Here's a question: Should we expect more or less from video art-typically edgy, projected film or digital media-than we do from painting and other more traditional, more static art forms? More because it is a dynamic, expensive art, full of light, motion, endless effects, technological possibilities and implications? Or less because it is a transitory, common medium, difficult to differentiate from TV and movies and the kaleidoscopic imagery that busies the cityscape with regularity and inundates us with messages of advertising, news and a middling, bland, indulgent self-reflectivity?
Judging the success of all art forms from the same general perspective (engagement? composition? beauty?) occurs as the immediate answer.
Yet like many things outwardly similar in appearance and demanding some mechanism of assessment (varieties of skiing competition, varietals of wine grapes) success in one subset demands slightly different skills and conditions than success in another. For me, video art is one of the most difficult and challenging art forms to consider; too much of it is created from pure geek factor and I've often found myself in a museum surrounded
by wall-to-wall flashing images and throbbing sound, feeling vaguely nauseated and wondering what the point is. In other
words, video is a medium that has to justify its own use-is there something in the content of the work, some message the artist is delivering that can't be delivered in an easier, simpler, more intuitive manner?
Fortunately there are at least three video artworks that meet and transcend this criteria in
Embodied: Seven Studies in Video
at the Museum of Fine Arts (107 W. Palace Ave., 476-1144).
First, there is the well-chosen entry piece to the exhibition,
Very Convex
, by Rob Shaw. By using a discreet camera to capture the hallway and anyone approaching the exhibition and then projecting them onto the facing wall, Shaw immediately engages viewers with a beautiful, undulating hive structure of cells populating the space around a shadowy representation their own bodies. Though the piece is simple in construction, it is elegant in appearance and though it is entertaining, it also pushes farther, providing a visual sense of heavy, energetic molecules bouncing through the world, a playful storm of energy through which an interconnectedness is realized.
Manifold
by Peter Sarkisian is the exhibition's eye-popping star for pure visual presence. Six projectors address a massive three-sided hourglass, within which the bodies of nude men and women are alternately folded, sucked and temporarily suspended in a blue multi-planed conundrum of bending rays and space-time. Sarkisian creates, with astounding facility, an accessible physical representation of high-minded physics and, more to the point, melds the blistering edge of conceptual science to human anxiety about time and space on a mundane, emotional level. Sarkisian's concern with traditional film gives his work a potent narrative quality and the artist's hand as director is evident-and appreciated-in a way that reveals a great majority of contemporary video work to be muddled, floundering and unfocused.
Suffering from none of those problems is
Hybrids
by Ligia Bouton, an artist who works in whatever medium compels her. Perhaps because video is not a sole source of expression for Bouton,
Hybrids
is straightforward, powerful and hilarious, using the medium for what it offers the artist, unconcerned with reciprocity. Bouton, actually three Boutons, stand facing the viewer with heaps of clothes at their feet. In frantic, speedy bursts of activity, the three put on wild, ensemble outfits (a sweater, scarf and hat; a purple gown; a tutu) and adjust hair and hems and then stare blankly forward for several beats before once again diving into a new, recombined fashion cross-pollinization. Without overboard effects-wizardry, demanding much space or insisting on immersing the viewer in a total environment, Bouton both mocks and seriously engages issues of identity, self-perception, beauty, the intersection between what's personal and what's public and the perceived demands inherent in both spheres.
If the remaining work in the show is, strictly speaking, less successful than these three standout works, it's not to detract from the success and excellence of the show overall. By way of example, from my own perspective,
Celestial Bodies
, by Steina, is overdone. Having a full room to itself, like Rob Shaw's work it captures the viewer, making audience subject, and uses distortion and delay to create a spectral ethereality that is funhouse charming. But half the room is consumed by muddied video filters reminiscent of '80s music videos (think A-ha's "Take on Me"), immensely detracting from the overall impact.
Not so for a group of children I encountered squealing with pure delight at the piece. I'll wager those kids will remember their experience forever and so will their parents. Not only is a child's awe more than worth the price of admission but it's a desperately needed notch in the belt of contemporary art and just the sort of thing our museum is there to do. Maybe later those kids will even be willing to look at a painting or two.
