Because NEA funding cuts recently prompted Art21.org to stage a telethon, because this is fundraising season (a number of non-profits, included Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, had their annual auctions, galas or other fundraisers this month), and because I’m preoccupied with MOCA’s recent Transmission L.A. festival — which I mentioned in last week’s column –, I wrote the below. It originally appeared on Art21′s blog.

Screen shot of Debo Eilers and crew performing "My Little Sunshine" during the Art21 Telethon.

When I tuned into the Art21 Telethon this past Sunday, the 8-hour performance-filled fundraising marathon had been live-streaming for just over 3 hours and brought in just under $4,000. Curator and co-host Miriam Katz, wearing a great silky floral top, was saying, “Our next act was going to be an animal act but I think there was an issue with insurance.” Instead, artist Debo Eilers’ crew was setting up nearby amidst microphones and floor mats. They were wearing white tunics like hospital gowns and red animal masks that made some look like turkeys and others like floppy-eared dogs.

“You can [perform] however long, but right now longer might be better,” said artist Ronnie Bass, the “official” host, who had conceived the telethon along with Katz and Art21 artist Tommy Hartung, after NEA budget cuts left PBS programming financially crippled.

“And since the act that didn’t come was supposed to be an animal act, if you want to put in an animal theme, that could be helpful,” Katz added.

Then everyone seemed confused for a while, and Katz accidentally blocked the camera as the group slowly began singing “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine” in childlike voices. It took a while before they were in unison. One of the performers beat the wall with a strap and held a strobe light, and continued to do this after the song ended, until Ronnie said “Thank you” and re-explained to viewers how to donate.

The artists featured in Transmission L.A. posing outside MOCA

I tuned into the telethon right after leaving the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art’s Geffen Contemporary, where the 19-day Transmission L.A.: AV Club, a festival funded by Mercedes Benz and curated by Beastie Boy Mike D., was on its last legs. It actually, weirdly, had a vibe similar to the telethon, a mix of confusion and free-for-all comfortability.

The festival was free, so people wandered in and out of MOCA at will. Artist Tom Sachs had designed a DJ booth that was out front, and galleries were full of video and light work (hip stuff — like Cory Arcangel and Takeshi Murata, who made even filmmaker Mike Mills, with his montage of appropriated pop images, seem like the fogey), and a black box theater in the back, where Lauren Mackler of the alt space Public Fiction had staged a series of performances. When I arrived, artists Ali Prosch and Meghann McCrory were “setting up” for their performance No Signal in Mackler’s black box. At least, I thought they were setting up — the set up turned into the performance so seamlessly that I didn’t notice at first. The artists wore all black and slowly moved scrims in front of lights, turned on projectors, and started up a fan that would rotate and cause fluttering, glittery light to move around the room.

Ben Jones video installation at Transmission L.A.

It was a durational, always-in-progress light show that ended with disco balls and tap dancing, and people felt free to walk into and leave whenever. (A little girl gasped when one rotating black box was disassembled to reveal a disco ball, but the same little girl lost interest and was ushered away by her mother about three minutes later.)

A lot of people wandered into the performance from next door, where the new Mercedes-Benz Concept Style Coupé was on display. The Coupé had debuted the festival’s opening night, and it now sat under lights that flashed on and off to the cues of specially composed music you could listen to by putting on headphones suspended under spotlights. You could also, apparently, touch the car — I watched a young-ish blond guy in board shorts spent about five minutes trying to close the back door he’d opened while three security guards stood on with arms crossed, not helping.

Because of these cars, the strobe lights, the Beastie Boy curator, an L.A. Times article and rumors I’d heard, I was sure Transmission L.A. was a durational fundraiser, what Art21’s telethon might have been if corporately sponsored and planned by a rapper. Why else would a museum debut a luxury car in its galleries? I put this fundraiser theory in print before I realized I was wrong.

Transmission wasn’t a fundraiser. MOCA would not benefit financially (at least, not significantly). The luxury cars weren’t a sponsor’s self-promotional push, I was told. They were there to be experienced like everything else in the galleries.

“LA is all about car culture. The tricky thing is to get people out of their homes,” says Mike D. in the Transmission A.V. leaflet. “[W]e’re trying to create this all encompassing sensory-rich environment.”

It was sensory-rich, and people did come out. And it was fun to travel through the mish-mash of cultural strata and sensibilities (luxury car, DJ, performance artist) and try to understand how they related to each other. But I didn’t know who had the power (MOCA, Mercedes, Mike D., the artists?), which is why, when I went home to live-stream the telethon for the evening, I felt less antsy. There, people who cared had the power: artist were raising funds for arts programming and mostly soliciting pre-exisiting art fans to do so.  Who knew a fundraiser could be a relief?

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: 21 arches, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

The majority of her sculptures are towering structures that dwarf the spectator as if one were standing in a forest. Barlow dilutes the nature of her mundane media by her exquisite use of color, whether included by virtue of fabric, electrical tape or spray paint. For siege, Barlow exhibits her characteristically massive structures as similar to pieces I have seen previously, such as untitled: 21 arches (2012) and untitled: crushed boxes (2012). In pieces such as untitled: balcony (2012) and untitled: broken stage (2012) however, she adds more of a tangible architectural thread that differ slightly from her conceptual-based sculptures. Her work mimics the urban environment in both materiality and the nature of the imposing structures that swallow – or impede upon – the viewer.

Phyllida Barlow, untitled: crushed boxes, 2012, Polystyrene, cement, scrim, paint & varnish, variable dimensions, Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth

With pieces such as untitled: crushed boxes (2012) Barlow depicts weight through the manner in which her boxes pile upon a fabric cushion, thin or bulging in parts, depicting the sensation of being crushed. Her work maneuvers within a certain corporeal consciousness similar to the work of Eva Hesse or Robert Morris in which the weight – or the interior – of the body is made manifest through the use of material. With aspects of both Arte Povera and Minimalism, Barlow’s work is sensational in its rawness, and though I rather missed the space at Hauser & Wirth London that added an irreplaceable dimension to her work, Barlow’s structures are not to be missed in the immense setting of the New Museum’s spaces.

On the third floor, Tacita Dean’s (b. 1965, England) exhibition entitled Five Americans explores the theme of preservation and memoriam through filmmaking as it intersects with various artistic mediums such as painting, writing and dance. By way of 16mm films, Dean features five influential American artists spanning several generations: Julie Mehretu, Cy Twombly, Leo Steinberg, Claes Oldenburg and Merce Cunningham. Works such as Edwin Parker (2011) and Manhattan Mouse Museum (2011) follow artists Cy Twombly and Claes Oldenburg respectively in their studios, spaces that despite the aura attached to these renowned artists by name are places of quotidian banality of comings and goings.

