Cedric Caspesyan VS Video Art

I've been kind of loosing it up
these days at
Zeke's blog (where I love to comment) about the topic of
video art, and how artists practicing within that field
constantly refuse to adapt to some of the medium's primus
proprieties: the fact that the medium can be easily reproduced
and broadcasted.


I almost sound like I hate video art, which is not the case at all,
as I sort of come from that field, and did a few video installations
myself.

But in an age where one can find easily classics of cinema,
including experimental shorts, on various dvd collections, I am
amazed that years and years later it is still very hard
to find copies of some video art pieces considered
landmarks of contemporary arts.


This text mostly concern single-channel video art
pieces, of limited duration, a description still encompassing
a great majority of video art, though more and more of these
single channel "clips" are presented on museums walls as
though they are installations (including the video credits at the end).



Here I'll paste my comment
from Zeke's Blog, that was replying
to his comment about VTape
offering web brodcast of extracts
from canadian video art featured in their
collection.



Hmmm....Come to think of it..I will edit bits of it:



Video artists are soooo pretentious.

Their tapes lie in dust in video art centres. No one gives a damn, and those who give a damn (like I do at times) often encounter a lot of administrative resistance
when attempting to dig copies (or simply...that weird look from the guy or girl at the counter who wonder why you came here to look at those tapes).


The small bunch of people able to enjoy these types of films are not even given a chance to watch them. Video artists treat their potential audiences as collectors. You like video art? Hey that must mean you got 2000 bucks to spend for my 5 min piece (they are juste 6 copies, you know?).


Eventually the best artists are released in compilations (Bill Viola, Stan Brakhage and...hmmm....count them on the fingers of one hand).


Rebecca Horn had an edition of her film performances...Guess what: they are like 1000 copies or less and sold more than 4000 dollars each.


Her damn compil is the work of art itself.



Just like this new idea that video artists sell their monoband as projection art pieces. There is nothing that tells you that these pieces must be projected. They're not loops, they're not multi-screens, they have nothing to do with the use of any special architecture.

They are short films with broadcast conditions written by the artist or gallerist. I think of William Kentridge, how most of his films are really traditional short films. I was so upset at this guy, incredibly pretentious (he calls his animations "projected drawings") considering the amount of animators who surely used similar methods to him (pencil and eraser) because they were as poor as him when they started.



I mean, he's making money out of selling the drawings...why need to sell the films as pieces of art? (ed's note: I made a mistake here, below I will be re-adressing the issue) What if Peter Jackson came and say: look... they are 5 copies of King Kong and they will be sold 5 million each. That would be ridiculous, because it wouldn't follow what the medium is about. In cinema the object itself, the celluloid, the dvd, is quasi irrelevant. And Kentridge is as cinematic as Peter Jackson: it's the same thing.


Unless there is a special need for a video installation (say..a Rodney Graham loop really isn't going to work as a single channel monitor piece), I don't think video artists who do art that respect the format of traditional cinema (including experimental cinema) should pretend to be doing anything else than cinema.

It's irrespectuous of a tradition that's been there before them, attempting for a moment to profit from an interpretative confusion between the people able to read cinema from the people able to understand contemporary arts.

Kind of like delimitating what is so bad in Matthew Barney's cinema from what is interesting "within" it.

I have studied in both fields enough to know that cinema uses a certain senses of framing that visual arts would never tolerate. In visual arts you are looking at yourself watching the movie. The projection is a canvas. In the movie you are really looking at the film. Video artists attempt to create a distance that is for the most part impertinent. Since the 80's at least, a fair portion of them is simply relecturing trad. cinema, functioning within that field, sharing little with
visual arts but an irony that was already prevalent in 60's exp. cinema.
Very few video art actually spoof cinema in such ways that they need to be
seen on gallery walls. Many (single channel, limited duration pieces) are proposing ventures in experimental and documentary that would make as much sense or even better if they were projected in cinema screening rooms.


This said, proof that there is a pertinence to video art:
the Mike Kelley "Day Is Done" installation from last year
was one of the best video installation seen in ages. But that shouldn't hold back from a version that could circulate as a monoband on your tv. Peter Greenaway has already done films that exist both in cinema version and installation version. Obviously he is more admired by the cinema crowds than visual arts (we barely hear about his exhibits), but at least he's not wasting space showing his films on
gigantic museums walls for 3 months, with horrible sound conditions, and smell of fresh paint, asking passerbys to stand up for 2 hours.

He understands why screening rooms were invented, and actually
uses them.


And once the broadcast copies are sold and shown everywhere, he released them as dvds for standard folks.


But an old videotape by Pipilotti Rist? That is wayyyy too cool and
wonderful to be released for standard folks. Way much better than say..a video by Chris Cunningham (they are dvd compils of some of the best music clips directors). So all you ever get are the internet extract clips
(if you're lucky), and a curator text saying: "hey you... I know
you can't see the whole clip right here but you just trust me, cos I'm telling you, it's really really THAT great..Wooooo!!!".


Well, what party.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com




ADDENDUM:


Ooops...ok, my comparison Peter Jackson and William Kentridge was not fair on one account:


Peter Jackson releases a certain amount of full 35mm prints of King Kong for broadcast companies (cinemas). A year later he releases it on dvd for the standard crowd pleasure.


