Chris Roper tunes in to Channel, an exhibition giving exposure to South African video art
Video art occupies a slightly ghettoised place in the world of art. Not many people can name its exponents, and some galleries and museums are ambivalent about its status. The Channel exhibition, currently running at the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) in Cape Town, is a perfect way to introduce the genre to those unfamiliar with it.
Using the pieces on show there as convenient examples, rather than dealing with them on their own merits, entails a fair bit of frustration, though. It’s a rich, complex exhibition. Besides large works involving more traditionally artistic elements of installation, there are videos that feature pieces by dozens of artists.
Imagine having to elide a work by William Kentridge? Or devoting a sentence (“his art is about that slapstick moment when representation breaks down”) to Robin Rhode’s very funny pieces involving performance and crude sketches? Lisa Brice, Clive van den Berg, Peet Pienaar, Anton Karstel, Amanda Williamson, many others – I’m going to have to ignore them all.
This apologia isn’t meant to function as an excuse, but to point towards fundamental debates about the status of video as art. This isn’t just the trite “is it art?” problem, but more interesting questions about how you look at art, how you frame it, and how you evolve a language to talk about it. Robert Weinek, co-curator of Channel with Gregg Smith, describes how contributor Minette Vari was irritated at being referred to as a video artist. “She said, `I’m not a video artist, I’m an artist using video as a tool.'”
An installation piece like Bridget Baker’s Stitch is undeniably easier to construe as an art object than is a videotape playing on a monitor, if only because you stand a much better chance of hanging it on your wall. Turn left into a dark space as you enter the AVA gallery out of the buskers’ bedlam of Church Street, and you are confronted by two panels of runners’ reflective belts in bright Day-Glo colours.
Phrases that include the word “run” are embroidered on the belts, such as “I do not run like a man aimlessly”, or “To whom will you r for help?” They are taken from the Bible and old letters to the artist. Over the left panel plays a video of Baker’s beautiful, serene face as she slowly runs, and over the right plays an endless stream of blurry runners. It’s a work that is peaceful, haunting and susceptible of intriguing analysis because of the many elements that almost immediately strike you as you look at it.
A video on a monitor demands a different kind of looking. In contrast to the brief encounter with a painting, you’re tempted to look for a beginning, middle and end, which can be frustrating. Weinek argues that video art should be dipped into, and experienced fleetingly. “A lot of video art isn’t about big issues. It’s about what it is, what you see.”
We shouldn’t be surprised at finding such basic debates around what is a newish genre. The informative pamphlet provided by Weinek and Smith tells us that videotape was first used in America in 1957.
Pioneer video artists included Nam June Paik, who was influenced by the music of Stockhausen and the work of Fluxus, an iconoclastic art movement of the early 1960s. Paik’s work included using magnets to create disturbances on videotape and inventing video synthesisers for manipulating images.
South Africa was a little slow in embracing video art, unsurprising in a country where ministers referred to TV as “the tool of the devil”. An early art film like De Voortrekkers by Matthew Krouse, Jeremy Nathan and Giulio Biccari (showing at Channel) was banned for years, and when shown in 1994 still had the power to cause a riot by Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging(AWB).
Histories of early video art by South Africans are sketchy, but Weinek dates a tentative beginning in the 1970s. One of the seminal video art works was produced by Malcolm Payne in 1974, and by the mid 1980s artists were showing at Johannesburg venues like the Black Sun cabaret venue in Berea.
In 1991 the Fig Gallery, started by Wayne Barker and Morris la Mantia, staged Konrad Welz’s Last Attempt at Paradise, one of the first video art exhibitions in South Africa. Barend de Wet and Hofmeyer Skolz’s short video for the 22nd Sao Paulo Bienniale was one of the first installation pieces to garner official recognition locally, and was nominated for a Vita award. (This was the same show at which De Wet urinated on an embassy official and termed it art.)
Welz, La Mantia, De Wet and Payne are all represented at Channel, which functions both as historical document and showcase of new art. Malcolm Payne’s Ten Canons of Stupidity is a meticulous, almost monumental work.
On the wall is a close-up of hands rhythmically throwing bones and shells. This image is projected over three tiny monitors fixed to the wall. One shows words scrolling down, meditations on concepts like ideology, religion and culture (and it is interesting how important the physical look of words still are to artists working in a medium that includes sound). The second shows the face of Hendrik Verwoerd floating around, and occasionally abused words with letters missing. The third shows a distorting Voortrekker monument, and the word “evil” cut up and interspersed with loaded words of political discourse.
If Payne is the serious side of video art, taking on history, memory and ideologies, Adam Lieber’s Sore Thumb is the pop side. Weinek describes Lieber (approvingly) as “just taking the piss”. On a stuffed chair, a cottonwool-covered creature with a monitor for a body and pipe-cleaner limbs watches a video. The monitor shows its animated cottonwool face, and a misshapen beastie called the Gimp is chained to its arm. The video it watches is a pastiche of B-grade movies, clumsy animation and cheesy soundtrack. At the end of the clip there is an intermission, just like at the bioscopes of old.
The piece that perhaps most encapsulates the potential of video art is Minette Vari’s Alien. Over footage taken from TV, Vari superimposes her own naked, distorting body. So a clip of AWB members waving their rifles on the back of a Combi becomes four versions of Vari, with bloating heads and melting breasts as the programmer strives to cover up the original subjects.
This artwork won a Loerie award for technical expertise, a delicious irony that points once again to the complicated, contested status of video as art.