Tacita Dean, Manhattan Mouse Museum, 2011, 16mm film, color, optical sound, 16 min, Courtesy of the artist, Marian Goodman Gallery, New York/Paris and Frith Street Gallery, London

There is an aspect of prescience in Dean’s works, as each are bound by a common thematic thread that deals with the notion of expiration. For instance in The Line of Fate (2011), Dean sits with art historian Leo Steinberg as he finishes his last book about Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo before his death months later, a fact unknown at the time when making the film. This is a similar case with Edwin Parker in which Dean films Cy Twombly in his studio amongst what would be his final artworks during his last months alive. Even in her other works albeit more subtle, the theme of preservation becomes contingent upon the cognitive artistic process that she poignantly captures.

The Parade presented by Nathalie Djurberg (b. 1978, Sweden) with music by Hans Berg (b. 1978, Sweden) is found in the museum’s next-door space ‘Studio 231’. In an eccentric field of dazzling puppetry, a parade it is. A snaking trail made up of hundreds of exotic and fictitious birds scatter the floor under spotlights, frozen in mid-preen and warble. Each bird installation – whether sparrow or human-sized – has the craftsmanship of a Julie Taymor theater prop, with each muslin feather painted in an ombré of fanciful hues. Alongside her puppets, five animations are projected on the walls playing to the discordant melodies of Hans Berg’s compositions.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Immediately upon entering the space, the menagerie comes alive with the eerie tinkering of chimes, a soundtrack that gives life to the nightmarish aspect of Djurberg’s mad animals and sinister animations. Her animation videos typically depict women as the central character in an anti-heroic role, often times as victims of absurd cruelty flecked with sexual overtones. Her videos feature handmade puppets both animals and humans, crudely rendered from clay, fabric, string and dolls hair, with lumps, bumps, spidery limbs and clownish faces. The Parade as a body of work exists in a similar abject vein as her various other works, yet in this exhibition she focuses on the avian rituals of flocking, mating and pageantry. Her videos portray explicit aspects of cruelty, betrayal and greed, in which her characters – both animal and human – play out instances of physical and psychological savagery.

The Parade: Nathalie Djurberg with Music by Hans Berg, 2012, exhibition view: New Museum

Djurberg’s work is brilliant in its manner of transparency. I am taken with the way in which she casts a light on the undesirable or abject aspects of human and animal behavior as the cynosure of her métier. And as usual, Berg’s musical compositions coupled with Djurberg’s claymation videos and theatrical installations presents a captivating mastery that dutifully emanates from their projects time and time again.

Phyllida Barlow’s siege runs through June 24^th, Tacita Dean’s Five Americans runs through July 1^st and The Parade by Nathalie Djurberg with Hans Berg runs through August 26^th. For more information visit the New Museum’s site.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

The revamped Museum of Contemporary Art Australia opened its doors with Marking Time, an exhibition exploring time, duration and mortality.

Jim Campbell’s ‘Last Day in the Beginning of March 2003’, a reimagining of the last 24 hours in his brother’s life, is a transfixing experience. One enters the dark space into the sound of rain.  Pools of flickering light illuminate wall texts identifying single moments such as the slamming of a car door, windshield wipers, the sound of a car radio, the lighting of a cigarette. Apparently random, banal – even meaningless, until they are connected by other texts identifying moments of nausea, anxiety, and the monitoring of medication levels to become a compelling, mysterious narrative. Lights rhythmically dim and brighten, suggesting the ways that memories of traumatic events blur over time, becoming disconnected and fragmentary.

Tatsuo Miyajima’s ‘Death Clock’ is chilling. 10,000 participants entered personal information in a ‘contract’ with the artist, nominating a time to die which activated their own ‘death clock’, an online countdown of their remaining seconds. 500 still images and 3 screens show the inexorable progression of each human life towards the inevitable. Like a 17^th century Vanitas, this work forces each viewer to confront their own mortality.

Tatsuyo Miyajima, 'Death Clock' (detail) 2011 - 2012, 500 black and white framed photographs, 3 LCD screens, 3 programmed Mac minis Image courtesy the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia © the artist

Katie Paterson worked with Osram to develop a unique bulb that emits light identical to a full moon. Consisting of 288 halogen lightbulbs with frosted, coloured shells, simulating the colour of the moon’s glow, and a single hanging lit bulb, ‘Light Bulb to Simulate the Moonlight’ is evocative rather than confrontational. If each bulb burned out one by one they would last for 66 years, the average human lifespan when Paterson made the work in 2008. Daniel Crook’s ‘time-slice’ video work ‘Static No. 12 (seek stillness in movement)’ starts with an elderly man performing morning Tai Chi in a Shanghai park, and develops into an alternate reality where physical matter dissolves into a viscous digital abstraction. Time is stretched like toffee and the laws of physics appear entirely mutable.

Lindy Lee’s ‘weather drawings’ are suspended scrolls which have been exposed to fire and water. Works such as ‘Conflagrations from the End of Time’ reference the teachings of Buddhist masters who likened the universe to an infinite net. In some works intricate patterns are created by holes burned in the paper with a soldering iron, casting lacy shadows on the wall behind them. They are suggestive of the movement of constellations across night skies and the passage of rain and wind. Burnt and stained surfaces reveal the processes of their creation – Lee leaves her scrolls of paper outside in the rain and the sun allowing time and natural phenomena to make their marks.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time', 2011, paper, fire, Chinese ink, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

In similar vein, Rivane Neuenschwander‘s ‘Continente – Nueven – Continent – Cloud’ consists of a false ceiling, lit from above, containing small fans and thousands of tiny white Styrofoam balls. Activated by timers, the fans blow the balls around the ceiling in great drifting clouds.  Audiences are invited to lie on the floor watching the slow movement which at times evokes ink dissolving into watercolour paper, or the movement of leaves or grasses in the wind,  suggesting the ephemerality and fragility of both the world we inhabit and ourselves.

Lindy Lee, 'Conflagrations from the End of Time' (detail) 2011, paper, fire, image reproduced courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Jennifer Steinkamp, "Moth, 5," 2012. Computer generated light projection. Approximately 7.5 x 10 feet.

