Hazel Friedman
VIDEO might have killed the radio star, according to the Buggles – that irritating bubblegum group of the1980s. But at the opening of Scramble, an exhibition on the video as art medium, not even the most sophisticated of techno-conceptual strategies could match the power of live performance. This took the form of a group of skollies who staged a fight in order to highlight issues of violence and racial stereotyping.
This piece of urban guerilla theatre functioned less as a precursor to a video artform (video artist Tracey Rose planned to video the responses of the audience) than as an effective example of cultural intervention.
Yet Scramble’s agenda is geared more towards education than provocation. Co-ordinated by Clive Kellner, Stephen Hobbs and Marc Edwards (both Edwards and Hobbs participated in the show), it clearly tries to provide an historical and contemporary overview of an art medium which has been around the rest of the world for approximately thirty years. It also raises – sometimes inadvertently – problems pertinent to a country which still perceives the medium as a window onto a new world of artmaking.
For example, there are few video artists practising in this country. Which means that while the rest of the video-art scene around the western world might have progressed towards using the medium in a more self- critical fashion, South Africans are still at the gosh-wow phase of video-art evolution.
Even the most flippant dabblings in this artform are accorded a status they might otherwise not deserve. And efforts to engage with video less as a recording instrument than a viable artform all too often remain in the realm of well-intentioned failures.
This is despite the fact that video theoretically makes for the most user- friendly artform, communicating both a sense of on-the-spot documentary urgency or contemplativeness, as well as exploring issues of psychological space and ephemerality. Understanding the medium – if not the language – is most certainly within reach of a nation intimate with the language of television.
Except that these works do not allow for passive consumption via a pre-digested narrative. In showcasing the history of video art via the works of Seventies pioneer Nam Jun Paik through the endeavors of Vito Acconci and Bill Viola, Scramble tries to chart the criss-crossings of video as both narrative and conceptual strategy.
But conceptual, non-narrative and experimental film in itself has flourished since the 1920s. Dadaist painter Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique, produced in 1924, is an imagistic dance of ordinary objects transformed into abstract images. And artists like Salvador Dali made surreal “trance” films, packed with dense, disturbing, dislocated and incongruous images.
Today, the tradition continues, high-tech style in Sam Taylor-Woods Method in Madness, for example, which focuses on the dialectic between sight, sound, action and reaction. Filmed in a domestic lounge, it consists of a single shot of one character in the throes of a nervous breakdown, enacted against a serene soundtrack.
The intensity of the captured moment juxtaposed against the incrongruous music constitutes the focal point of the work. But the disjunction does not merely occur between music and subject. Rather, it lies between the absence of literal story and the imaginative narrative the viewer imposes on the action in order to extract sense from it.
Then there is Cerith Wyn-Evans’s portrait of a male model auditioning for a Kim Wilde show in 1995. The subject could just as easily be a rent boy strutting his stuff with cupid- like pout, insolent slouch and quivering lower-lip. The viewer is not guided by narrative beacons, but is positioned – alongside the absent Wilde – as voyeur.
In contrast to the exlicit decadence of Wyn- Evans work, Steven Hobbs’ Four Channels Surfing evokes a surreal sense of urban ephemera. The images are mediated through a porous screen separating the viewer from the television set – as though simulating sight from behind a curtain.
As flashes of green, red and blue appear almost randomly onscreen, the viewer becomes mesmerised by the abstracted plays of colour, diffused and dislocated from their source.
Yet the most titillating video on exhibition – apart from The Passing by Viola – belongs more in the ambit of music than art. A sharp, witty blend of editing and image superimposition, the Leger-influenced video revolves around the German avante-garde group O Hi Ho Bang Bang.
But while subtle references to surrealism and conceptualism abound, even the uninitiated would respond to this work on the most primal of levels: its performance value and its refreshing departure from the plodding, self-conscious semantic clutter that characterise much of the other work on show.
The video exhibition Scramble is on at the Civic Gallery in Braamfontein, Johannesburg, until October 29