Timeous Challenges of Video Art

The Artful Viewer: July

Timeous Challenges of Video Art

As one of those who take my Hollywood movie fix in the form of a rental from the corner store video shop - not only to avoid the depressing experience of going to the bioscope in de-humanised environment of a shopping mall, but to take advantage of that glorious personalised system that allows you to skip and fast-forward - video art presents a particular challenge.

And I guess, I’m probably not the only art observer out there with such an affliction.

With so-called ‘new media’ an entrenched presence at all contemporary art exhibitions, and the (fast-aging) category of video de rigueur in any self-respecting group show, I sometimes just sigh, take a deep breath, and try my best to sit it out. (Well, more than likely, not ‘sit’ - because few galleries offer such a luxury - but loll about in the gloomy darkness or terrifying glare, as comfortably as possible while some artistic indulge passes by on the small or large screen, or whatever serves as such.)

Here’s the thing: video art take up one’s time. And we all subscribe to the cliché that time is of the essence. In the mad-mad modern world of everything-goes and free-for-all art-making, considering a viewer/observer’s time is an issue, surely.

Ten years or so ago, when the mini-videocam did not yet have all those no-brainer gadgets of today, artists worldwide took to video like ducks to a newly discovered-pond of productive pleasure. All arrived artists had to boast a video. (Of course, it is so much easier to fiddle with images on screen than to actually use a screen to print them!)

At biennales and big-deal art events all over the world, viewers were lured into boxes or confronted in alleys with the new-fangled medium. (To sit through all the art at the Venice Biennale in the mid-1990s, you had to book into an hotel for extra days and suffer leg cramps.)

Ninety percent of these videos is dreary, boring and simply bad.

South African artists jumped into the pond with glee. What most of them didn’t realise is that masterpieces in video art are far more difficult to churn out than a steadicam and editing apparatus suggest. After all, there is a long, long history of, yes, cinema and, come to think of it, television.

Which bring me back to the time factor. And an artist imposition on the viewer’s physical presence in time. The great American art philosopher, Arthur Danto, once talked about video ‘requiring an investment of real time on the viewer’s part with no guarantee that there will be an artistic pay-off’.

Hollywood bosses have known for yonks that bioscope audiences are finely tuned to how movies play out in the time and how long they are prepared to sit in the dark before losing interest.

Why would it be different in contemporary video art?

Before gallery-goers were forced to put on earphones or go behind curtains into darkened rooms, you had control of you own time to walk around and check out the pictures on the gallery wall. Video imposes a demand on your time - and hence your tolerance.

This is where many video art bites the dust. Or, more sympathetically put, lose the viewer. If it ain’t interesting enough, why stay and watch? (At home, the fast-forward facility is a great help.)

At the moment in Cape Town, most of the big art operators (a number now cosy together in Woodstock) have video art in some form or another on display in their galleries. And there are more to come.

The opening exhibition of Michael Stevenson’s new venue had a few which demonstrated different ways the medium works to greater and lesser success: Steven Cohen’s Golgotha, not much more than a documentary; Yinka Shonibare’s 14 minutes of Odile and Odette, a mini kind of movie; Dineo Bopape’s wacko Dreamweaver, a kind of free-floating atmospheric piece; while the imported Sweetberry Sonnet by Kalup Linsky was only for the hard-wired fans who could stand around for half an hour.

As part of Power Play, the Goodman Cape had videos which tested visitors’ endurance levels with the potential to frighten them off forever. The new Bell-Roberts shows work by Jacques Coetzer as part of the Matter & Meaning group show, and an elegant, if taxing, three-channel projection called The Theory of Displacement by Johan Thom.

Whatiftheworld has, as part of the rather nice Prints & Edition show, two shorter pieces by Charles Maggs - quite a video wiz normally - which don’t quite match some of his brighter stuff. Offering videos as part of an exhibition that set out to feature ‘a selection of works that are contextualised through the medium of prints and the concept of editions’, makes a rather important point about video art and its ‘preciousness’ or not.

If you’ve paid the R26 400 asked for the Thom video at the Bell-Roberts, and have a nice bright broad white wall to project it on in your suburban house, do you wonder about who owns the other two of the three in the edition? And do you sometimes feel, if no-one is looking, whether you may fast-forward any of its 6 minutes and 58 seconds?