And to these people, too bad if you missed the first two installations in the Henry's three-part video series this spring. Each of the three installations showcased a different powerful potential of video art--different psychological, aesthetic, and narrative aspects.
The series began last March with Sam Taylor-Wood's Hysteria. A woman appears onscreen in close-up, laughing uproariously, silently, in slow motion. Her head rears back, at times dipping out of the screen, barely contained by it. Eventually you realize that she isn't really laughing anymore--it looks like fake laughter, forced, and then she's crying. And you watch for a while, and then you're not so sure if it's indeed crying; it's not laughing either, but a hysterical plateau between the two.
Denied the signals that sound provides, you look closely at the woman's face. You notice that when she cries, her chin puckers. You notice that laughter is a set of staccato mouth movements, whereas crying is more like a howl, prolonged and steady. You see her fillings. You see her hair disengage from its bun. After eight minutes, you've looked more closely at her than perhaps you have ever looked at anyone, and since you're missing the most crucial piece of information--why is she hysterical?--it's a strange new objectivity. You're forced to complete a sentence about a psychological non sequitur, forced to participate instead of just watch.
Bill Viola's Anthem is about as far from Taylor-Wood's clean neurotic aesthetic as possible. It's a series of images that start in stasis--a tree, a motionless oil drill, a sleeping body--and develops into active images that suggest intrusion: open-heart surgery, the same oil pumps drilling, pipes bellowing smoke. Every so often, we see a girl standing in a train station. At first she does nothing but stand, but in later shots she opens her mouth and screams. The scream is slowed so the individual tones are distinguishable, and it becomes a low, long howl, reverberant, as if in a tunnel.
This piece is harder to fathom. It took repeated viewings for me to see a kind of dream logic, a subconscious lyrical connection from image to image. Viola tends to work in a Jungian vein (Taylor-Wood's work is more Freudian), concerned more with universal shared knowledge than with individual response. At times, Anthem is very hard to watch--the surgery shots are gruesome-- but it is equally hard to turn away. The result of the stream of images is a developing aesthetic. If a painting is a set of formal concerns resolved, video art contains the suggestion that resolution is impossible.
Nic Nicosia's Middletown, on view through June 25, is the most penetrable of the three works. In one uncut 15-minute shot, a camera trolls through the streets of a suburban Texas neighborhood, never stopping its determined forward motion (except once, to let an old man cross the road). The audio track is carnival-esque music, suggesting stories (sinister, happy-go-lucky, dreamy), but the camera never stops long enough on any one person to let those stories develop. What we do see, though, is intriguing: a girl kicking over a wagon, a boy dragging something--a mannequin?--behind his bicycle, two suited men in luminous cowboy hats. The camera retreads the same streets five or six times, so that the territory becomes an emotional cul-de-sac. The boy abandons his bicycle; a woman in a robe who has run across the street runs back with a young man carrying a bat; the two cowboys continue to purposely stalk through the neighborhood. The suggestion and then rejection of narrative is what much of video art is all about. It's utterly clear that there is life beyond the frame chosen by the artist, and that he has decided not to let us see it. A weird, superficial intimacy develops between the viewers and the characters who appear again and again, an intimacy brought on by imagination. The most everyday things become surreal and unintelligible.
