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Biennale. A review.
Jul. 24th, 2010 01:41 amVIDEO ART. Fucking video art all over the place. Cockatoo island is an incredible environment, and it would be unthinkable that, if you were some fancy contemporary artist faced with the awesome privilege of being invited to exhibit there, you wouldn’t attempt to engage in some way with that environment. And the way that most of the artists engaged with the environment in this case was to find a dark room and put a fucking screen in it.
Artists, I’m calling it now. I’m annoyed. If what you have done consists of a film, especially a narrative film with a beginning middle and end that would benefit from being watched in that order, and if your film does not interact with the environment in any meaningful way, and it does not need any special conditions to view (array of different screens, projected onto a 3D surface, etc), what you are doing is not “video art”. What you have made is called a short film. You can enter them into film competitions and festivals, which will be a much better venue for them. There, people will be able to see your hackneyed fairy tale appropriation from beginning to end, replete with its somewhat problematic gender stuff and dwarf casting, just as you intended it. Rather than walking in halfway through. Not that it would help you, Kataryzana Kozyra, you hack.
Despite this, there were a couple of video pieces that stood out. The first was Tsang Kin-Wah’s The First Seal – It Would Be Better If You Have Never Been Born. A simple idea but well executed: the ceiling of the room is divided by beams into a 4x4 grid. To whispering ambient music, a glowing word appears somewhere on the ceiling, then fades away (do you see, Kataryzana? Projecting onto something other than a screen!). Then another. Then another. Then a whole phrase, and another. The phrases follow on from one another. Then two at once. The music gets louder as the phrases multiply. Then they start moving, subtly at first but becoming a writhing mass of worms as the soundtrack reaches horror movie proportions and the words themselves become increasingly aggressive. Eventually they converge on the central beams, moving in straight lines, becoming more numerous and intense until the individual letters disappear and become a giant glowing cross (Kin-Wah has some issues with christianity). Sinister, and worth standing in a room and staring at the ceiling for 5 minutes for.
The second video thingy that caught my attention (rather than wrath) was Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, which most definitely was a movie, and a big budget one at that, but I’ll forgive that for its use of ten double sided screens. I only stayed for about 25 minutes of it, and have no idea how long it actually goes for, but it is an intensely visually interesting meditation on the distances that people cross and the desperate measures they take to find a better life, and on the things they leave behind.
And that’s all the time I’m going to give here to video installations, apart from a special mention to Russian art collective AES+F’s Feast of Trimalchio, which depicts an allegorical collapsing capitalist empire with all the decadent glossiness and faux culture of a “classy” advertorial. Which makes it a bit creepy to watch.
Sculptures, though! There were not nearly enough sculptures there, but even the simplest of them were much more effortlessly interesting, simply for existing in the already interesting surrounds of Cockatoo Island, rather than trying to compete with the environment, as screens tend to do. The best and simplest incorporated the act of exploration, such as Choi Jeong Hwa’s enchanted forest of green colanders.
Disappointingly, though, two of the most popular interactive pieces - Kadda Attia’s climbable rooftops and Brook Andrew’s jumping castle/war memorial - had both been closed because people had interacted with them too much.
Which is a bit dumb.
On the bright side, here is a picture of an exploding car:
Cool guys don’t look at explosions, etc.
There is more, but I’m tired.
So, overall, there was some interesting stuff, but also some rank stuff. Cockatoo Island is the best venue in the entire world and it is being criminally under-utilised here. More pieces need to be brought in that actually work as part of the space. Street artists know how to make this work. Why are “legitimate” arty types so tonedeaf when they step outside the contextless white space of a gallery?
Artists, I’m calling it now. I’m annoyed. If what you have done consists of a film, especially a narrative film with a beginning middle and end that would benefit from being watched in that order, and if your film does not interact with the environment in any meaningful way, and it does not need any special conditions to view (array of different screens, projected onto a 3D surface, etc), what you are doing is not “video art”. What you have made is called a short film. You can enter them into film competitions and festivals, which will be a much better venue for them. There, people will be able to see your hackneyed fairy tale appropriation from beginning to end, replete with its somewhat problematic gender stuff and dwarf casting, just as you intended it. Rather than walking in halfway through. Not that it would help you, Kataryzana Kozyra, you hack.
Despite this, there were a couple of video pieces that stood out. The first was Tsang Kin-Wah’s The First Seal – It Would Be Better If You Have Never Been Born. A simple idea but well executed: the ceiling of the room is divided by beams into a 4x4 grid. To whispering ambient music, a glowing word appears somewhere on the ceiling, then fades away (do you see, Kataryzana? Projecting onto something other than a screen!). Then another. Then another. Then a whole phrase, and another. The phrases follow on from one another. Then two at once. The music gets louder as the phrases multiply. Then they start moving, subtly at first but becoming a writhing mass of worms as the soundtrack reaches horror movie proportions and the words themselves become increasingly aggressive. Eventually they converge on the central beams, moving in straight lines, becoming more numerous and intense until the individual letters disappear and become a giant glowing cross (Kin-Wah has some issues with christianity). Sinister, and worth standing in a room and staring at the ceiling for 5 minutes for.
The second video thingy that caught my attention (rather than wrath) was Isaac Julien’s Ten Thousand Waves, which most definitely was a movie, and a big budget one at that, but I’ll forgive that for its use of ten double sided screens. I only stayed for about 25 minutes of it, and have no idea how long it actually goes for, but it is an intensely visually interesting meditation on the distances that people cross and the desperate measures they take to find a better life, and on the things they leave behind.
And that’s all the time I’m going to give here to video installations, apart from a special mention to Russian art collective AES+F’s Feast of Trimalchio, which depicts an allegorical collapsing capitalist empire with all the decadent glossiness and faux culture of a “classy” advertorial. Which makes it a bit creepy to watch.
Sculptures, though! There were not nearly enough sculptures there, but even the simplest of them were much more effortlessly interesting, simply for existing in the already interesting surrounds of Cockatoo Island, rather than trying to compete with the environment, as screens tend to do. The best and simplest incorporated the act of exploration, such as Choi Jeong Hwa’s enchanted forest of green colanders.
Disappointingly, though, two of the most popular interactive pieces - Kadda Attia’s climbable rooftops and Brook Andrew’s jumping castle/war memorial - had both been closed because people had interacted with them too much.
Which is a bit dumb.
On the bright side, here is a picture of an exploding car:
Cool guys don’t look at explosions, etc.
There is more, but I’m tired.
So, overall, there was some interesting stuff, but also some rank stuff. Cockatoo Island is the best venue in the entire world and it is being criminally under-utilised here. More pieces need to be brought in that actually work as part of the space. Street artists know how to make this work. Why are “legitimate” arty types so tonedeaf when they step outside the contextless white space of a gallery?