Standing within Jennifer Steinkamp’s most recent solo exhibition, “Moth,” at ACME (Los Angeles, CA), I was reminded of this detached relationship with actuality. Esteemed for her captivating 3-D animation projections and installations, the new media artist has steered away from her recent room-engulfing environments for something quieter, though still digital. A few swatches of tattered fabric are suspended by unseen pins, silently fluttering and twisting in a simulated breeze. Their pastel hues evoke a Southern spring, like garments abandoned on the clothesline for the alluring indulgences of a lazy afternoon. Steinkamp’s mastery of movement simulates the kind of nostalgic hypnosis found in nature’s many gestures – a beckoning tree branch or a nodding lilac coax you to stay for awhile, like a child meandering through the park. “Moth” is alluring in its unpretentious grace, the cloth reminiscent of a neglected, tangible past, elegant despite its imperfections. Hinting at the nettlesome insects of the same name, “Moth” brings to mind abandonment, or human experience left to decay in favor of e-simulacra. Consumed by a persistent need for a personal repository, we often overlook the ephemeral in our desperate plight for eternal imitation – a notion best illustrated by Steinkamp’s moth-eaten textiles, which reveal a reoccurring choreography after several moments.

Jennifer Steinkamp, "Moth, 2," 2012. Computer generated light projection. Approximately 7.5 x 10 feet.

Much like “Madame Curie,” (2011) the artist’s recent commission for the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, “Moth” alludes to the increasingly complex kinship we share with nature and technology. While both share the unwavering observation of time and evolution, each faction poses ever more conflicting interpretations of mortality. Whether our sensory consciousness or our intellectual annals prove our livelihood remain to be seen; until then, we may continue to twist in Steinkamp’s imitation wind.

“Moth” is on view at ACME through March 10th, 2012.

Mazu, Silence (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves is a nine-screen video installation interweaving three seemingly discrete narratives that explore the migratory journeys of people whose impetus for movement converges on the sole need to fulfil utopian desires for a better life. Set against the contrasting backgrounds of the blustery northwest coast of England, the rush hour in Shanghai and the misty bamboo forests and mountains of the Guangxi province, Ten Thousand Waves’s motivating incident and first filmic narrative is the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, in which 23 Chinese migrant workers drowned while picking cockles at the seashore in England while Wang Ping’s poem, specially commissioned for this work, is intoned over Julien’s images. In the second filmic narrative, Julien re-interprets the classic silent movie The Goddess (1934) – a euphemism for a streetwalker – whose protagonist (played by actress Zhao Tao) struggles with her chosen occupation in order to support herself and her son. In the third story, an ancient sea goddess Mazu (played by actress Maggie Cheung) believed to be the saviour and protector of fishermen and sailors in the Southern Chinese provinces, soars above the mountainous Chinese landscape.

Blue Goddess (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

Ten Thousand Waves, 2010, Installation view, Bass Museum of Art, Miami. Courtesy of the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. Photo by Peter Haroldt.

But if the 55-minute film tests the endurance of any gallery visitor, its heavily down-sized counterpart, shown simultaneously at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery (VWFA) white-cube space as photographs/stills from the film, neglects the fundamentals of this monumental work: the labyrinthine, imagistic spaces of nine, double-sided screens positioned strategically to “frustrate the ontological gaze of the spectator” (in Julien’s own words), within which the viewer experiences the truncation of traditional, linear cinematic narratives. In fact, the freedom of audience movement between screens subverts any attempt to establish a coherent narrative and sets up instead, a poetic interplay of images competing for visual dominance that tell of the migratory experience across the installation space.

Yishan Island, Dreaming (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Unhinged by the lack of context and the significant immersive engagement provided by the film, there’s the hazy sense that VWFA’s wall installation’s inevitable emphasis could only be photography’s proclivity for the duplicitous. In the film, Julien readily draws attention to the level of artifice that is merely hinted at in the photographs in VWFA. If it seems as though Ten Thousand Waves ostensibly indulges in rehashing Sino stereotypes  (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s cinematography for western spectatorship comes to mind here), it is just as quickly dispelled by footage of the production process that Julien weaves into the show. Against a green screen, Cheung dangles on wires in a film studio in front of a green screen while her long dark hair blows around her with the help of a wind machine. But while the dissolution of the mythical fantasy of Mazu serves as an ironic allusion to the oblivious Western articulations about non-Eurocentric Others, Mazu admittedly remains, in this globalised era of transnational capitalism where film grounds much of popular culture, a reminder of the highly marketable paradigm of Asian self-representation.

Green Screen Goddess (Ten Thousand Waves), 2010. Courtesy of the artist, Metro Pictures, New York and Victoria Miro Gallery, London

***

Isaac Julien (b. 1960) is a British filmmaker whose work incorporates different artistic disciplines in audiovisual film installations. Ten Thousand Waves: Photographs by Isaac Julien will be on show at the Valentine Willie Fine Art Gallery in collaboration with the Victoria Miro Gallery until 26 Feb 2012. The film is presently showing at the ICA Boston until 4 March 2012.

Show card for "Hybrid Narrative" at Mac Arthur B Arthur, in Oakland, CA, 2012.

Sight, acknowledgment, and shared experience all figure prominently in Hybrid Narrative: Video Mediations of Self and the Imagined Self, currently at Mac Arthur B Arthur in Oakland, CA. Artists Liz Rosenfeld, Chris E. Vargas, Sofia Cordova and Shana Moulton make themselves “seen” though video, film transfer, installation and performance.

Liz Rosenfeld, Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), 2005.

Rosenfeld’s Untitled (Dyketactics Revisited), a 16mm film transfer to video, brings us to another time both via its material, and the performers themselves . A near-direct reenactment of filmmaker Barbara Hammer’s Dyketactics (1974), Rosenfeld’s work is non-narrative and lyrical. A small group paints their faces, necks and arms, and bind themselves with tape in what appears to be abandoned urban and industrial spaces. The short film is an analgesic; these desirable and compellingly filthy bodies lull and please, but also unabashedly idealize. Untitled recalls the ‘70s not just in its aesthetic but also in its evocation of community – Hammer’s original film sought to make visible the 1970s lesbian-feminist art coalescence. Rosenfeld’s work is decidedly queer and pictures a similar community present at the margins of the larger contemporary art market.

Chris Vargas, Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before?, 2010. Video still.

Chris Vargas uses his body comically in Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? (2010). The artist visits several photo-worthy locales, each with particular artistic or pop-culture significance: the LDS headquarters in Salt Lake City, the Las Vegas strip, the salt flats of Utah, a windmill noted as “Americana,” and – most notably – Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1976). In each location, he asks the uninhabited space “have you ever seen a transsexual before?” – pulling up his shirt and exposing his chest. Vargas grows increasingly frustrated with the lack of response, dramatically flopping on a hotel bed or scurrying out of frame. Have You Ever Seen A Transsexual Before? takes an unanticipated turn via the artist’s frequently used low-fi green screen technology, transporting Vargas to other, faraway locales as he searches out and finds a Painted Bunting, a bird native to the American Southeast. The brightly colored bird is, in this writer’s humble opinion, pretty gay.  They are also easily misread as exotic or distant by the untested eye, although they remain ubiquitous throughout much of North America – perhaps an interesting parallel for one’s sexual or gender orientation.

