The artist duo presented a video installation using myriad audiovisual resources, involving audience members in an electronic happening designed to make them feel out of touch with the venue: it was impossible to move around the place, even though the geographical space encouraged motion, and thus spectators were called upon to share the powerlessness that a situation of separation entails.
artists
Works
Essay Dominik Barbier, 1990
The No Way Buster Project
There is a bit of electronic show (music, importan scenic device, serious and naive journey before reaching the gothic representation classified by Barbier as “cosmogony”) and of a theme full of apocalyptic symbols where melancholy is totally reassured.
The use of what we may consider installation fragments, trying to reconcile intercontinental passion and electronic splendor, works against the idea of installation as a closed work. It takes us apart from the sculptural language. If the broad of “The No Way Buster Project” differentiates it from any complicity with TV, its bias toward content and the “immediate” pleasure of its journey makes it almost a “merry-making”. In addition, the artist does not hesitate in showing his love for scientific fiction as well for involving music. One of the problematic aspects of Barbier’s creation which, paradoxically represents its streght, is to place the audience which is in the Observatory is a situation similar to what is happening in the remaining of the room. On the other hand, everything is arranged for the observer to feel himself apart of the installation sites: it is impossible to him to walk throught the work in spite of geographic space which encourages movement. The observer is called to share the impotency of this dissociative situation.
As opposed to the most conceptual installations, “The No Way Buster Project” is a monumental and open work which apeals to theatricallity and to the spectacular. The parth of creation-video is today similar to the contemporary artistic practices, that is, splintering of analysis fields, fragmentation, contradiction. “The No Way Buster Project” in its “monumentality” is an attempt to devour all these axes.
8th Fotoptica Internacional Video Festival. 09 a 15 de Novembro de 1990. p. 90.