Gary Hill, USA
Blind Spot, 2003, 12'27''
Blind Spot constructs a space of living portraiture by “focusing time” on an exchange between the artist (the camera) and a man on the street in the small Algerian neighborhood of Belsunce in Marseille, France. As the camera zooms in slowly on its subject, the imagery is interrupted by longer and longer segments of black/silence, in essence slowing the scene down so that it almost reaches the photographic.
Commissioned for Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image. New York: Bick Productions and New Museum of Contemporary Art.
Gary Hill (b. 1951, Santa Monica, USA) — is a maitre of the American video-art. Being among the first artists, who started using video in the mid-70's, not merely as a tool for recording performance, but as a new artistic form, he is now considered the grand master of American video-art. Hill turned to video after sculpture when he started taking great interest in philosophical works of Blanchot and Levinas, but it was his sculptures that earned him a Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 1995. His poetic and carefully built art statements explore the range of issues related to the visualization of text, transforming a word into an object of plastic art, as well as reciprocal and supplementary functions of image, sound, language, body and electronic media. Exhibitions of his work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Centre George Pompidou, Paris, Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona among others.
Bill Viola, USA
Chott-El-Djerid (A Portrait In Light And Heat), 1979, 28'00''
Chott El-Djerid is a large dried-up salt-water lake in the Tunesian Sahara. Viola was brought there by his quest to discover a location that was nothing more than a flat landscape and a sky, where 'what you can see is the limit of what you could see'. So that meant a place with the minimum of visual information such as a desert, a prairie or an ocean. Viola's challenge was to record this place and convey a sense of development, change and perceptual discovery. Chott El-Djerid begins with shots of snowy landscapes and winter prairies, impressions that contrast symmetrically with the images of warm, vibrating deserts which are ultimately just as alienating. The shimmering mirages and distorted landscapes, buildings and objects that subsequently appear are the result of a combination of the high temperature, the light and the camera. To record these images Viola was generally using powerful telephoto lenses that emphasized the effect of hot air rising. At Chott El-Djerid Viola discovered a space where the dream world seems to combine with the world of waking reality. Viola has surpassed not only the borders of reality's perception, of what can be physically observed, he has also transformed the act of viewing into a mental experience.
Bill Viola (b. 1951, New York, USA) is a video artist. He received his bfa in experimental studios from Syracuse University in 1973. After graduating he worked in Florence, Italy for 18 months as technical director of production at Art/tapes/22, one of the first video art studios in Europe. He later traveled to record traditional performing arts in the Solomon islands, Java, Bali, and Japan. In 1977 viola was invited by cultural arts director Kira Perov to show his videos at La Trobe University in Australia. A year later, Perov moved to New York, where she and viola married. they have lived and worked together ever since. In 1980, they lived in Japan as part of a cultural exchange where they studied buddhism under zen master daien tanaka. During this period, Viola was also invited to serve as the first artist-in-residence for Sony's atsugi research lab. his work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National gallery in London, Guggenheim Berlin, Guggenheim New York, the Whitney museum of american art, Getty Los Angeles and the Metropolitan museum of art in New York. Viola was also selected as the u.s. representative for the 46th Venice Biennale, where he showed ' Buried secrets', a collection of five installations including 'The greeting'. Viola has served as a scholar in residence at the Getty research institute in Los Angeles in 1998 and was elected to the american Academy of arts and sciences in 2000.
Marina Abramovic, Serbia/USA and Ulay, Germany
City of Angels, 1983, 20'00''
City of Angels was the first work that Abramovic & Ulay made specially for video and TV. It was shot in the capital of Thailand, in the garden of what appears to be an ancient Buddhist monastery. Abramovic and Ulay describe the spiritual and ascetic dimensions of Eastern culture in general, and of Buddhism in particular, in a series of staged 'tableaux vivants' which are 'enacted' by monks and by the local people. The artists depict the essence of religious life in a number of lucid, stylized and theatrical scenes which are partly accompanied by Buddhist chanting. The timeless harmony attested to by City of Angels is created by the sense of unity that exists between the location, the sound and the participants. It evokes an atmosphere of meditative concentration.
