The
Curator's View With "The End" showing on screen and the house lights gradually coming up, you slowly rise from the comfort of the theater seat, your mind now in a much less comfortable trance-like state. No words yet to describe the experience – you feel you have just been to hell and back. This powerful cinematic trip took less than two hours: its visual beauty seduced you, and you found yourself completely absorbed by each disturbing scene along the way. Your visit to the darker side of humanity was well worth the price of admission. Now, engulfed in this post-film daze you exit the cinema, while attempting to sum up a most disquieting, yet satisfying, cinematic experience. Can an art exhibition do what a superbly "brutal" movie can? Is it possible to capture within an exhibition format the complicated emotions that permeate an oustanding film? The challeng of Moving Pictures was to create an exhibition of recent video installations which form an uncomfortably satisfying experience, and present themselves as if scenes building to a crescendo, while also showcasing an impressive group of artists and artwork in a manner that ensured each would shine on its own. Real Art Ways is a rare place, being both Hartford's best art cinema and an internationally-respected venue for cutting-edge art. The seed that blossomed into Moving Pictures was born out of admiration for this unusual situation, and respect for the dedicated patrons and members who support Real Art Ways' program of contemporary independent films. My wish was to introduce this film-going audience to other forms fo contemporary time-based art. I want to acquaint our gallery visitors with video art that becomes sculptural – in essence breaking free of the one-screen wall projection and "TV-box" look, and showcase artists who insert actual "moving pictures" into their assemblages in a mannger suggestive of the early 20th-century Cubists who likewise embedded their own popular media into works of art. Above all, I wanted to showcase this terrific group of time-based artwork, each of which more or less voids the notion of movie's requisite beginning, middle and end. Moving Pictures was also created for another community – the contemporary art world. It was curated as a response to the numerous shows that have been mounted in the past few years. Until now such exhibits have been assembled in only two modes: the first, focusing on individual artists, such as the recent retrospective by Bill Viola at the Museum of Modern Art, and the current retrospective of Nam June Paik's work at the Guggenheim Museum. More problematic is the second category of video exhibitions which include several artists, and which focus on the medium rather than the content of the artists' work. No savvy curator would consider organizing a painting exhibition in which the only link was the medium – he or she would surely narrow the focus. Yet recent video exhibitions lack any message besides, "Here's some good video art that's presently in vogue." Ideally Moving Pictures will help the cliché "video exhibit" by presenting a cohesive body of work that shares similarities other than just monitors and projectors. In fact, as much as possible, Moving Pictures hides the elaborate technology that is running the art in order to amplify the emotional impact of the scenes themselves. In Moving Pictures, it is the non-narrative portrayal of human dilemmas caused by dysfunctional relationships, detachment, and psychosis which both connect and challenge the ten pieces on view. Artists don't – and shouldn't – consider how art might someday look and be compared with other art, for a work of art is a singular thing to be appreciated exclusively on its own merits. Curators, however, must make such judgments, and are expected to pull works of art together precisely to make comparisons and to point out interesting relationships. Moving Pictures contains many connecting points. The viewer will find duality popping up everywhere: two channels, two monitors, two walls, two people. Look closely and you will see the near carbon-copy strangeness of Gary Hill's two disquieting larger-than-life figures who seem to be pondering their and our presence in the galleries. Concerned about their own being, too, are Tony Oursler's "Little People." Get close and listen to them for awhile. You wil discover that "she" is not one, but two. The "we" she keeps referring to is, in fact, the "other" one of her personalities. Next you hear from a distance a dark, heavily accented voice calling, "Ready or not, here I come!" But instead of running, you wish to find the voice that is coming form a grimy half dollar-size softly spotlighted hole in a wall. Peer through the hole and you encounter a father and a daughter, who is now a young woman, playing the game of Hide-and-Seek. Shot with a hand-held camera and portrayed from the viewpoint of the searching father – we find ourselves viewing not so much child's play as an increasingly foreboding pursuit between the stalker and temptress. Now, the father's calls to his daughter "Ready or not, here I come" suddenly take on new meaning in this work by Janine Antoni. Amy Jenkins' gallery installation "Trapped Wasp," like Antoni's "Ready or not, here I come," utilized a hand held video camera to record a home interior. But, while Antoni's work seems to miniaturize the setting by forcing the viewer to witness it through a peephole, Jenkins' installation does the reverse. In "Trapped Wasp," you aren't just looking into a house, you're there. On one of its walls hangs an oval-shaped wedding picture, which is actually a rear screen video projection. The image shown looks like a studio photograph taken of a 1950s bride. What is disquieting about this portrait is the oversized wasp trapped inside the frame with the newlywed. The insect alternates from frantic attempts at escaping from "her" confinement, to restful moments when the bug domestically washes and grooms herself seeming quite content. On an adjoining wall is a very large black-and-white video projection, which at times is "stung" with bursts of color. What you are seeing at first seems like a very middle-class home. But look again, this isn't a full scale house – it's a doll's house. This creepy scene is captured by Jenkins using a hand-held camera in a David Lynch-like way. It makes believable the sensation that we are seeing this home's interior through the eyes of the wasp. Might this obviously confused wasp be in fact yet another trapped W.A.S.P.? Being imprisoned within a bad and abusive relationship is presented in Moving Pictures as a cinematic equation to Sartre's novel No Exit. Sam Taylor-Wood in her "Travesty of Mockery," and Raul Cordero in his "Pelea Lenta (Slow Fight)" each explosively hammer this thought home. These compelling pieces each show a man and woman in battle, forcefully and continuously arguing about something. What that something is seems totally non-essential to us, or them. What's important is that there is no hope for these couples – they are surely doomed to argue forever – or at least until the movie stops playing. Peter Sarkisian's "Twilight Zone"-like motel room installation, "Roadside Series No. 2: The Isolate," and Jocelyn Taylor's poetically moving two-channel work, "Up to Now, A Blur," imply a fate even worse than arguing into eternity. These artists show us the feel of a personal purgatory walled in by aloneness. Sarkisian's piece reads like a sculptural interpretatoin of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. As painful and totally realistic is Taylor's installation. The scenes are of New Yorkers frozen in a state of sadness, set against the backdrop of the hustle and bustle of the metropolitan envirnment. The silence seen and felt is deafening. This is the stillness that comes with mourning, in this case the mourning that comes at the end of a relationship. "Out of sight" was our wish with the technological components of the artwork. But, "out of earshot" was not entirely feasible. Even as flexible as the new Real Art Ways galleries are, ambient sounds from several pieces do encroach on other artwork. Our best solution has been to control the volume of each piece, placing louder works closer to silent works, isolating some, and situating each piece where the sounds and dialogue from other installations seem plausible. Moving Pictures is a disquieting dark carnival which incorporates ten remarkable installations in tableau fashion. Seen together, their mission is to offer up a painstakingly enjoyable artistic experience – one that hopefully informs you about cutting-edge video art, but also has the psychological impact of a deliciously disturbing yet rewarding experience. Barry
A. Rosenberg
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