whitehot | Artists Explore Screen Space @ The Power Plant Artists Explore Screen Space: Ryan Trecartin; Peter Campus; Joachim Koester; Sharon Lockhart The Power Plant
Viewing Any Ever, Ryan Trecartin's installation of seven works - his new four part series, Re’Search Wait’S (2010) and Trill-ogy Comp (2009) - is like getting lost in a small universe of distinct, hyperactive planets. Wandering through interconnected rooms designed almost like sets (the unique seating in each relates to the content of the video shown) it's easy to become absorbed in the immediate environment. And, as to be expected with Trecartin's work, this disorientation manifests on a subjective level as well - but it would actually be less disorienting if it were more abstract. Much of the power in Trecartin's aesthetic is drawn from explosively familiarity. In his videos, the visual languages of commercials, sitcoms, infomercials, pop-up ads, product placement, reality tv, horror films, surveillance, music videos, gaming and the internet at large flash past in accelerated fragments. The speed with which he mixes these references may seem overwhelming, but one can imagine it's not too far off the way our subconscious is forced to process all the sensory 'noise' associated with our daily channel surfing, web browsing, magazine flipping and social media engagement. It resonates deeply with a culture that is defined by mashing-up, remixing, retweeting, appropriating, collaboration and open source propelled by high-performance applications and high-speed connections. His characters, too, shift. They change their roles and relationships with a fractured rapidity that would seem to bely the strident, often aggressive manner with which they proclaim them. The fluctuating world he sets them in, so disconcertingly reminiscent of our own, seems to offer very little space for subjective stability. With hyper-coloured hair, skin, and clothes, negligible concern for defined gender or age, impulsive, frantic gestures and digitally heightened voices, they throw themselves into each self-manifestation, no matter how grotesque or awkward, with huge confidence. "Wouldn't it great if no one ever got embarrassed?" Trecartin observed. When asked about the aggression often associated with their interactions and monologues, he explained, "I think we're on the verge of a huge transformation. It's difficult, but I see it as a really positive thing. Kids growing up today are amazing. They won't talk about this art the way we would, they'll just be like 'whatever.' They absorb everything from their environment.' Exaggerated corporate-ese, social groupings that obliquely function as companies (and vice versa) and pervasive faux-product placement is present throughout Trill-ogy Comp. But an emphasis on corporate saturation is tightened and focussed in Re'Search Wait'S, where Trecartin explores the mining of behavioural data for profit. In this respect his work is something of a No Logo for a new generation, except that instead of a call to action it is a self-aware participant in a massively complex process that, from the artist's perspective, is generating an entirely new consciousness.
Peter Campus's Reflections and Inflections comprises two works that have a strong relationship to their gallery space: Anamnesis (1974) and Inflections: change in light and color around Ponquogue Bay (2009). Viewing his work with Trecatin's, it is easy to fall into the obvious binary of avant garde vs. old guard. There is value in this. The opportunity to see Anamnesis, one of the pioneer video works, in the context of both Campus's personal career trajectory, as well as the overarching trajectory of an entire genre of work that he helped establish, is unique and not to be underestimated. But it is a simplified perspective; the artists' works are not as disparate as they might seem. And they do seem disparate. In contrast to Trecartin's, Campus's videos evoke a tremendous sense of serenity. Anamnesis records viewers and plays back their image with a time delay that doubles it. A large screen is on the far wall of a darkened room, and as he approaches, the viewer is bathed in a single, decentralised ray of light, and becomes the subject. The black and white footage is minimal, highly contrasted and softly rendered. The time delay imposes a somnambulistic fluidity on the motion. But there is also destabilisation of personal identity here. At each movement, multiple versions of self are created; they act with reference to you, but in accordance to their own distinct time. If you stop moving, the doubled image settles gently back into one, momentarily contrasting a fractured vision of identity to one that is stable and familiar. The representational dissonance is strange, but not overly uncanny in the full, Freudian sense of the word - it more provides a quiet meditation on the possibility that we do not always (or ever?) exist as singular and inviolably defined psychological entities.
Continuing with liminal themes, Sharon Lockhart is known for work that approaches the edges of anthropology and documentary, while remaining definitively within a fine art practice. Her latest piece, Podwórka, took her to Poland where she filmed children playing in six relatively desolate courtyards. ('Podwórka' translates loosely to 'yards'.) The film is projected onto a large, free-standing wall. It fills the surface completely and precisely; viewers sit across in front of an architectural volume of equal height and width. This creates an intimate, concise spatial frame for the viewing experience, and there is a difference, somehow, in watching figures appear from and disappear off of the sharp edges of a three-dimensional form as opposed to a flat, embedded screen. A beautiful stillness is imparted both by her signature fixed camera position and the imposing scale of the motionless wall, and this exits simultaneously with the kinetic energy generated by the uninhibited activity of the children. Their behaviour is completely natural, and yet it is almost difficult to imagine that it has not been scripted simply because Lockhart's eye for formal aesthetic relationships is impeccable. The installation conflates screen, photography and sculpture - the moving image, the still image and three-dimensional sculptural form. As adult viewers we can't help but feel the international socio-economic disparity depicted: rather than play involving jungle gyms and super soakers, the children in Podwórka scamper over dilapidated concrete structures. Maybe in a few years they will feel the full force of inequalities and corporate influence. Maybe they already do. But if so, this is beyond the scope of the lens. In this sense, the fixed position of Lockhart's camera effects not only geographic cropping but powerful emotional and social editing. These edges are emphasised by the structural nature of the installation, and by making us keenly aware of the borders associated with observation, be it anthropological, documentary, or artistic, she is also providing an important critique of the 'information' it provides.
|
                             |
.jpg)