From 1976 to 1988, Marina Abramovic (b.1946, Belgrade, Yugoslavia) and Ulay (Frank Uwe Laysiepen, b. 1943, Solingen, Germany) collaborated on a large number of performances in which video played a variety of roles, reaching from being a documentary tool to its use as a 'proper' artistic medium. They are one of the best-known contemporary art collectives, having exhibited their works at various prestigious venues. As with Abramovic's celebrated solo works, their collaborations often employed 'endurance art' techniques that involved causing pain to or endangering the body in some way. This took a range of forms, from acts that posed a serious threat of physical violence to pieces which required sustained 'meditation' and concentration of the artists. The themes of their work include an exploration of gender roles and interpersonal symbiosis, the elimination of the boundary between art and life and the relationship between technology and humans as part of the natural world. Abramovic/Ulay were interested in Asian culture and freely appropriated Eastern philosophical concepts for their work. This culminated in the famous Great Wall Walk of 1988, in which they each started to walk from a different end of the Great Wall of China, meeting in the middle for a brief reunion that marked the end of their relationship.
Thierry Küntzel, France
La Desserte Blanche, 1980, 22'08''
In this tape reality is covered by a white veil which imbues it with an abstract quality. Whitish, soundless images of a simple interior (a door, a sideboard) loom up and ebb away again. There is also a lengthy silent image of a woman sitting by a table. Small, almost imperceivable changes take place within this composition: in the interior, in the pose and movements of the woman... There are also minute transformations in the contrasts between black and white, as if light were moving across a painting. What you see seems to last for an eternity as if the images have been suspended in time and become temporarily frozen...
Thierry Kuntzel (1948-2007, Bergerac, France) — is a video artist and a film theorist. Based primarily in Paris, with several years spent in Berkeley, California. Thierry Kuntzel was preoccupied with time and memory, and the question of what happens beneath the surface of representation, beyond a narrative story line. In the late 1970s he wrote regularly for Camera Obscura and Film Quarterly Journal. After that Kuntzel left the analysis of film for the production of video. Minimalist in representation but rich in suggestive content, his works use video to uncover the essence of the perception of reality and representation, memory and the unconscious, in relation to the codes of cinema, photography and painting. His works were exhibited internationally at festivals and institutions, including the University Art Museum, Berkeley, California, Paris Biennale, American Center, Paris, The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Yang Fudong, China
The Nightman Cometh, 2011, 19'21''
The Nightman Cometh unfolds in the realm of historical fantasy. An ancient warrior is seen wounded and forlorn after battle, thinking of his mission. The warrior has to decide whether to disappear or to continue the fighting, which undoubtedly might lead to the same fate — death. The body is obviously desirable whereas the soul is more precious. The choice is difficult.
Three ghost-like characters appear as emblems of different paths. Yang Fudong defines the genre as «Neo-realism» — it is a history theater where current and contemporary societal conditions play the main part. The question is — who is more real? The warrior baron in his period costume or the ghost in a modern outfit? When did the ancient battlefield scene and other historical events take place? Do they belong to the past, to the present or to the future?
Yang Fudong (1971, Beijing, China) is an author of one of the most beautiful works in the independent Chinese cinema. His elegant, black-and-white 35 mm films evoke the anachronistic feelings; they combine Chinese painting’s lyricism with the austere picture. Fudong graduated from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. After his training the painter moved to Shanghai. Yang Fudong’s works were presented at the Venetian, Shanghai, Prague and Liverpool Biennale, in the British gallery Tate Modern, Parisian Centre Georges Pompidou, National Art Centre in Tokyo, Kumsthalle in Vienna, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Castello di Rivoli in Torino and other places.
Provmyza group, Russia
Eternity, 2011, 44'00''
The work Eternity by the Provmyza group arouses a feeling of dread — the authors immerse the viewer into a multilayered space where the surrounding reality and a human gaze itself decompose and we find ourselves at a border in search of a starting point. A little girl serves as a metaphor of Eternity, as she mentally resists the destroying force and always defeats it.
Provmyza group (Galina Myznikova, b. 1968 and Sergey Provorov, b. 1970, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia) was organized in 1993. The artists work in various spheres of contemporary art employing a wide range of multi-media means. In their creative work they follow the tendency of obliterating the borders between the kinds and genres of art; their approach is mostly based on the tradition of the Russian objectless art of the beginning of the 20th century comprehended in the light of the modernistic experience of the subsequent times. Their projects were presented in Russian pavilion at 51st Venice Biennial, 67th Venice International Film Festival, George Pompidou Center, Paris, Moving images biennale (Centre pour l'Image Contemporaine, Geneve) and others. In 2009 they won Tiger Award for Short Film at 38th International Film Festival Rotterdam.
