Takeshi Murata’s spectacular Monster Movie is the
unmistakable star of the show up now at Western Bridge. To make the
four-minute-long piece, Murata digitally tore up a few seconds from the
1981 B movie Caveman using tools that allow him some degree of
improvisation, turning the scenery into a roiling blitz of psychedelic
color that surrounds the monster as he performs a funny-sad convulsive
dance. A catchy song by Plate Tectonics acts as the soundtrack.
Over and over, the monster charges forward as though he’s fighting
with the very surface of the video, in the manner of, say, de Kooning
tearing at his abstract paintings, destroying and remaking them
hundreds of times before declaring them finished. Or the collagists. Or
Lucio Fontana, the canvas ripper. The images are both illusionistic and
abstract. Likewise, the work is both deep in terms of its engagement
with philosophies of artmaking, and flat in terms of simply being
entertaining.
It’s a video that’s more about painting and cinema than video. And
in fact, as Western Bridge director Eric Fredericksen points out, the
entire group video exhibition, titled Multiplex, turns out to
be more about dance and choreography than about video.
Multiplex is one of three video art surveys on display in
Seattle right now, but none of them claims actually to survey video as
a medium. What would be the point? It may have been a viable idea back
in the 1970s, when video was young and self-conscious, but now video
art can be just about anything: abstract, literary, sculptural,
painterly. It can be indistinguishable from experimental film, costume
drama, hand animation, documentary, and everything else on YouTube.
(Check out Kalup Linzy’s “All My Churen” to see an artist whose work
really fits YouTube.)
In art galleries and museums, the diversity of the medium is evident
in the insane number of different screening apparatuses. It’s almost
comedic, and usually determined by a gallery’s relative resources, but
it also feels right for the unpoliced loping around of the medium
itself.
How many ways are there to install a work of video art? At the
independent nonprofit Crawl Space gallery, it’s like a poor man’s
technology fair right now. There are handheld DVD players, clunky TV
sets with thick frames around the screens, tiny naked monitors mounted
on the walls and sprouting wires, and the glowing eye of a projector
focused on a screen in the middle of the room. The occasion is a survey
of nine young video artists from around the country—an unlikely
event in a one-room alternative space, meant as a retort to the many
juried shows that leave out video entirely because of practical
considerations.
The rich man’s version is over at Western Bridge, where sleek
flatscreens are the preferred but by no means only display devices.
There’s a giant projection in a pitch-black room, movie-style; a screen
dangling in midair over a balcony; wall projections; and a large,
complex built structure that acts as a wooden proscenium for three
screens with a roped-off area of visible “backstage.”
Multiplex is a buffet of video from the last 10 years,
augmented in the upstairs sitting room by an on-demand anthology of
video curated by the New Museum of Contemporary Art and called
Point of View: An Anthology of the Moving Image.
Demonstrating the high-production-value end of the spectrum is Isaac
Julien’s loaded, psychoanalytic performance video The Long Road to
Mazatlan (2000), part of Multiplex. A lush tour de force,
it follows the charged rendezvous of two men in the Texas desert,
expressed almost entirely in stylized choreography. (There are also
showgirls.) It’s a layered, literary seduction—of the men and the
viewer. The wooden display apparatus with a symbolic “backstage”
invites you to read the video symbolically.
Of the other works in Multiplex, only Seattle artist Jack
Daws’s Bicycle Thief (2002) seems worth special mention, for
its hard-edged sense of humor. In it, the artist comes upon a bicycle
with a lock on it; he breaks the lock and replaces it with another one,
committing a mystifying crime.
In the separate anthology Point of View, be sure not to
miss Francis Alÿs’s El Gringo, in which even dogs smell a
racial divide; David Claerbout’s sweet-natured Le Moment; the
first few minutes of Gary Hill’s mesmerizing Blind Spot; the
last few minutes of Douglas Gordon’s Over My Shoulder; Paul
McCar-thy’s anarchic WGG Test; and Pipilotti Rist’s weirdo
I Want to See How You See. Be sure to miss Joan Jonas’s
embarrassing Waltz.
Coming of Age, the unassuming little show crowded into
Crawl Space, has almost as much appeal as Western Bridge’s bigger-name
production. It was juried by Seattle Art Museum assistant curator
Marisa C. Sanchez, who selected the 19 works from a national call for
submissions. Aside from a few that smack too much of well-trod ideas
(Jennifer Campbell’s boxing video, for instance, doesn’t add much to
the domain of earlier camera pugilism by Tracey Moffatt, Vito Acconci,
and Sophie Whettnall, but her bird-eyed video is pleasantly
surrealistic), this array of works by an array of young artists is
exciting for its freshness and, naturally, range.
Animations in the humble medium of watercolor by Jennifer Levonian, a Philadelphia-based MFA grad of Rhode Island School of Design, are astoundingly funny, smart, and well-made. She
inserts herself as a character into each video, whether it tells the
story of an attempted cover-up involving an invasion of macaws at
Colonial Williamsburg, a bank robbery with a Busby Berkeley twist, or a
sweaty and patriotic church picnic.
Getting the Love Want, by Seattle-based artist Debra Baxter
and Zack Bent, is an entire eventful relationship told in one minute
through bubble-gum bubble blowing. Ellen Lake’s unadorned documentary
of the relationship between her grandmother and grandfather made from
interviews and spliced home movies turns out to be more expansive than
it looks. Shannon Benine’s Moth is also a documentary of
sorts. A toy moth appears onscreen, unmoving, for the duration of the
action in the background: flashes of light synchronized with audio of
soldiers taking cover during a real mortar attack, recorded by a
relative of the artist who’s serving in Iraq. “Don’t crowd me under the
table,” one man says to another. “Please, Lord, let it stop.” 
