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 Tony Oursler  Amy Jenkins  Jocelyn Taylor  Gary Hill  Sam Taylor-Wood  Peter Sarkisian |
See the webalogue of the show Through May 14, 2000 Moving Pictures is an exhibition comprised of time-based installaions, both large and small, which explore human relations and emotions. Most recent video exhibitions have tended to be either "about" the medium or focused on a single artist. In Moving Pictures Real Art Ways presents a group of outstanding artists whose installations emotionally activate a defined space. Janine Antoni Raul Cordero Gary Hill Amy Jenkins Tony Oursler Paul Ramirez-Jonas Peter Sarkisian Jocelyn Taylor Sam Taylor-Wood Real Art Ways Delves Into The Voyeur Within Us From the Review By Matthew Damsker Special to the Hartford Courant "Moving Pictures," a display of video and film installations now at Hartford's Real Art Ways, is disturbing and fun, but mostly it's fun. That's probably because the guiding spirits here aren't the distant curators and arbiters of today's avant-garde so much as the modern masters - Bunuel, Duchamp, Hitchcock, Scorsese and Warhol, to name a few - who recognized long ago that the voyeuristic impulse was central to our interest in art and film. They also sensed that our desire to be teased, titillated and terrorized was a worthy chord for any artist to play. The ambient sound of the various installations tends to spill one into the other, enhancing the whole experience and generating a good, creepy sense of psychological distress as we wander from scene to scene and, finally, back out into the real world, which seems a little changed as a result of all that cinematic illusion. Several of the featured artists work in two-channel video to potent effect. Raul Cordero, for one, offers "Slow Fight," in which a Spanish-speaking couple, facing off via separate monitors, harangue each other in a clinical example of domestic frustration. Meanwhile, in a comer of the same large area, Sam Taylor-Wood has a two-channel minimovie of a hip young American couple, also squabbling and threatening, sulking and smoking. What the actors say matters less than that we feel complicit and a little guilty in our naked observation of their angst. On the Opposite comer, Gary Hill's "Standing Apart" features the larger-than-life double image of a tall, casually dressed man who seems mannequin-like, until his subtle, alternating changes of gaze and position reveal that this is an image of living, breathing duality. Nearby, Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez Jonas' diptych video of a couple stepping into and out of each other's footsteps as they walk along the sand offers a sweet, looping metaphor for the early idealization of a relationship. But on the wall behind it, Jocelyn Taylor's "Blur" chronicles the painful complexity of a relationship gone bad. Its characters wander through the city, in and out of focus, as a text of recrimination and self-pity underscores the action. At the extremes of "Moving Pictures," all this angst and human comedy are ratcheted into powerful abstractions. There's Peter Sarkision's roomhaunting installation, in which a man's hat sits on a suitcase while an overhead camera projects a video design of slow-shifting, blackand-white light and shadow, with the ambient sound of cars and wind fading in and out. This miniature masterwork seems to boil down the basics of film noir into a central, sculptural image - the hat and suitcase of a salesman, a transient, a father apart from his family - and leaves us writing our own script. More surreally, Tony Oursler's video voodoo uses small dolls with featureless white heads, upon which a camera projects the image of a live talking head, grimacing and delivering a pained, fragmented monologue. Oursler's dolls lay splayed on a chair or in a veritable coffin of a box, each of them spookily animated by the video illusion. We want to comfort them, touch them, gently rearrange them, but they are at once remote and remarkably present, a chilling metaphor for the power of film and the isolation of the modern soul. Indeed, such inspired pieces use video as components in a larger sculptural project, honoring the legacy of Buhuel or Dali. The pure voyeurism of film is taken to another extreme by such works as Janine Antoni's "Ready Or Not Here I Come" in which the viewer must peer through a peephole in a false wall, a la Marcel Duchamp's famed installation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. We then witness a game of hideand-seek from the subjective view of Antoni's real-life father, whose camera's eye seeks the artist as she hides in a large apartment. The suspense and growing compulsion of the game evoke Hitchcock, and a Freudian element emerges when Antoni flashes naked from beneath her mother's skirt. Similarly, Amy Jenkins' "Trapped Wasp" matches two channels of video. One is the small filmed image of a wasp trapped in a framed photo of Jenkins' mother in her bridal gown. The other, larger video is the subjective, wasp's-eye view of a domestic setting. In this case, it's the interior of a doll's house from Jenkins' childhood, with sudden "stings" of color as the insect alights on key objects. Jenkins is crafting a personal metaphor for suffocating, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant domesticity, of course, and, like her fellow artists in this show, she has a lot on her mind. But on the simplest, most delightful level, all of them are exploring the sheer kinetic charge of lights, camera, action. Video Artists Supply The Moving Pictures; Viewers Provide The Meaning from the story By Owen McNally Hartford Courant Real Art Ways' "Moving Pictures," (is) a splashy video-art show that transforms RAW's new gallery into a giant fun house/madhouse of light, sound and provocative images. In what might well be the best and the brightest light-and-sound show Hartford has seen in many years, "Moving Pictures"opens Sunday and runs through May 14 at RAW. Among (the artists) are Sam Taylor-Wood, one of Great Britain's hottest art superstars, and the celebrated Janine Antoni. A young, multitalented artist, Antoni is known to Hartford fans for her performance-art piece in 1996 in which she used her long, beautiful hair as a brush while painting the entire 1,000-square-foot floor of the Wadsworth Atheneum's Matrix Gallery on her hands and knees with hair dye. Her backbreaking performance, which made the painting of the Sistine Chapel ceiling look like an easy gig, was an enormous hit with the enthusiastic viewers who packed the museum. Each installation plays on the underlying theme of dysfunction: dysfunctional relationships, angst, despair, and split personalities. The show becomes a clever, ambient, sound-and-light equivalent of such existential classics as Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit" and