Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Though Fargier is often seen to be a highly-articulate defender of European narrative video and a major innovator of the literary video, it is fairly important to underline that his experimental significance as an image-maker focuses primarily on his sustained imaginative desire to locate some of the more critical principles of video as they particularly apply to the spoken work. Fargier, in his profile oeuvre, specifically in major works like Robin des voix, Joyce Digital, Robin texto (1987), and Things Seen (1985) is motivated by a fundamental question: how best to use voice in video? His answer is to deploy sparingly rare and beautiful images and manipulate them in a fashion reminiscent (in the words of the artist) of "a horse running". Images that evolve gradually demonstranting video's entrancing ability to show, to quote Thierry Kuntzel, "the time that takes to pass".

Fargier's videography is situated somewhere (as he once indicated) between Godard and Avorty. Central to his art of video is his consistent neo-Paikian objective of analysing the conceptual, visual and radiophonic ramification of Joyce's (post) modernist aesthetic of discontinuity, double-voicedness, space as space time (something which has broader implications here. As Maureen Turim has recently outlined, reminding us that modernism in the visual arts emphasised a well-defined interactive relationship between temporality and spatiality) and relative simultaneity. Therefore it is important to note that the Joycean-Paikian connection to Fargier's work emblematised in ironic, playful and suggestive terms in Joyce Digital, and more recently, in the artist's own documentary portrait homage to Paik in Play it Again, Nam depicting Paik's performance homage to Beuys centres arounf Finnegan's Wake (Fargier's description of the novel as a "nocturnal remake of Ulysses" is quite apt given the function of collage aesthetices and the double operating in both Joyce's and Paik's work). Finnegan's Wake's valorisation and the double operating in both Joyce's aesthetic of impenetrable decentred hetereogenity, chance, indeterminancy and strategies of hesitation has not only coloured Fargier's and Paik's work, but it has influenced (to a considerable degree) the overall concerns and direction of contemporary video. 

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "9º Festival Internacional Videobrasil": de 21 a 27 de setembro de 1992, p.40, São Paulo-SP, 1992.