A kid, a girl of ten or so, stood in front of the Aernout Mik video screening outside Cafe 2 at MoMA hollering over and over “What is this? Somebody tell me what this is.”
My guess is her family had already gone into the Café, but putting first things first, she needed to know what the deal was with this video before she would go in. When no one answered her I finally said, “It’s a video, kind of like a movie, of different people doing different stuff.” “ Oh,” she said, “okay.”
Apparently that was enough for her, but then I thought wait a minute, is that really it? And yes, it is. All right, maybe there’s a ton more curatorial like stuff to be said about his videos, but it really boils down to some people doing some stuff – no more no less. Which is fine, but where’s the way in, and how does it connect?
I had a Chemistry teacher who taught me to look for the connection between all things and all things. He loved to relate issues of chemistry to everyday events and even though the only one I remember is reaction rate related to urban travel (ie; walking and taking the subway) he gave me a new way of being in the world: the one of trusting in connections and believing that there is no such thing as a completely closed system .
So what would he relate to film/video art that goes no where, that seems to have the purpose of never to arrive anywhere but nevertheless insists on taking long unwinding, or hardly winding, roads? I wonder.
I’ve passed by that Mik video on a number of occasions and I find myself not caring if the current images relate to previous images, not caring if they add up to anything but forget Mik for a moment, and take instead Warhol’s “Sleep” , the king of art video/ films never going anywhere – the 5 plus hours film of John Giorno sleeping.
Where’s the connection there? I dont’ know but I’ve got a digital projector and a dvd player and a courtyard with a big wall and wouldn’t it be great to screen “Sleep” out there? I could run it in short spurts (like this youtube exerpt) or let it run continuously for the full 321 minutes .
I do get the overall part of the sixties connection since that was a time of finding the way, when it was useful, if not required, to go down endlessly long roads if only to see what was or wasn’t there. But now that we know that there’s no water route to the Pacific where does that leave us? Is the connection only to a meditation on connections. Or it it that it simply frees us to leave the magic of arrival behind, free to let film art / video art be object art?
Maybe.
Which brings to mind stuff like the John Gerrard’s work recently exhibited at Knoedler Project Space ….
TO BE CONTINUED
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly on art and other stuff 