Jesper Just, Denmark/USA
Nameless Spectacle, 2011, 13'00''
The title of the work inspired by a William Carlos William poem. The work is made up of two gargantuan panoramic video screens juxtaposed opposite each other in the centre’s vast temporary exhibition space. There is both a tension and a dialogue between the screens, the spectator is caught between them, consistently forced to choose between one or the other; unable to see both at the same time.
The on-screen action consists of a vague narrative about a woman and a young man, her in a wheelchair, him on foot in and around Paris’ Butte Chaumont park. As a whole it evokes separation, the impossibility of communication, artificiality. There are reasons for the latter — Buttes Chaumont is a completely man made park and the work’s actress, Marie France, is herself a transsexual.
Danish video artist Jesper Just (1974, Copenhagen, Denmark) creates the works which attract a viewer by their sensual and stylized images, elaborate visual effects, music and light. His atmospheric creations are being compared to cinematic works by Visconti, Fassbinder or Gus Van Sant. Jesper Just gained a degree at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. He is the winner of the high-prestige Carnegie Art Award (2008). His solo exhibition projects were realized in the largest museums and galleries all over the world, including Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austria), SMAK (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst) in Belgium, Moderna Museet in Stockholm (Sweden), Royal Museum of Fine Art in Copenhagen. Jesper Just will represent the Danish pavilion at the Venice Biennale of contemporary art.
Julian Rosefeldt, Germany
My Home is a Dark and Cloud-Hung Land, 2011, 30'00''
The film installation deals with a central aspect of German mythology: the forest. Different scenarios and traditional concepts of the forest are combined in a film plot that deliberately cultivates confusion and avoids constructing a conventional narrative arc. In order to create his four-channel installation, Julian Rosefeldt immersed himself in the cultural history of the forest. The works he consulted included Tacitus' Germania, Romantic forest poetry and literature on subjects such as forestry, the use of the forest as a metaphor and its ideological instrumentalization.
Rosefeldt comments: "I became interested above all in the question of the extent to which my own ambivalent feelings towards my homeland are linked to its landscapes and the extent to which the image of the landscape associated with Germany plays a role in the idea of what is 'typically German,' which includes both negative and positive characteristics, such as hard-working, pedantic and orderly, blinkered and inflexible, melancholic and self-hating, etc."
Julian Rosefeldt (b. 1965, Munich, Germany) has made a name for himself with lavishly produced 16mm and 35mm films. Projected onto several screens to create a panorama-like effect, his films carry the viewer off into a surreal, theatrical world whose inhabitants are caught in the structures and rituals of everyday life. In what are probably his best known film installations — Trilogie des Scheiterns (Trilogy of Failure, 2004–2005), in which he dealt with universal themes like the absurdity of human existence, approaching them with slapstick humor and plumbing their deeper philosophical meaning. Recent exhibitions include Gesamtkunstwerk (The Saatchi Gallery) and My home is a dark and cloud-hung land (Jewish Museum Berlin).
Tony Oursler, USA
The Loner, 1980, 32'00''
In this work, the anxiety-ridden Loner comes of age during a dark and dreamlike quest to find his female counterpart. He is not played by a single, identifiable figure, but rather is represented by various crude objects and props, such as a spoon, a water-filled garbage bag, and a condom. The Loner drifts through a series of traumatic and humorous situations; in an effort to move beyond the feel of traditional cinema and toward a more poetic visual language, Tony Oursler experimented with a sophisticated nonlinear narrative. Inspired by Kabuki theater and Viennese Actionism, the artist combined performance with handmade painterly and sculptural elements to make this video.
Tony Oursler (born 1957, New York, USA) is a multimedia and installation artist. Tony Oursler received a BFA from the California Institute for the Arts in 1979. He has since participated in numerous international exhibitions including a mid-career survey, Introjection,which was on view from 1999 to 2001 at the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts, the Massachusetts Museum of ContemporaryArt, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Los Angeles Museum ofContemporary Art, and the DesMoines Art Center. Primarily known for his innovative combination of video, sculpture, and performance, Oursler's work explores the relationship between the individual and mass media systems with humor, irony, and imagination. The artist's work is represented in a number of major museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Tate Gallery in London.