Whispering Pines 10 – Trailer from Shana Moulton on Vimeo.

Time and place are also critical to the show’s other two works, Sofia Cordova’s installation and video, Fiebre Fanta [Fanta Fever] (2011), and Shana Mouton’s series Whispering Pines (2004- 2011). Cordova’s installation includes black-and-white prints (including what might be a picture of the artist as a toddler), a video projection with stuttering images, an electric palm tree, and the sound of storms, running water, and club music. The jumble of media brings to mind how identity traverses time and place: the artist, as a baby, particularly butch in a white A-shirt, and then again, recognizable as her “self” in the ostensible present.  Moulton also splices time and fantasy with the early ‘90s splatter paint, faux marble madness that is Whispering Pines. The TBN-worthy soundtrack and ample use of clip art both critique and revel in technology, not to mention self-help literature from the recent past and notions of beauty.

Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo. Screen capture using Google Earth.

When I was a child, I spent countless hours poring over a Cold War–era National Geographic photo atlas. I traced every road and river, in every country, some which no longer existed or were currently in the process of brutal disintegration (à la balkanization). Sometimes, when I was really lucky, a country would be represented by two or three photographs. Some countries earned no photographic representation. Nonetheless, these photographs helped me learn that Thai women had really long fingernails, Brazilian men wrestled anacondas naked, and Africa was an untamed land bereft civilization and modernity. This photo atlas provided a seven-year-old me with irrefutable evidence about my world, but it also left so many questions. Malawi and Kyrgyzstan had no photos; what were they like? As I grew older these questions became more nuanced: Are all Algerians really Tuaregs? Might South Americans actually wear clothes? Are Western Europe and the United States as idyllic and perfect as the amber waves of grain imply? As much of a colonial travesty as that book was, it sparked an intense interest in the world and provided me with enough information to later deconstruct its own narrative.

Jump forward a few decades. Croatia is firmly established as a tourist hotspot, Dubai is megalopolis, and Burma is now Myanmar. So much has changed. We also now have a qualitatively different kind of atlas: Google Earth. This new atlas—a seven-year-old technology that allows me access to every nook and cranny of the planet’s surface—ostensibly offers a potential antidote to the inaccuracies of older atlases. This computer software exposes the mysteries of the world; every single village, building, and street on the planet is immediately viewable to me, save those hidden beneath thick canopies.

Prior to photography, atlases were geometric abstractions, lines representing places that were theoretically real, but unconfirmed to those people who had never been to them. The dragons and mythical creatures that sometimes populated these maps speak to their susceptibility to distortion and myth making. But with the advent of photography, people believed they could see the unmediated reality of these places. Photography offered a form of documentation that then (and now) carried more authority than technical illustrations. A “higher” form of knowledge was now available. But as my childhood photo atlas shows in hindsight, nominal and highly selective representation does little to demystify those places we’ve never been, and this epistemic pitfall can be found in Google Earth as well.

On the surface, Google Earth is far from a medieval abstraction aided by a few self-fulfilling photographs. When I look at the Congo, I see it exactly as it was at a distance of 2,300 feet on Tuesday June 29, 2010. Google Earth also contains millions of geotagged photos. Provided primarily by tourists and amateur photographers, these images offer much more than a bird’s eye view of a particular locale. In many parts of the world, Street View offers an even more in-depth view. While planning a potentially hypothetical trip to Monaco, I traveled around the streets of Monte Carlo noting where restaurants and adequate parking are (note: there is a lot of one, and very little of the other). By having an on the ground look, I will know that town inside out before I even land in Nice.

Does this deluge of specific, visual information foster only an armchair interest in the world? Why even go to Monaco? I’ve seen it. So what is left of the experience? I can visit San Diego if I want warmth, visit Vegas if I want wealth, and visit Napa if I want wine. Does our easy access to so much information about the places viewed render them “known” and negate our search for a deeper understanding of a place or a visit to it?  However, my desire to visit Monaco—or Saint Helena, or Iceland, or the Mongolian steppes—is not diminished one bit. That intense yearning to learn more about these places and really see them (whatever that means) still persists. This suggests two things: that there is something more to the places we visit than what we see, and that there is something lacking in the apparent omniscience of the digital atlas.

Boulevard Princesse Charlotte, Monte Carlo, Monaco. Screen capture using Google Earth.

There is really no easy way for someone in Monte Carlo to document her experiences of taste, touch, and smell. Sight and hearing, on the other hand, are easier senses to capture; images and sounds less complicated to disseminate. It is easy then to equate places with their sights, those buildings, monuments, and natural wonders that are named for the sense that we most associate with them. And until virtual reality and holograms are perfected, the first-hand experience of a distant place is absolutely unattainable. So while I am zipping down the rues and avenues with Street View, I am missing out on the sounds of the horns and seagulls, the mild Mediterranean breeze, the coconut scent of the artificially buxom and bronzed starlets, and the taste of the latte that tops it all off. More importantly, I am missing out on the first-hand experience of all it all. I engage in no conversations with locals, no arguments with merchants, and no drinks with fellow tourists. That is, all that I enjoy about visiting a place is completely missing. Even sightseeing, the most Flickrable activity imaginable, is nothing without the phenomenological experience of feeling the mass or the emptiness of a building in the pit of your stomach.

Yet we use Google Earth as much more than a surrogate for tourism. It is a compendium of knowledge about the world—knowledge that may provide the basis of how we think about the world. Popular, specious knowledge says that to see is to believe and that a picture is worth a thousand words. By my count then, Google Earth is worth untold billions of words, constituting many, many beliefs. Given the scientific satellite imagery and seemingly exhaustive photo documentation provided, viewers may erroneous take these “beliefs” to be objective approximations of the world when sometimes they are incredible aberrations.

For example, North Korea is a starving nation. It has been reported that in 2011, authorities reduced the daily caloric intake for each individual to 700, or one Venti Double Chocolaty Chip Frappuccino from Starbucks. The average official salary for workers is $2 per month. The country is wracked by poverty and oppression, but Google Earth provides scant acknowledgement of this. To the uninformed, the geotagged photos of Pyongyang provide evidence of a wealthy nation. Magnificent architectural achievements abound, great stadiums suggest that the city may have once been host to the Olympics, and nary a starving child is to be found. Ever the skilled curators, the North Korean government finely crafts how the rest of the world sees it. They disseminate few images from their country and those few outsiders who are allowed in are taken on highly orchestrated and monitored tours that show them only what the officials want to be seen. In turn, these visitors can only rarely (and very illegally) document those starving and dying in the streets.