Albert Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus." Paul Sarkisian's evocation of a dreary 1950s motel room, where a washed-up traveling salesman has set down his seedy hat and suitcase, is a piece of high-tech gloom and doom right out of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman." Taylor-Wood's piece, which flashes movie-like images on intersecting corner walls shows a young couple bickering fiercely. We never find out what it's all about. The scenario is deliberately fragmented, a manic deconstruction of a lover's quarrel. You stand in the corner and become a Party to the spat, which looks like an episode of "The Honeymooners" on a bad acid trip. It's full of sound and fury. What it signifies is whatever you create in your own head. Video art gives you the image. You give it the narrative. Some pieces are just engagingly goofy, such as Gary Hill's dual-comer images of a guy ogling his ordinary doppelganger, which alternates with the doppelganger contemplating the ordinary guy. Before you yawn over this ode to bipolar banality, check out Antoni's mysterious work, which is viewed by peering vouyerristically through a peephole into a domestic scene shot with a wobbly hand-held camera. Is it about innocence? Incest? Is it a sweet childhood memory? Or is this a sordid childhood incident that can be dredged up only with the help of a psychiatrist or a vice-squad detective? The point of the show is to make the viewer think about each piece and then to see how they all play off of or connect with one another thematically or aesthetically. To Hell and Back Moving Pictures poses the big, existential questions at Real Art Ways Alistair Highet Hartford Advocate "Hell," Jean-Paul Sartre famously wrote, "is other people." The line comes from his play, No Exit, where three reasonably unpleasant people find themselves looked for eternity--it's hell actually--in a tiny room with Second Empire furniture, a bit of bad sculpture, and nothing else to do but pull one another to bits, piece by livid piece. This, Sartre noted, is the human dilemma: We define ourselves in relation to other people. We cannot escape their defining gaze and become, in effect, the prisoner of the other. Put simply, if they don't like us, we feel bad. If they do like us, they distort us with some kind of transferential projection. Either way, people are trouble and it's best to avoid them when possible. Video art has exploded over the last ten years, and has opened a lot of new technical possibilities for artists, combining the atmospherics and motion of cinema with the irreducible "thereness" of sculpture. And we like to look at television sets. Most of us have been trained for decades to understand the language of television, while the language of painting, for instance, has become largely the purview of an elite. In some way, then, video art has the potential to invite the viewer into an arena of experience that is fresh and new, and for which we are peculiarly equipped. It tugs on our attention through our attachment to television, leads us down that familiar TV pathway into a place of rupture or apprehension that is beyond our expectations. Several of the pieces in this show do that. Some leave me kind of flat because the medium has limitations, too, one of which is that the video image by its nature has a way of keeping us at distance, and presenting us with the image of the thing, or person, as remote--it deals in residue. In other words, video is very good at existential nausea, though I wonder if it can ever successfully do jouissance, to stay in the French vein for the moment. It can say "isolation" and "ouch" and "alienation" but it doesn't do modesty, frailty or beauty that well. The closest it gets in this exhibit to the beautiful is Janine Antoni and Paul Ramirez-Jonas' Migration 2000, two video screens on the floor of two sets of bare feet, one following the other, through the wet sand to the sound of the ocean. Nice. The eight artists assembled here are from all over, including the United Kingdom and Cuba, and include some big names, such as Gary Hill, winner of a MacArthur Fellowship and a pioneer of the form, also the much-written-about Jocelyn Taylor, who is commonly nude in her videos, though not here. The most striking piece for me was the simplest, Peter Sarkisian's Roadside Series Number 2: The Isolate. Maybe it was so strong because it managed to evoke the sense of presence. In a dark room on a pedestal, is a gray suitcase, and on it, a gray hat. What you hear, is the sound of a clock ticking, and the swish of cars passing by the window. What makes it all work is a video projector that is pointed down on the suitcase, which creates the effect of car headlights passing outside the window. This is Willy Loman's hotel room, and the feel is uncanny. Also very strong--and richly weird--is Anne Jenkins' Trapped Wasp. You sit on a bench in a little room. On your left, is a oval-shaped screen on which is projected the wedding photograph of a woman, and as if trapped inside the oval, a largish wasp, which bashes itself against the screen in an attempt to escape. Then, in front of you, is projected a black-and-white (largely) hand-held video of the interior of a house. The wasp buzzes, the camera lights on the kitchen table, the toaster, the chairs in the living room. The wasp buzzes louder. You look at the wedding picture. David Lynch, you think. It goes on, because there is a photograph inside the house of a man, and then what strikes you is that this isn't a full size house--it's the interior of a doll's house. Video does this well--the lurching, voyeuristic, exploration of the dark corridors of desire. Again, the moving images remind us of film and television--nice, safe stuff--and when it betrays our expectation we feel struck in a vulnerable place. It's hard to find words for how disturbing Tony Oursier's work is, or how cool it is, only that I've never seen anything quite like it: A rag doll lies in a little box. The box lid is open a little bit. Projected onto the blank face of the doll is the image of a face, talking. So the little doll seems strangely human and alive, and it is talking to you: "Are you still there?" it asks. No, you think, no I'm not here. "I want to be you." It says. "I see you, but you can't see yourself." Ah yes, Sartre again. I'm sure I'm missing something in the pieces by Gary Hill and Jocelyn Taylor. Taylor's is a disjointed narrative told on two screens, with text and pictures, of the breakup of the relationship. Hill's is two large, mirrored projecting images of a man, maybe the artist, standing still. Nice blue shirt. At least, I thought, you could have something like that in your home. It's quiet, and it doesn't seem to wish you any harm. |
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