In a post-painting art world, video seems to be the medium du jour, writes Brenda Atkinson
If it is possible to distil one widely shared impression from the critical cross- currents of the second Johannesburg Biennale, and in particular of its showcase exhibition, Alternating Currents, it is this: there was a whack of video installation to get through. In fact it seemed that, by most peoples standards, you had to become the art-world equivalent of the Camel man to endure the trek from one dark, chairless viewing room to another (a journey that even became scary towards the dank nether regions of the Electric Workshop).
An apparent paradox emerges from this impression: if the ubiquity of video art suggests that it is becoming the new painting the medium du jour of contemporary art then why is it so difficult to access? On an exhibition such as Alternating Currents, which featured as much, if not more, photography, why did so many people point to video as the saturation point of their viewing experience?
Trends in the international art world do suggest that video is being embraced with some relief as a workable and marketable medium in a post-painting decade. Last year Gillian Wearing scooped cultural kudos and 20 000 when she won Britains prestigious Turner Prize for her submission of two video works. In 1996, video artist (and Glaswegian) Douglas Gordon beat Gary the revival of painting Hume to the Turner, to the consternation of art-world punters anticipating the Tates return to conservatism. Interestingly, not only has the Tate not bowed to traditionalist support of painting, it has recently added Bill Violas video works to its permanent collection.
Internationally, it seems video might be the present-perfect art form: it straddles technology and authority, concept and narrative. We recognise its lineage in film, but it offers us something new a time-based art form that can mess with time; a chronologically linear experience that allows for lateral and associative interpretation.
According to Johannesburg curator and lo- tech video artist Stephen Hobbs, Technology is increasingly encroaching on the traditional tools of the artist. Like abstract expressionism, video is about optical agitation: it bombards the senses through the eye. So why did the bombardment of the video on the biennale feel, after a while, like so much art torture? Ask anyone what happens at the end of Shirin Neshats video installation, and maybe one in five people could tell you that the praying Muslim woman pulls a gun.
I find most video boring, says Jo Ractliffe, whose four-minute work on Alternating Currents is the second video punctuating her predominantly photographic repertoire. For me, its that the conventions of looking are a problem, insofar as a lot of the stuff is unwatchable: you cant sit down, you dont know how long they are, so you cant decide to commit yourself to standing through it or not.
As Ractliffe points out, these and other factors make a lot of video seem predicated on an aesthetic of non-delivery. And while video is currently trendy and popular despite being expensive to maintain and use video artists have yet to develop a critique of their own medium and its relation to film.
The exceptions on the biennale suggest that an imaginative and critical approach to the medium, its history, and its conditions for viewing substantially affect reception. In My Lovely Day, Penny Siopis has transferred 16mm film footage to video, which is viewed in a miniature replica of a 1930s cinema run by the artists grandfather in Umtata. In the video, Siopis uses the layers of her family history to explore dislocation and exile, at the same time foregrounding the mechanisms and meaning of viewing.
Pepon Osorios mixed media installation Badge of Honor consists of two cubic spaces joined by the same wall, respectively the prison cell of a father and the over- decorated, glitzily camp bedroom of his son. A video monitor in one space faces another next door. Although the screens cannot see each other, they are the talking heads that enable a disjunctive and poignant dialogue between father and son.
On Hong Kong, Etc, at the Rembrandt van Rijn Gallery, Roderick Buchanans Soda Stream, which is viewed on a television monitor, is artfully placed at the top of the gallery staircase, underlining the works sense of spatial and psychic void.
Compared to the number of uniform spaces in which other videos were placed, these works engage the viewer spatially in a way that discourages passive absorption or mere optical agitation. In working with an art form frequently used to refer to realms of uncanny possibility beyond the frame, artists and curators need to exploit the possibilities of space, time, and relationship it offers. Surprisingly enough, it seems that most viewers would prefer to come away from video having reflected, not only on the world, but on their own place within it.