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Straight to VideoTo reach the Manhattan gallery that represents video artist Althea Thauberger, you have to walk past the frosted windows that front the pristine white interiors of the heavyweight galleries, beyond the shuttered nightclubs to an industrial canyon where shipping trucks lurch between loading docks. It’s an unlikely place for an art gallery, but search carefully and you’ll find a door marked John Connelly Presents. Inside, a swarm of people are making their way through a darkened room at the back of the gallery to see Thauberger’s latest work, Zivildienst ≠ Kunstprojekt (Social Service ≠ Art Project). Thauberger, who divides her time between Vancouver and Berlin, first found critical acclaim with Songstress, a compilation of musical performances sung by celebrity hopefuls whom she found through a classified ad and filmed in lush settings around Victoria, B.C. Her new piece is grittier: A contingent of young German men appears trapped in a black and white world of scaffolding. Without uttering a word, they clump up and down the structure, working and playing together, falling out into two separate factions and then reuniting. The performers are actually part of a Zivildienst program that lets conscientious objectors complete social work instead of mandatory military service. Their sense of being trapped isn’t fabricated. It’s been more than 40 years since South Korean artist Nam June Paik invented video art. He filmed Pope Paul VI’s procession through New York in 1965 with a Sony Portapak camera and played it back for an audience at a Greenwich Village café. Since then, influential artists like Janet Cardiff and Colin Campbell have swapped canvases for Walkmans and camcorders. As late as the 1990s, though, it was still a fringe medium. Sure, it was interesting, but was it art? In a high-definition YouTube world, new media and technology have become more accessible than a set of paints and brushes. The next generation of video artists, including Montrealers Adad Hannah and Pascal Grandmaison and Vancouver’s Rebecca Belmore (who represented Canada in 2005 at the Venice Biennale of Visual Art), is building on the legacy of people like Cardiff, not to mention Stan Douglas and Rodney Graham. “It’s become more acceptable as an esthetic medium in terms of the galleries embracing it, but also more accessible,” says Catherine Elwes, the London-based author of Video Art: A Guided Tour. Last year, New Yorkers packed mainstream theatres to watch art provocateur Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, a 135-minute work starring Barney, his girlfriend Björk and a massive amount of Vaseline. Contemporary art collectors like software maverick Peter Norton – who reportedly displays video art in his bathroom – are going digital. Last year, a still shot of Brad Pitt in his boxer shorts from a Robert Wilson video graced a cover of Vanity Fair. Even the vanguard J. Paul Getty Trust is expanding its audiovisual conservation wing. Where early pieces were often introspective, Thauberger, Hannah, Grandmaison and others are now making them interactive. Thauberger arranged for the young German men to serve as performers for part of their work terms. No one is merely a performer; everyone onscreen is also an author. And Thauberger collaborates with her subjects for weeks or even months to develop a script. “It’s a way to think outside the world of contemporary art and to bring different worlds into collusion,” she says. Thauberger’s slick, cinematic films contrast with the photographic style of Grandmaison, whose tightly framed images feel at times unsettling. Last year, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, when Grandmaison showed Air – a work featuring disconcerting close-ups of a woman’s skin and eyeballs – he upped the intensity by raising the floor and lowering the ceiling of the gallery to induce claustrophobia. (Air will be part of his solo show at the National Gallery of Canada this November, followed by a growing string of shows across Europe.) Manipulating the audience’s physical response is natural for Grandmaison, who deals in repetitive motions and fragments of images. “For me, the film is often just like a photograph with a little bit of time in it,” he says. Adad Hannah also plays with the conventions of traditional photography. In Still, he rigged a video camera to play back images of people in the room as long as they stayed in one place; if they moved, the image would disappear. But he’s best known for the similarly titled Stills, a series where people onscreen are caught in mundane tasks like washing a car. To the casual observer it looks like a photograph – until you notice the waver of an arm or the blink of an eye. With conventional film, “you’re able to suspend your disbelief and your eyes are told where to go,” says Hannah. “But with my videos, you have more time to wander around the image.” Later this year, he’ll film another series on museum-goers at Museo del Prado in Madrid. Back in the darkened gallery in New York, Thauberger’s audience gives commentary. “It’s different than her other work,” comes one voice. “Darker,” responds another, approvingly. They’ve seen her work before. In the blackened space, the stomping of shoes on scaffolding punctuates the silence, and no one makes a move to leave. Write to us: letters@enroutemag.net |
