes a symbol of any number of mismatches being played out in the world today.
That it is filmed in the syrupy period black and white style last seen in Scorsese’s Raging Bull only adds to the work’s resonance. You, the viewer, are free to pick any metaphor from the cinematic or ‘real’ worlds to unlock some meaning.
Another great work to hunt down is American artist Erik Levine’s compellingly awful More Man, a work that will be scarily close to the bone for many Kiwi blokes. The roughly 15-minute video consists of an endless succession of teenage American football teams being verbally blasted by their coaches for ‘not fronting up’, ‘playing like girls’ and various other sins against the macho code. Bug-eyed and frothing, the coaches’ pre-game and half-time tirades on the themes of manliness or the apparent lack of it produce a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer documentary on the sanctioned bullying and gender stereotyping in much so-called ‘team’ sport.
It is not a pretty picture. It is, however, the perfect illustration of why video art is the preferred style du jour for many younger artists.
Once we believed that the camera never lies but now, as we see in every bogus tornado newsflash, that idea is under threat. The next evolution of the visual arts is a response to the fakery, digital manipulations and ‘black arts’ of the mainstream media. Today’s video art is an assertion of the primacy of the real in opposition to the fantasy broadcast nightly as news.
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