Tag Archives: video

Learned behaviour

Posted on by
Reply

Hetain Patel, Dance Like Your Dad, 2009

Hetain Patel, To Dance Like Your Dad, 2009

At some point, all children copy adults. Admittedly, this doesn’t usually take the form of restaging a parent talking about their work, but that’s the basis of Hetain Patel’s To Dance Like Your Dad, a simple but effective video work shown at Frieze by Chatterjee and Lal. Shown on two screens, the work consists of Patel’s father showing us round his place of work and explaining what happens. Patel himself appears on the right hand screen, performing his father’s role in sync with the original. The parent and child relationship is seldom simple and while we may be fiercely proud of our parents they also have the capacity to embarrass. Here there is a sense of pride and respect in the act of restaging – and in filming Patel senior at work in the first place – but the notion of potential embarrassment is right there in the title. Dad dancing is generally not a good thing, after all.

Continue reading →

Closing the gaps

Posted on by
2

Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979, 2012

Elizabeth Price, The Woolworths Choir of 1979 (still), 2012

With the end of the year rapidly approaching and with the start of the academic year having provide rather too hectic for me to manage regular blogging as well, now seems like a good time to close some of the gaps by looking back at some of the art I’ve seen but not written about this in 2012. And where better to start than with the Turner Prize – which in fact I have already written about but for MostlyFilm rather than here – and with the work I correctly predicted would win. Of the work in the Turner Prize exhibition, other than Paul Noble’s Nobson drawings which I’ve seen from time to time over the years that he’s been making them, it was Elizabeth Price’s The Woolworths Choir of 1979 and that I was most familiar with having seen it quite by accident at MOT International earlier in the year. That encounter was an intriguing one; I’d headed to Bond Street to see, I think, Nancy Holt or maybe Jamie Shovlin at Haunch of Venison and had a enough time to spare to pop in to MOT without having checked what was on there.

Continue reading →

In painful pursuit of beauty

Posted on by
2

Marina Abramovic, Art Must be Beautiful, 1975

Marina Abramović, Art Must Be Beautiful, 1975

The female nude is an all too familiar figure in the history of Western art. There is a lot that is troubling about representations of the female form in art and the notion of beauty as an essential facet of art. Seen in the context of this, Marina Abramović’s Art Must Be Beautiful is an intriguing work. Abramović is seen brushing and combing her hair, repeatedly and with an intensity that makes the performance – or the video documentation of it – really hard to watch at times. Abramović accompanies the often violent hair brushing with a mantra ‘art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful’. The notion that art must – or at least, should – be beautiful remains a quite widely held belief albeit one that has been widely challenged over the last hundred and fifty years or so.

Continue reading →

The other side

Posted on by
Reply

Mark Wallinger, Threshold to the Kingdom, 2000

If there’s a hellishness to When Parallel Lines Meet at Infinity that makes it possible to see  Mark Wallinger’s journey through the underground as a journey to the underworld, then his work Threshold to the Kingdom can be seen as representing an altogether better passage to a different world. The journey here is a simple one – through a set of automatic doors into the arrivals hall at London City Airport – but it is made in slow motion and to the accompaniment of glorious choral music which gives the arrival an uplifting feel. Some are greeted by friends, others pass through to continue their journey alone but there is a feeling  of calm even when it briefly looks like paths might converge and collisions occur.

Continue reading →

In the round

Posted on by
2

Mark Wallinger, When Parallel Lines Meet at Infinity, 1998

While I’m still on a transport theme, however tenuous some of the connections have been, it seems relevant to ponder a work by Mark Wallinger that I saw in his Whitechapel show however many years ago that was (yes, yes, Google would know) and which has stayed in my mind but refuses to quite come into sharp focus for me. What I remember is a wall sized video projection of the view from a Circle Line tube train as it went round in circles. Standing watching the tracks as we travel forward along them is a slightly giddying experience. There’s no sense of separation. And there’s always something slightly vertiginous about a wall-sized projection; the lack of the framing device of the wall around the edge of the projected image means there’s a strange sense that this is a world we could pass directly into.