Disneyland, Anaheim, California. Screen capture using Google Earth.

But even outside dystopian societies, Google Earth remains a world of selective documentation. Take, for example, the city I was born in. It has a population of over 300,000. It has shopping malls and theaters, rich and poor neighborhoods, hospitals and offices. Some of this is made visible by Google Earth, but very little. The reality of this city is almost entirely obfuscated by an eighty-five acre lysergic Zion: Disneyland. To Google Earth, outside of Disneyland, Anaheim and its hundreds of thousands of residents do not even exist. This phenomenon can be found, to varying degrees, in every city in the world.

The fact is, most of us simply do not photograph liquor stores and gas stations. We photograph that which we find interesting and that which we think others will find interesting. This leaves us with a digital photo atlas of the world that is entirely unreal. The slums of Anaheim are not photo worthy, nor are the well-kept buildings of Freetown, Sierra Leone. All regions of the world are affixed with preexisting narratives, and tourists, journalists, and Google users often reinforce these narratives through the photographs they shoot and share.

But let us not forget the lesson of my childhood atlas. While it promoted a racist and NATO-centric view of the world, it nonetheless gave me knowledge for critiquing that very viewpoint. I must first know that Freetown exists before I can even imagine challenging how it is represented to the world. After witnessing countless photos of shanties and dilapidated buildings in Freetown on Google Earth, I eventually came across a photo of a sleek, Mies van der Rohe–inspired bank building—a stark contrast to the narrative of a rural and bush sub-Saharan Africa. But then again, thank God for the photos of the shanties; it would be a tragedy to forget them.

Zenith Bank, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Screen capture using Google Earth.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Recently in the San Francisco Bay Area it has been impossible to walk down a street without running into (or trying to avoid) someone protesting something. The messages range from concise to ironic, sardonic to flat-out fed up. In the undulating sea of abridged manifestos, there is the rare message so poignant that it demands the sign-bearer’s cause receives deeper consideration. Geoff Oppenheimer’s current exhibit at Ratio 3 Gallery, Inside Us All There is a Part That Would Like to Burn Down Our Own House, presents a reductive, politically-driven narrative filled with violence, chaos, nationalism, pageantry, existentialism and self-reflection. The title may be a mouthful, but it creates an interesting opposite to Oppenheimer’s expertly edited works, and sets the tone for the show as a whole.

Installation View, Geoff Oppenheimer, "Inside us all there is a part that would like to burn down our own house," 2011. Courtesy of Ratio 3 gallery.

Depending on when you enter the gallery, your initial sensory experience will most likely be one of two things: visual or auditory. For some, a minimalist installation of sculptures and photographs will greet them. Others will not be able to ignore the deafening cacophony of marching-band instruments streaming from an invisible source. But we’ll get to that later.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Anthems," 2011. High definition video; TRT 0:04:40; Edition 1 of 3 with 2 APs. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

The two bodies of work in the main gallery, Social Failure and Black Signs and Modern Ensembles, act as examples of how conceptual art can effectively function. The images in the series Social Failure and Black Signs are almost identical—black-and-white studio scenes of a hand holding a black sign with bold, white text. At face value, each piece holds an intriguing, reductive beauty. After learning the origins of each work, a satisfying sense of quiet epiphany develops. Each sign has a different fragmented statement that Oppenheimer chose from interviews with political figures such as Regan, McNamara and Castro, in which each man discusses the failures of his ideology. Devoid of any of the expected contextual information associated with protest signage, the images transition to an interior plane—a subconscious battlefield on which each person struggles with the contradictions of his actions and beliefs.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

In dimensional and aesthetic contrast are the rectangular sculptures of Modern Ensembles. Oppenheimer made each piece by detonating various custom charges of explosive chemicals inside ballistic Plexiglas. The resulting cuboids are three-dimensional cross sections of a distinct explosion. By containing the blast, Oppenheimer makes us witnesses to a frozen moment of violence. Additionally, the time it takes to view the pieces’ six sides allows for the consideration of the relationship between space and time—an explosion takes place in an instant, yet with each ensemble, we are able to stop time and find the curious beauty in the chaos.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Social Failure and Black Signs," 2010. Pigment print 34 x 24.8 inches; Edition of 3. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

After or during your time in the main gallery, you will undoubtedly start hearing the sounds of Oppenheimer’s video piece, Anthem. Tucked into the side gallery, the projection features a marching band playing four different national anthems. Instead of hearing them in succession, Oppenheimer layers each anthem so they play simultaneously. The resulting meta-anthem and/or non-anthem is an assault on the senses. In the video, figures fade in and out of opacity, overlapping into an accumulation of tan and brass. Each anthem, recited with pride, becomes a futile attempt at nationalism—not one can be distinguished from the others. The longer you watch, the louder it gets, as if each anthem is competing to be heard. The notes crescendo to an unintelligible roar, and then, as if overwhelmed with sound and light, break into white silence.

Geof Oppenheimer, "Modern Ensembles," 2010–2011. Gunpowder, blackpowder, smoke dyes, ballistic plex, and aluminum; 20 x 23.25 x 23.25 inches. Image courtesy of Ratio 3.

Oppenheimer’s work truly benefits from deeper consideration. While each piece stands on its own, the combination of the three series, plus the title, opens an investigation into a part of all of us that maybe we are not very proud of: the part that never lets us forget we did something wrong, the part that would like to burn down our own house.

Bischoff Soren Black installation image, 2011. Image courtesy of Johansson Projects

The current exhibit at Johansson Projects is how Oakland often seems; vibrant, mysterious and disorienting, with an underlying hum of recognition. The title of the show, BISCHOFF SOREN BLACK, when said aloud sounds like it could be part of a chant or spell, or the name of some mythical creature, when it is simply the last names of the three featured artists, Brice Bischoff, Tabitha Soren and Ellen Black. The works of all three artists combine to create a narrative of time, space, humanity and chaos.

Brice Bischoff, Bronson Cave VI, c-print, 2011

Upon first entering the gallery, you’re confronted with the contrast of Ellen Black’s stark, abstract geometric sculptures housing small video screens, and the dreamy cave interiors created by Brice Bischoff, that look like he was somehow able to get a whole rainbow to sit (relatively) still long enough to release the shutter of his camera. The caves filled with the unintelligible blurs use the magical capabilities of photography to illuminate and emphasize the mystical, contrasting qualities of caves and the light that fills them. The depth of each location anthropomorphizes the earth’s occupants before living creatures evolved – giving  life to the elements.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 15759-3, pigment print, 2011

This quiet, pre-human interaction between earth, fire, water and air crashes into the violent un-worldliness of Tabitha Soren’s photographs. By inverting the images, Soren presents us with a tumultuous world that brings to mind the primordial soup from which we all came. With water crashing everywhere, it is sometimes hard to firmly orient oneself on the ground, causing the same kind of uneasiness one feels when stepping off a boat after being on the water for hours.

