Associação Cultural Videobrasil

my Apology sequence [air metric]

i was listening to this song1 and remembered u in the rain2, the artificially dilated time setting a rhythm for your body, for the rain, for eroticism, for design, and for the information of that object, for the machine, for the motion exchanging roles with the soldier3, showing the dizzy, completely un-recognized landscape, a landscape of light red war, a dark-red and black landscape of V8 interceptor—all super flat—religiously and radically headed towards the rain4.

...i speak of a question of metrics, of measures (of time, of values), and of uncertainties brought about by the metaphor of the pilgrim and the tourist.5 the former experiences the duration of the trip as intensely as the arrival at the destination; time is distended, but not necessarily uniform; to the latter, the dilation of time is an issue to be solved through extra credit card mileage.

but I want to escape the double and even more so the trinity that the metaphor herein may imply6: what cheers me up is your spin7, your continuum8, the focus on balance9 that is an exercise in mind-emptying based on one single, simple slo-mo gesture, but which at once reveals and economizes all that is excessive in the world's technological software10 (of video and of war—the fact that it was born out of a war-related necessity and convenience—, of the history of art, white cube and otherwise, of the policies of identity that revolutionized culture just as the Silicon Valley revolutionized the market and culture, of the sensationalistic art market that makes use of the policies of identity to auction a video for US$ 90,000 at Sotheby's; I am not sure of the exact value, my apology #2).

...because we like it on the sly, until it hurts, I cannot see your art communicate policies (of identity in Australia, the mundane of street staking brought from outside to the inside of contemporary art aesthetics...); I cannot see your art informing anti- or pro-something values. but I do see—let us hope—in your art, because it suspends the rhythm of the tourist, even if only for twenty-three silent minutes or sixteen minutes channel stereo, in two channels, or six, that the world is a large farm with a problem flushing out the animals' shit, toxic, radioactive shit, that it does not matter whether the beach is Bondi or Itamambuca (Shaun, I am Brazilian. my history of art is as mine and as foreign to me as yours is familiar and foreign to you, of that I am certain...my apology #3 for making this bet).

it all comes from the being-a-colony thing, the postcolonial that forgets to ask questions or face up to things—out of convenience, cowardice, or whatever—what would in fact be the difference between the egocentric burden of being 'me' against the black hole that it is to be the 'other'11; it is never horizontal). the pilgrim travels the Bondi-Itamambuca route on foot, this is your slo-mo. this is your time. at a subway station, in the risk that stopping everything would entail, emptying the mind so as not to lose balance, lose focus, fall flat on the ground, break your neck, the pilgrim is the first to fall, but he is also the first one to get back up.

my apologies #4 and 5 are for the fragmentation of this text, unfinished, all interrupted by subtexts (with subliminal images), footnotes, backs and forths, pauses for reflection. u reveal, but at the same time halt the tourist's day-to-day and reminds us that le voyage of the pilgrim is possible. it's all there. we of the 1970s generation are all that, alas (maybe... apology n#6)12.

xoxo

1 - Sort of wonder why no one said a word
Don't you like it on the sly?
Don't you like it till it hurts?
Have I been on your mind? What's a voice without a song?
Something in your head you've been fighting all along…
(excerpt) Metric, Raw Sugar, off the album Grow Up and Blow Away (2005).

2 - Storm Sequence, single-channel video, 2000.

3 - Double Field/Viewfinder [Tarin Kwot], synchronized two-channel video, 2009–2010.

4 - Interceptor Surf Sequence, HD single channel, 2009.

5 - Zygmunt Bauman, "From Pilgrim to Tourist – Or a Short History of Identity," in Question of Cultural Identity, published by Stuart Hall and Paul de Gay (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1996).

6 - it is not a question of religion, obviously, even though the word figures outside of the metaphor in the first paragraph. it is a question of metrics of time and of other connections triggered by the artist's work (religare, etc.) which, I suspect, the critics do not use, addicted as they are in the trance that mistakes knowing with informing (not all critics, but most of them, my apology #1). however, the "urban ghettos," as the skateboarder, the hip hopper, and the biker crowds, among others, have come to be called, share an experience of belonging and of common values like members of a religion. in their own ways, they are all looking for a place that will act like a plant that manufactures meaning for what we call life.

7 - Pataphysical Man, single-channel video, 2005; Double Field/Viewfinder [Tarin Kwot], synchronized double channel, 2009–2010; Woolloomooloo Night, single-channel video, 2004…

8 - War Memorial Sessions, triple-channel HD, 2005; Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi), single-channel video, 2010.

9 - In a Station of the Metro, two-channel video, 2006.

10 - Air, Surfing on a Rocket, off the album Talkie Walkie, 2004.

11 - a kiss for my dear Jørgen Michaelsen (Pourquoi Malady, par(ent)esis publishing house, Florianópolis, yet to be published).

12 - Apologies 1-6, HD video, 2007–2009.