Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Question

Where, or how, do you situate the confluence of art and cinema today?

Consider Art and Cinema as a pair of rivers: into which Ocean do they flow today? The answer is obvious but rarely stated: the ocean in which art and cinema mix their waters is Television. However, this ocean does not behave like those on our planet: it is not the ocean that is fed by the rivers, but the rivers by the seawater that travels inland. Art and cinema have negligible impact on television, while TV wields immense influence over both cinema and art. Television, in the form of Video, has invaded the precincts of art: its studios, galleries, museums. No truly modern movie is made without importing some effect or other from television: its Direct effects, simultaneities, mixture of genres.

Statement

I can still hear Paik lauding this effect or that work with the definitive statement: “very elegant”. It is a criterion I have used myself a lot ever since. Today, the only quality that runs through all of the videos that seduce me is precisely their elegance. Hence the following seven examples from France. In Frédéric Lecomte, the dance of light traces around the bodies and objects, incessantly emptied of their realist substance and plastered over with layers of numeric colours, gives rise to something original, a form that is more than trendy procedure. It is elegance itself—in the raw. The sexual pulse, which projects its metamorphoses into an enormous white hole, open like a vagina inviting coitus, throbs with the endless redoubling of its own subject: why images rather than nothing? The first time I watched videos by Laurent Millet I uttered the name Viola. His sense of time-moulded images begged the comparison. However, Millet’s way of seeing captures more of the real than does the American’s. Without falling back on special effects, his films immerse us in the arcana of multiple time, and with a rare subtlety. Someone could still even be at school thinking that we’re missing something that has yet to be discovered. In order to achieve that ambition—the foundation of any desire to become an artist—you have to know your predecessors well. In Mise en Ordre, Caroline Bobek (an Austrian student at Paris 8 University) bid farewell to Gary Hill (How do things…) and Viola (The Reflecting Pool). This numerical crossing of two inversions analogically tested by two masters is perfection itself—yes, elegance indeed. Elegance is also the appanage of Jean-Claude Gallotta, as much in his choreography as in his films. There is something stunningly natural about the simple way he deploys, step by step, frame by frame, the most sophisticated, incongruous, discordant signs. He is a master at hiding the seams. Chris Quanta, for his part, could be described as “smart”. His penchant for black-and-white confirms this, as does his gestural rigour and perfectionist bent, hunting down the loose threads before they can escape. The permanent swing of Chrystel Egal is a matter of posture. With each film she changes her forms to suit her theme, but without ever straying from her style as organiser par excellence. Style is as natural to her as breathing. For a performance artist like Lydie Jean-Dit-Pannel, what could be more elegant than having butterflies tattooed all over the body? At once naked and dressed, artist and artwork at the same time: the dream! Especially when the sign she wears harks back to the primordial pulsations of the interlaced semiplotlines of which all video images are made. Two birds, one stone: a return to the origins, in Paik and Vostell. The circle closes. Magic and elegance, seven-fold: elegance is always a style rediscovered.

ASSOCIAÇÃO CULTURAL VIDEOBRASIL. "16º Festival Internacional de Arte Eletrônica SESC_Videobrasil": de 30 de setembro a 25 de outubro de 2007, p.16-17, Edições SESC SP, São Paulo-SP, 2007, p. 155.