Tabitha Soren, Panic Beach 06734-20, pigment print, 2011

As soon as you feel like you’re finally getting a grasp of what is going on, Ellen Black’s video installations throw you back into the abstract. The white containers that hold her tiny video screens are more like quantum cubes than “boxes,” with edges and corners jutting out as if an unexpecting polygon was frozen while in transformation from one shape to another. The video pieces reflect their containers’ fluctuating desolation, with bleak beach scenes layered on top of other geographic scenes that break through the video’s digital deterioration, while miniature silhouetted figures wander with no apparent purpose across the landscape, some may be playing or drowning in the surf.

Ellen Black, Last Summer, single channel video, 2011

The experience of viewing the exhibition is one of quiet turmoil in contrast with the inherent beauty of the natural world. Like watching a video of a forest fire with the sound off, you know that something destructive is happening, but you know it will lead to regeneration. And of course there’s no denying how beautifully mesmerizing it is.

BISCHOFF SOREN BLACK will be on view at Johansson Projects until October 15, 2011.

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

I remember arriving at college as a bright-eyed freshman and recognizing familiar faces within moments. It was not because I went to a small school or because I had met these classmates at orientation events in my hometown, but rather that I had done my due diligence on Facebook. Today, not a week goes by that I don’t find myself googling unfamiliar names or wishing a friend Happy Birthday by e-card – or dare I admit it, text – rather than by phone or hallmark card. And yet none of this feels strange.

It is this unprecedented interconnectedness fostered by the digital world that CO-LAB founders Laleh Mehran and Chris Coleman take as a point of departure for their most recent project entitled W3FI. An unmistakable play on words, W3FI is a combination of WiFi, the word “we” and the slang use of the number 3 in place of the letter “e” as a nod to the digital parts of our lives. The W3FI project encourages people to consider their online identities – referred to as S3LF – and how we can use technology to interact with one another in positive ways. The artists explain, “[t]he W3FI project is much more than an awareness campaign, it is a movement in social activism to ask a new set of questions for each of us every time we click, text, or share a photo.”

In its manifestation at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, W3FI is an interactive installation in every sense of the word. The project’s central tenants are presented on the gallery walls as a series of moving texts and symbols alongside dynamic statistics about national and international use of the internet, cell phones and social networks. Broad statistics – usually difficult to grasp in real terms – are made more tangible through their juxtaposition with data that relate directly to the Boulder area. A topographic map of the region is overlaid by animated visualizations of internet use and signal data. Live tweets from local residents utilizing the words “I” or “we” punctuate the gallery walls as well. Museum visitors can become a part of the W3FI network by having images of their faces taken and integrated into an ever-growing forest of interconnected trees projected along the gallery walls. While many museum galleries offer limited seating – encouraging visitors to rapidly proceed through the galleries – seats are deliberately interspersed throughout the W3FI project space in order to facilitate discussion, learning, reading and quiet contemplation.

CO-LAB (Chris Coleman & Laleh Mehran). Installation view of "W3FI" at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Interactive Installation.

CO-LAB does not merely demonstrate a philosophy and data with W3FI. They bring this concept to bear by relying on Open Source software and hardware in designing the installation. Open Source encourages the sharing of knowledge and work by having contributors make all the files they have developed available online for others to copy, supplement and improve. Generating the terrain of Boulder for the map, controlling the glowing seats and the forest of faces on the “W3FI tree” were all made possible through various Open Source programs and hardware.

While the project unfortunately closes tomorrow, never fear – W3FI will live beyond this singular venue. CO-LAB’s goal is to continue promoting the W3FI presence in both real and digital space; online it will be represented by websites, pages and social networking media. And in the “real world,” Mehran and Coleman will continue to organize traveling exhibitions.

Didier Faustino, (G)host in the (S)hell, 2008. Video Still. Image courtesy of the Artist and Galerie Michel Rein.

as Donna Haraway proclaimed in her 1991 manifesto. The fusion of man and machine in popular culture, scientific exploration and artistic production in the late 20th century, was loaded with fear, alongside great aspirations, of genetic engineering, technological advances and mechanisms of control. However, the anxiety of the future that was expressed in 1990s art with the exploration of digital interfaces and the disintegration of the body, seems now to have dissipated – our reality of this is far less distressing than what was envisioned 20 years ago.

Black Dog Press’s recent publication and accompanying exhibition at WORK Gallery, See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception, takes up the post-humanist trajectory of art once again, but reframes it within one aspect that has largely been brushed over – the senses – and asks you to consider how trans-human prosthetics alter individual perception and the experience of reality – or what it might feel like to be a cyborg?

In Didier Faustino’s (G)host in the (S)hell, perception and appearance are altered by a relatively benign substance that through excess becomes deformative. Faustino’s video records a performance in which the artist painstakingly chews bubbly pink gum that when adequately softened, is applied to his face. With time, the sickly sweet substance turns the artist into a monster, his breathing becomes increasingly laboured, and we can only cringe at the sticky reality underneath it all – the host must truly be in hell.

Beta Tank, Eye Candy, Yellow, 2008. Image courtesy of the Artist.

Extending sweets into cerebrally triggered sensation, Beta Tank’s Eye Candy project creates a proposal for an object that is stimulating to both the tastebuds and the mind. Eye Candy aims to ‘transmit vivid emotive images into your mind’s eye’ in six distinct flavours through an electrode-laden lollipop – a fictional creation based on very real existing technology. A true synaesthetic world where image and colour are on the tip of your tongue.

Ann Hamilton, Face to Face • 28. Image courtesy of Ann Hamilton Studio.

Ann Hamilton’s curious series of photographs, Face to Face, appear, at first glance, to present the world through the aperture of the eyelid as faces hazily emerge from a distinctive frame. However, Hamilton is working with the same portal as Eyecode – transforming her mouth into a tiny, functional camera. Her ‘mouth seeing’ extends the senses of the mouth beyond taste – here becoming the location of vision.

