The curatorship by Lynne Cooke, is a selection of four American videos, produced between 1998 and 2001, all of which combine different genres and forms, going back to the roots and heritage of video in other art forms. All pieces have an ironic, upbeat, and subtle character to them. Initially, the programme included a lecture by the curator, but she could not travel to Brazil due to the events of September 11. The exhibition took place at the shed auditorium.
artists
Works
Curator's text Lynne Cooke, 2001
Ironic Connections, Subtle and Humorous
Many of the most compelling and memorable single channel videos made in North America in recent years were devised by visual artists who work across several fields, and in a variety of media. Most are visual artists for whom the exhibition space of a gallery or museum is a primary if not exclusive site, and for whom the question of medium is determined according to the needs of each project and not the result of a commitment to any one material, genere or art-form. That is, for them single channel work whether designated for a monitor and/or for projection in an auditorium implies introduces different concerns and requirements from works situated in actual space, and within a strictly fine art context and framework. The works selected for this program share a concern with engaging other genres or disciplines in order to create layered references and allusions that in turn invoke the origins and heritage of video in other art forms. That they do so in a witty, ironic, knowingly playful spirit further connects them, as does the fact that although eschewing straightforward analytical deconstruction of the medium and its modalities they are far from merely supine or vogueish when drawing on various forms of entertainment as their modus operandi. Film and literature are as much part of their heritage as are television, cartoons, video games and home movies. No opposition is established, since there is a clear recognition that cinema as much as the novel are most frequently experienced filtered through the television set.If video permeates every day life in multiple ways, from movie rentals, to amateur family recordings, to television and leisure pursuits, its hegemony and ubiquity are nonetheless under seige from the massive incursions of computer based media which seems now morphs exponentially into every seam and facet of daily activity. Its relentless infiltration and usurpation of the visual field signals the rapid demise of video from its unassailaed centrality, imparting to the medium the promise of nostalgia in decline. Whiffs of retrospection infuse much of this selection of tapes, not least via its preoccupation with sampling, appropriating and recycling albeit via unexpected or unfamiliar channels and conduits, witness the unlikely juxtaposition of Superman and Sylvia Plath, or the clinched embrace of De Palma and Antonioni that brazenly oversteps the decorous bounds proper to an homage. Slyly debunking, nonchalently casual, these four works speak eloquently to the predicament that faces artists working in this increasingly precarious terrain.
ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL, "13º Videobrasil": de 19 de setembro de 2001 a 23 de setembro de 2001, p. 178, São Paulo, SP, 2001.