Being more and more recognized by the artistic institutions, the videoinstallation uses the electronic image technology as a basis to develop a contemporary art. The relationship between viewer and monitor changes in a given videoinstallation, as the 2-D image moves out of its plane and expands towards the outer space in order to bring up time and motion to the scenery. The presentation of the 11 videoinstallations, quite diversified among themselves, show the broad possibilities about what could be made and is a unique opportunity to know the work of internationally-renowned artists.
In the videoinstallation Motorway, by George Snow, the viewer watches – in screens around him inside a replica of a car - fragmented images recorded in roads, mixed and reedited with other images by the author.
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Essay Michael Mazière, 1994
On the road
George Snow’s installation Motorway exhibited at the World Wide Video Festival in Den Haag (Holland) is an ironic, amusing and clever tribute to motion, travel and the automobile. While there has been an endless stream of American tributes to the road and all it’s associated Iconography – from sunglasses to motels – very few Europeans (particularly in video) have ventured in a celebration of the road, and when they have it has often been stereotypical or unimaginative. In Motorway Snow has used road footage he has recorded over a number of years, documents which are visual sketches and notes as many artists who work in an intuitive and procedure manner. This databank of images has been edited, transformed and processed and computer generated imagery (icons, spaceships, figures) has been mixed in to create a fantasy world, a childlike vision.
You enter in darkness a small place surrounded by screens and sit in one of the seats (pilfered from an ex Mercedes). A makeshift replica of the motorcar, the music starts and the screens which surround you light up, you are travelling. From tour seat you can view the motorway through all the screens, front, sides and rear, you are in what can be described as a very basic virtual motorcar. The motorway rolls by to the sound of the Art of Noise and the viewer here can either engage in the motion or look around the screens for different vantage points. As you glide along the motorways of Italy, Spain, the Brooklyn Bridge and Death Valley what strikes you is not the similarity with the experience of driving but the differences.
There is no question here of recreating an environment but rather of transporting the viewer into the subjective imaginary of Snow’s vision. You suspend reality and engage in the teasing playfulness and seduction of this visual flying carpet – a pure experience of lightness. No attempt here to reproduce the motorcar experience, this is pure flight – no sensory sign of the engine but a deeply accelerated motion and the extreme psychedelic colouring and manipulations of the image. As you progress low flying alien ships appear, space and colour are transformed and the earthly motorway looks more like Kubrick than Kerouac.
This is undeniably an exercise of pleasure, a safe hallucinogenic trip through a labyrinth of sceneries connected not only by their spectacular settings but more so by the artists recording of them. This installation seems more born of the fun fair than the current discourses in video art and it is this which has so divided the response to it. George Snow’s work is experiential and motorway is so in the extreme, it offers the viewer an instant gratification by placing us in a semi-simulated environment to translate an experience. But it is through the collusion of the viewer with the artist that the piece is successful – no one is in any doubt that we are in a darken room surrounded by screens – and the irony is ever present, from the extreme acceleration of the motion to the eventual glowing and kaleidoscopic transformation of the space.
What Motorway does is not create a virtual reality or “Disneyesque” journey but it translated a raw experience into an artistic possibility, a subjective vision into a collective imaginary. It takes us lightly and cleverly through the marks and imprints of a personal journey from it to its flight into a pure perceptual excess worthy of Aldous Huxley.
Snow’s work has always been populist, coming from a graphic designer background with many forays into the world of the music clip he has a quite unique view of both the video-art and the mainstream world. Motorway fits neatly in his authorial development, it celebrates a popular myth in a distinctive and compelling way. This antithesis to much of what is considered serious art, existential anxieties, subjective confessions, political comments or formal and technological investigations is both the strength and the failure of the piece. When Yugoslavia is burning, the planet is decaying and fascism is rearing it’s ugly head who wants to go and watch a festive celebration of the motorcar, a boy with toys rendition of the joys or driving? Should we not rather be scrutinising a difficult, multi –layered engagement with language, politics and the medium of the electronic image? It is this question that the piece brings out by it’s crudeness, honesty and directness – it pulls no punches as to the pleasures of the 20th century stretching them to their virtual limits. Much installation work is concerned with integrating video into the high art market with cultural references embedded in modernism, academicism and language of the gallery. Snow’s piece literally puts the boot into those discourses by the simplicity of it’s approach and the technological skill with which it is accomplished.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "10º Videobrasil: Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica": de 20 a 25 de novembro de 1994, São Paulo-SP, 1994.