Golan Levin, Eyecode. Image courtesy of the Artist and Bitforms Gallery

And turning vision back at you, Golan Levin’s Eyecode, allows you to see yourself seeing, and others seeing you as well. Levin’s high-tech programme unwarningly records your eye movement as you stand in front of the screen, and plays it back to you alongside hundreds of others who have stood there before you. An uncanny, and quite intriguing, experience indeed, founded in mechanisms of surveillance.

What sets these works apart from the previous generation of artists is a sense of humour and intimacy – an engagement with the body that is less founded in fear, and rather in intrigue and the exploration of potentials. The question has been reframed to curiously ask, ‘What does this feel like?’ – and the possibilities of reality presented are quite enticing indeed.

Desirée Holman, video still composite from Heterotopias, 2011, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

Along with nine, hand-selected participants, artist Desirée Holman has spent the last two years developing a series of avatars. The resulting project, Heterotopias, 2011, a video and supporting drawings on view now at the Berkeley Art Museum, refers to corporeal reality’s relationship to virtual reality, the physical process by which the digitally rendered avatar is formed, and the ironic stasis of the body whilst the imagined self is set free.  Unfortunately, Holman only refers to these ideas.  While aesthetically engaging and fun to watch, Heterotopias fails to delve beyond the surface of her topic.

Shot as a sort of music video, the participants sit before laptops in similar, homey interiors.  They dance, are transformed into both live-action and digitally animated superhero-like characters, and engage in battle with long staffs. Considering the care taken in creating the colorful and fanciful costumes and scenery, as well as the richness of the concept, a viewer expects much more from these characters than what is delivered.

Desirée Holman, Mask of Agamemnon (Diffuse Map), 2011, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

One cannot help but wonder: is sitting in front of a computer the extent of the lives of these individuals?  Even Superman’s Clark Kent has distinguishing characteristics, personal dramas and quirks.  If these avatars are an opportunity to exist in a space untethered by the bounds of the real, why do the avatars perform feats no more complex than hitting one another with sticks?

Not one of the actors or avatars has any true individuation, despite the potential offered by their appearances. The elaborately developed avatars are little more than costumes: digital exoskeletons worn by the subjects.  Holman and her participants supposedly spent a great deal of time and effort in the development of these fictions: why is the audience not granted access to this aspect of the project? We have all played video games, seen superhero fiction, or engaged in social networking sites as digitally warped versions of ourselves.  In each of these scenarios, the stories generated by fictional or semi-fantastic characters are engaging and multi-dimensional: both morally and socially complex.  We should be granted similar complexity from these characters.

Desirée Holman, Dancers Dancing in Their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons 1, 2010, courtesy of the artist and Silverman Gallery, San Francisco.

The show’s accompanying drawings are an interesting addition. Pieces such as Dancers Dancing in their Own Digital Ectoplasmic Cocoons are beautifully executed and freeze time in a manner that allows us to attempt a more in-depth connection with these individuals.  The “ectoplasmic cocoons,” incidentally, work better in the drawings than in the videos; in the latter, the pink lining on the characters as they jump between fantasy worlds seems to be a result of poor color-keying. Though not all of the works are as successful, one drawing of a costumed face alludes to information promised but never quite delivered: a man stares ahead, awkwardly, wearing a humorous headpiece.  His eyes indicate that he is unsure of the world in which he belongs, torn between his virtual self and actual self.  He is self-conscious, but nonetheless set free by his ridiculous garb.  Is this a drawing of the man, or of his digital armature?  Where in this spectrum does the drawing, and in fact, all art—itself a virtual rendition of reality—fall?

David Hockney, Untitled 26 December 2010, iPad Drawing. Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.

David Hockney included himself among the iPad’s expectant lovers. Since 2008 he’s used the application Brushes to draw on his iPhone—but what he can do with the app on the oversized model, oh. He can draw with multiple fingers and recently a stylus.

His show Me Draw on iPad is exhibiting until August 28th at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. 20 iPod touches, 20 iPads and a triptych slide loop through several hundred still lifes, landscapes, portraits and self-portraits looking, I think, especially Matisse. On display the bright screens color in the dark galleries like panes of stained glass, what else. They light like the screens we hood our hands over in movie theaters. And, how weird—to come to a museum to stare into a face probably like the one stifled on your person.

Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Photo credit: Brøndum / Poul Buchard.

One iPad drawing reads,

made for

the screen

totally on

the screen

it’s not an

illusion

I am able to watch these works come into being thanks to an animation playback feature—the ghost in the machine going through the motions again, his intense lines. Someone at my shoulder remarks, “Det godt.” It’s good.

There is no saying what the implications of this new form are for making. The form is easy-to-access and convenient-to-create. Apps aren’t messy, no. Witness this playback of Hockey’s flora, watch how it blooms to life something like child’s play. Then consider the immediacy of the process. How there is no consequence because you can choose not to “Save” and take it out of the world lickety-split.

The thing no one’s saying about this show is that it’s all more or less politeness. When art is an omnipresent file on a portable showcase, do we need to get hung up on museum walls? Obviously this is not “street”; it’s something else. Hockney likes to send his flowers and sunsets to the inboxes of friends. In fact, he has, over the course of this Louisiana show, continuously emailed new drawings to the exhibition. Unless you count yourself as an intimate of Hockney’s the museum seems like your window in. But theoretically, that won’t prove true. Maybe Hockney’s “iPad period” is not a phase.

Hockney has always had a big pocket put into his tailor-made suits, ad hoc for sketchbooks—but now that pocket is reserved for his iPad. As technology advances, I wonder if maybe what is next is subscription services. Art with a capital “a,” delivered like RSS feeds or Netflix—like milk in the old days—right to you. Pay-per-view? (Holograms?) I do not know that we can only interrogate in hallowed white spaces. It was said that no one would shop online. That the Video Home System would flop because we want to be swallowed by the cavernous theater. It wasn’t the same. And no, it isn’t the same. And yet. We can get the soul of a book without the spine. And I’m looking at a Hockney drawn on an iPad.

Bruce Nauman, Going Around the Corner Piece, 1970, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian

In the self-explanatory show entitled Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010, the history and evolution of the video art genre are recounted through 50 video works and installations, drawn from the collections of both the Singapore Art Museum and Centre Pompidou. Having developed in tandem with the apparatus of television and the analogue and then digital video cameras, video art’s reconfiguration of the politics of image-making and its ability to place the spectator as an indispensable agent in a work’s existence are significant tenets on which the exhibition is established. The infinitely widening scope and scale for the production and interpretation of (moving) images, the mode of their dissemination, and the documentation of performances (technical or otherwise), pose several key but general questions around which the works are grouped.