Continue reading →

Art about art – Mel Brimfield: Between genius and desire at Ceri Hand Gallery

Posted on by
1

Mel Brimfield, Vincent (Portrait with Fur Hat and Bandaged Ear), 2012

Mel Brimfield makes art about art in a very different way to others that I’ve written about here before (the reworkings of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress by David Hockney and Yinka Shonibare or Gregory Crewdson’s remained Edward Hopper picture, for instance). As with Shonibare’s Diary of a Victorian Dandy, Brimfield’s work is performative but there’s a humour in the work that feels more connected to Nina Katchadourian’s Self-portrait as Sir Ernest Shackleton though in Brimfield’s work the performances are collaborations between artist and performer. The resulting works – photographs, videos and sculpture – reference not only the artists Brimfield is looking at but also our ideas about art and the way the artists have been represented in films. Brimfield’s exhibition Between Genius and Desire at Ceri Hand Gallery Project Space – the gallery’s first show in London – gave me a lot to both think and smile about.

Continue reading →

In a state of flux

Posted on by
Reply

Allan Kaprow, Poster for Fluids: a Happening by Allan Kaprow, 1967

While Francis Alÿs choose to melt ice the hard way, he’s not the only – or the first – artist to make art from ice melting away. In 1967, Allan Kaprow staged a Fluxus ‘happening’ in which enclosures were built from large blocks of ice around the Los Angeles area; they were then left to melt away. Kaprow advertised the event in advance to find volunteers to help build the enclosures, a major undertaking given their size.

The event was documented photographically – by Dennis Hopper (yes, that Dennis Hopper) – but essentially this was an event to be experienced in real life rather; it existed for those who were involved in the building process and in a different way for those who came across the ice enclosures before they melted away.

Continue reading →

All in a day’s work (from something to nothing)

Posted on by
2

Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis I (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997

It’s the idea of making art by making a journey that’s brought Francis Alÿs to mind now. Alÿs is an artist whose work I find fascinating. It can be funny, moving, thought-provoking and, in a couple of cases, really quite alarming. And quite a few of his video works are all about the journey. I’m pretty sure I’ll write about other works by Alÿs at some point but the idea of the dismantling and remaking of the shed in Simon Starling’s Shedboatshed (Mobile Architecture no. 2) in my mind, has made me think about Alÿs turning something into nothing by making a journey.

In fairness, a block of ice in Mexico City stood a proverbial snowball’s chance in hell really, but Alÿs has made facilitating the act of disappearing the ice into a pleasingly futile act through the application of hard work in the hot sun.

Continue reading →

Secret spherical screens

Posted on by
3

Lindsay Seers, installation view of Entangled² at Turner Contemporary, 2012 

Seeing Lindsay Seers’s work is never straightforward. Her work is essentially video but it’s never as simple as watching something on a monitor or projected onto the gallery wall. Entangled² is no exception. Unlike previous works I’ve seen, Seers hasn’t built a space within a space to contain the work here. Instead it’s shown in an existing part of the gallery building but one the publicity material refers to as a ‘secret location within Turner Contemporary’. There are screenings every half hour; those wanting to see the work are met in the foyer and led out through the car park to the space. While this is something that could easily irritate me, I’ve found all the work I’ve seen by Seers so far really intriguing so I quite enjoyed loitering in the foyer and wondering who else was on a Seers-seeing mission. And, a real plus, it mean that the whole audience was in placed and headphoned-up before the piece started which meant no distracting comings and goings during the film. So far so good, but what about the work?

Continue reading →

Today, tomorrow and yesterday

Posted on by
7

The unmediated sea at Margate.

There’s something compelling about the sea. It looks so flat and innocent but it demands our respect and we know how violent it can be. But even on the dullest, stillest day, I think I could stare out to sea for quite a long time without getting bored. Standing outside Turner Contemporary at Margate, Mark Wallinger’s Sinema Amnesia is watching the sea this summer and showing it back to us in the form of The Waste Land. The installation takes the form of a shipping container supported by scaffolding and not trying to pretend otherwise. There are references to cinema not just in the title but also the signage but otherwise it’s essentially just a black box in a car park in a run-down seaside town, albeit a car park outside a contemporary art gallery.

Mark Wallinger, Sinema Amnesia installed in Margate, 2012

Continue reading →