Video Sculpture in Germany Exhibition opens at the Modern Art Center
Attention! Your ideas about the world of art could turn out to be wrong. Or, in other words, any fact (or, rather, as it is now fashionable to say, artifact) of art is impossible without wrongheaded ideas about it. It is now already clear that the ideal correct picture is one created without anyone’s participation. Actually, a computer, a VCR, or some similar device differs from the hammer by its ability to act independently.
That is why with the somewhat strange term, video sculpture, the accent should be placed on video, for the sculpture is certainly a completely different situation for both artist and onlooker. The question in general should be put differently, for its context is totally different. Here, for example, we have Buddha watching television — is this a vision or a problem? Does the breakthrough granted along with the frequency of so many megahertz per second have something to do with any new esoterica or art? It appears that it does, for here are all the external parameters of ritual precisely like at the exposition itself: people concentrating, noisy speeches, white walls, and unhurried movement from one exhibit to another. Here we have a horse and a gentle deer in one harness.
Still, Buddha Watching a Candlestick Television might be a good symbol of the exhibition as a whole, just as its author, Nam June Paik could be held up to symbolize the whole trend of video art. Video art owes its birth to the talented Korean-American artist. It was precisely Nam June Paik who as early as in 1960s began creating works unprecedented for that time, using a TV-set and a video tape recorder as both material and tool. In parallel, he was perfecting the technology itself, having created, for example, the world’s first video synthesizer. But, and it is worth repeating, it was not the pile of fancily twinkling TV-sets demonstrated at the exposition (some time ago these very installations brought fame to Pike) and not even the interactive video toy. It looks very simple — a joyful pudgy Buddha vis-a-vis an empty television set with a burning candle instead of a picture tube inside. And Buddha looks into this TV- set, feeling good. Similarly, the whole exhibition recalls the smile of this almost cartoon-like demigod, because the visual effect of the German video sculpture exudes a comfort in perception on the verge of complete nonexistence, a ghostly parade, the conveyer of benign spirits. Requiem for an Oak resounds, with the oak eternally burning onscreen, twinkling with effect in the dark hall. Or take Video Guards by Anna Anders with its only two-dimensional phantoms onscreen, diligently watching the emptiness. Steadily aging and decaying female bodies are found in the work Arachne-Vanitas by Franscisca Megert. In To Dulcinea by Jean-Francois Gitone the same TV sets are juxtaposed to the fake windmills. Or finally one is offered practically a black hole of narcissism in No Name by Dieter Kissling as two cameras and two monitors showing each other to each other. Perhaps the equipment can really make friends with itself and even love itself (incidentally, who just wrote this line — me or my computer?)
Sometimes the small is seen at the distance too. Actually Video Sculpture in Germany by itself is just a part of the much more grandiose Media Art Festival that took place this summer in St. Petersburg, Russia. There an incomprehensible picture was presented, an accumulation of equipment stuffed with megabytes of most incredible information. No sculptures, no canvases, films, photo paper, nothing of the kind. Only monitors, processors, keyboards. Some computers and videos served as the mirror, some as imbeciles or executioners. It seems that once again that either a new kind of art or one more toy was born there: soon everybody will pass to the video and graphics editors in order to create facts of art as impeccable as the cows’ mooing on the eighth day of creation. This is no joke. Buddha is gazing into the candle television set. Buddha is old, he could not care less. For him the whole world is the bad television. Media art, video art, video sculpture — it could well be precisely this very fragmented kinescope that reflects the twinkle of so many brains.
Brains that so far still belong to us.