The pertinence of such questions however, falters in the collaborative effort that has shown up more differences than similarities. Reconciling the inventory of the Singapore Art Museum with the Centre Pompidou’s reveals the tentative forays into the processes of historicisation that are only beginning to develop in Southeast Asia and the inevitable rift in the standpoints of Western art and Southeast Asian art history. The Pompidou’s international collection stretches back 4 decades to the genesis of video art; the Singapore Art Museum’s inventory spans approximately a decade that really began with the Asian Financial Crisis (1997-8) and is focused on works produced in the surrounding geographical region. The wider ramifications of this collaboration go beyond an overwhelming inventory imbalance and the expanded visual vocabulary that video technology provides; indeed the emerging ideological differences become apparent when speculative comparison – the attempt at a comparative video-art history, should it even exist – inevitably sets in.

Pipilotti Rist, A la belle étoile (Under the Sky), 2007, © Coll. Centre Pompidou. Photo: Georges Meguerditchian.

The seeming futile effort of historicising video art in this instance, is thus mitigated by several thematic (and loosely chronological) focuses that ground the show: television critique, the representations of self, the documentation of performance, installation in space, landscape as metaphor, video-as fiction and the deconstruction of narratives.

If early efforts by video pioneers such as Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman and David Hall took the definition of an art object beyond its conventional parameters as a static entity produced for visual consumption, perhaps the greatest strength of video art triumphed in this show is the unprecedented potential of experiential interactivity between artist, installation and spectator. Peter Campus’ Interface (1972) invites the viewer to superimpose their reflection onto their projected image after which they simultaneously face 2 images of themselves – one of the video image and their reflection on the glass screen. The inherent sense of ego coupled with a measure of curiosity is a potent brew, particularly when facets of the multi-layered self are revealed in art. Like the literary Doppelgänger (the ghostly and sinister double), artists’ early efforts recognised the potential of video art in exploring the loss of existential reference in which the traditionally held view of the consecrated sense of self is destabilised. In Bruce Nauman’s Going around the Corner Piece (1972), the surveillance set-up is symmetrical and simple: perched in the corners in a white square-room are closed-circuit cameras and small TV monitors that capture visitor movements going around the corner of the enclosed space. The spectator’s image disappears from view as he/she rounds a corner; speeding up in an attempt to play catch-up with one’s image results in a unsuccessful tail-chasing endeavour – which is probably the glorious core and yet most vexing part of this work.

Peter Campus, Interface, 1972.

Departing from the investigative preoccupation with the apparatus and the monolithic hold that television had, video art had, by the 1980s, begun deconstructive strategies of memory and narratives, debunking on its way, stereotypes of sexuality, ethnicity and gender perpetuated by the very same mode. Nam June Paik’s semi-documentary Guadalcanal Requiem (1979) explores the subjectivity of memory through the deconstruction and subsequent reconstruction of narratives, in a film that coalesces history, time, cultural memory and mythology on the site of one of World War II’s most devastating battles in the Solomon Islands. Surrealistic images of archival footage, interviews, Charlotte Moorman’s fragmented cello performances come together like a scratchy Hitchcock–Buñuel/Dali crossover. The haunting collage is often fraught with poignant tension and a sense of the macabre: interviewees with singular (or paltry) memories picking up where some have left off; Moorman playing a cello with a long palm leaf against a thunderous horizon, and at another time, performs concealed in a body bag.

Guadalcanal Requiem, Nam June Paik, 1979, © Nam June Paik Estate video still Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EIA) New York

A deconstructive approach to the moving image seemed to be video art’s trajectory from the 1990s into the early 21^st century, incorporating new developments of photo processing, digital editing and image layering in contemporary visual culture. Swiss conceptual artist Pipilotti Rist’s A la belle étoile (2007) moves between micro- and macrocosms on horizontal and vertical surfaces. As suggested by curator Christine Van Assche, such works operate on removing depth of field, redefining in the process, the spectator’s own rapport with space.

Despite the influence of the commercial mainstream, video art has nevertheless, retained its earlier forms: the performance documentary, mixed-media texts, or even the visual portrait. Such forms seem conceivably better suited to the preoccupation with art’s social purpose and its context of production that remain dominant traits in Asian-produced videos; perhaps most similar to the historical Western notions where art was produced within corresponding socio-political backgrounds. Just as Gustav Courbet’s post-romanticism was a rejection of academic and bourgeois juste milieu, much of Southeast Asian works are filled with the rhetoric of social change in which media artists show no desire to be unbound from their local cultural matrices. By continuing to invoke ties to tradition, incredibly varied configurations (or even fragments) of history that appear in Asian works at best, seem to read as disjointed narratives to the viewer unschooled in the intricacies of China’s tumultuous last few decades.

Yang Fudong, Backyard - Hey! Sun is rising, 2001.

Yang Fudong’s Backyard – Hey! Sun is Rising (2001) follows the Keatonesque slapstick antics of four young men enacting military rituals and traipsing around with swords, questioning the meaning of rituals in the wake of social changes. A richer meaning however, could be gleaned from Yang’s work if considered in the light of the communism’s wane, as well as in the historical traditions of Zen, martial arts and the aesthetic disciplines of poetry, painting and calligraphy – all of which are mirrored in aesthetic form and content in his videos. Like Yang’s disoriented characters who seem to seek penance in an environment marked by repression, The Propeller Group’s Uh… (2007) confronts Vietnam’s youth culture’s adaptations to the changing socio-cultural and political landscape through the symbolic use of graffiti, and the disorder and spontaneity it represents – the antithesis of Vietnam’s ordered socialist state.

Uh..., The Propeller Group, 2007, Singapore Art Museum Collection

Manet's Luncheon on the Grass and the Thai farmers, Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, Two Planets series, 2008, Singapore Art Museum collection

While Western artists like Pierre Huyghe and Issac Julien integrated mixed media installations with the spectacular and immersive experience of cinema, Asian filmmakers also tended to persist with the use of narrative (and at times, the meta-narrative) as a didactic strategy. In Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets Series (2008), Thai farmers – groups of people blithely oblivious to the cultural or economic baggage associated with canonical works of Western art history – talk about several cornerstones of modern European painting. Their discussions of Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass (1863), van Gogh’s The Siesta (1889-90) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) are artlessly literal, context-less and extremely humourous, with the constant comical tendency to drift towards off-topic situations. Straddling the diverse worlds of rural farming and art history, Rasdjarmrearnsook raises questions of socio-cultural context, the parameters of interpretation and appreciation, but stops short of suggesting that our efforts in basting together a coherent narrative and interpretation of art are vain but significant detractors from the lost pleasure of looking.

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Video, an Art, a History 1965 – 2010 is presented by the Singapore Art Museum and the Centre Pompidou, and runs through 18 September 2011.