Powerful Video

96 simultaneous videos of faces from Hungary

Yesterday we spent the day at the Venice Biennale, the great modern art exhibition.

Even for someone who lives over the MoMA, it was an overwhelming show. Building after building, pavilion after pavilion of new and contemporary art.

I was most taken, however, by the video art.

There is lots of it.

As plasma screens come down in price, more and more artists are turning to video as their medium of choice.

And most of it is terrible, (at least in my opinion).

Terrible in that it is so painfully banal.

It is a waste of so powerful a medium.

There was, for example, a work by American artist Bruce Nauman at the US Pavilion (they are done by countries) which was constructed of two video monitors, one on top of the other; each showing hands being washed – over and over again.

The same video, about a 1 minute clip, looped over and over.

If you ran that on Youtube, you would not get more than 100 hits, if that.

It is banality packaged as art.

That having been said, the one observation I could make as I made my way through the exhibits, was that all the video art drew huge crowds, no matter what they put on the screens.  It seems that after 70 years of 4.5 hours of TV a day, we are all pre-conditioned to be drawn to glowing screens.

It is the potential of video art that intrigues me, however.

It is a medium that is just getting started. Unlike painting, which has been around for some 17,000 years, give or take a few, since Laseceaux, video happened just yesterday.

The problem, (at least from my very limited perspective) is that artists don’t seem to know what to do with the video.  They have mastered the technology, but they don’t know what to put into the box.  

Journalists do.

70 years ago, photography stood right where video art is now.  It was making its first humble steps into the modern art museums of the world.  

But photography as art was and is powerful and engaging.

At home, I have a Salgado on my wall. 

It is art, but it is also journalism

It is where the two meet, and quite well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sudan series, by Sebastao Salgado

The video wall (top) is from the Hungarian pavilion, and is the work of  artist Peter Forgacs.

It is a wall of 96 simultaneously running videos of faces.

The technology is impressive, and I am sure there is something of a statement there. 

But what is lacking in Forgacs’ work, and in so much of the video art, is powerful content.

When photojournalism went to art, it went from completely the opposite direction.

Powerful content became art.

The work of Salgado or Cartier Bresson or Bourke-White was always driven first by the content. That it was powerful and moving opened it to acceptance as an art form.

In the world of contemporary video art, it seems to be a world of art in search of content or meaning.

Perhaps then, this is a moment for the journalist,  working in the medium of video, but using video, much as Salgado or W. Eugene Smith used a stills camera, to step into the vacuum.

The interest and the technology are here, now, to begin to see video as an art form in its own right.

What we can bring to the museum or the gallery, is painfully powerful content.