William Kentridge sells a certain amount of films to museums for them to be projected on white walls (why museum walls, go figure...).

The problem thereafter is that he never ever releases them on dvd for the general public (this is an hypothesis...a case study of a visual artists working with single channel work). They are catalogs of the drawings, but a catalog (dvd) of the films, which broadcast versions have all been sold since ages, seems implausible.
You can get a whole reproduction of a Picasso but you will never get a whole reproduction of a Kentridge. "20 000 frames
against 1 ???? Hey, that's not fair !! Don't steal my art!"

Video art suddenly becomes engulfed into an aura that it has created for itself. Tapes get stacked into the vaults of contemporary art museums and lays forgotten there through the years. Most people have never heard of that old Lisa Steele tape, you know?

And then, 20 years later some curator finds them back and show extracts on the web to not offuscate monsieur's copyrights. Or if he's a star they end up being released on dvd 75 years after the death of the artist.


I mean...frankly... They are many programs showing short films on specialized tvs (in Quebec there is Silence On Court), but I cannot think of one program, after 40 years of the birth of video art, that ever broadcasted video art tapes on public television. (!)

Why not ? Why do I still need to go freeze my ass into an obscure
abandoned factory at a Champ Libre event each 2 years to see some video art ??

Why do video artists, instead of snobbing movements like Kino, simply not participate and propose an alternative, throw them tapes on the stage, compile them, play them.


I mean...what's all the fuss about
video art ? I thought Brakhage did it all.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com



ADDENDUM 2:


Final one: promiss:


How in hell could I have forgottten
this:


There WAS a series last year in Quebec on video art made for ....forgot which channel, but it was not even Artv (meaning that no-one probably ever saw it).

But again I think it was all extracts, extracts, extracts...


It's a chance that with artists like Manon Labrecque
sometimes you don't make a difference between an extract and the whole thing. ;-)


Cheers,


Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com

1:11 AM

BGL VS Caroline Lathan-Stiefel

Hello again,
and no that's not the sound of a bad tune by the band
The Cars, but just me showing up again to babble about my wherabouts.


I've seen a couple art shows lately
(missed many others), endlessly getting
back to a normal life.


I was disappointed by the BGL show at Art Mur,
which really looked more like an assemblage of bits
from previous works and performances.

I am sad that it was the first time in 4 years
or more that this group had a solo in Montreal,
because frankly it could give an impression that they "lost it",
when their last show at Mercer Union was one of
the top best exhibits in 2005.

I hope these guys can read me, but..It's really not
worth it to fill air in between other invitations
with a show of pre-baked stuff. And I understand
that Art Mur is a commercial gallery but I am certain
these guys are open to ideas. Did you know you can sell
bits of an installation while it's actually playing?
No need to sell bits of it 3 years later.


Nonetheless, a bad BGL show is still above
many other shows, and the best part was the turnstyle made with a taxidermised moose (that came as a surprised
once you turned around a vertically half-cutted wall that was hiding it).

The hidden-wall installation must have surprised some anew
to their art but was only a re-hash of bits seen previously.
Reinstigating a theatrical contrast between the lightning of a fireplace
switching with the ambiance of a dry office room that was left empty
but a series of chair folded against the walls, as if they had
been previously used for a discussion group (the subtlety was in all the ashes
spread around the corners of the room).


This group of artists have often surprised by the way it
linked a sheer humor with otherwise serious socio-political
outcries, when not simply daring to engage the sublime (usually in over-the-top
immersive installations).

But this time I got to say this mess of
sculptural bits, mixed with a couple photos,
canvas, and one video residual of earlier
performances, look more like scusez-moi
plain quebecois slapstick. Art for the sake of laughing.
Or twitting, to use a term from my previous blog.
Hmm...Interestingly I was recently
praising the healing qualities of humor art,
in fact just one post ago, but I guess I just didn't find the
BGL proposition to be "that" funny.


A very good show was
Caroline Lathan-Stiefel's installation
at Articule, which I don't have the name
next to me, but which consisted of a
complex inter-weaving of tiny constructions
and nets made with colored "fiber-wires"
(I forgot the name of those too, but you
can find them in any dollaramas).


Have you heard of any "sprawling aesthetic" lately?


Have you heard of Sarah Sze, Thomas Hirschorn, or even the coming
back of Jessica Stockholder ?

Well this was it, merely. Sort of a soft, crafty, childhood-sy, dollhouse-oozy version of that, on a smaller scale, but less confusing because mostly made
from a couple singled-out materials, and featuring many recogniseable forms
(beds, octopus, houses) among a generally abstract expression.


I think that is where art is going. Really a name to follow.



What else?

Nah... The best part about the last show at Optica was indeed that the walls
were painted black, but that is all I wish to say about it.


Tomorrow is Nuit Banche in this city, a full night of open events,
so I might as well visit a couple shows then.


I am considering, quite lazy-ly, a trip to New York in March,
but hoolah, maybe just a couple days, to visit the
Andrea Zittel retro.


I never wrote any damn review of 2005, maybe I should
try think about that too.


Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com


PS: I should be doing art of my own
if all goes well, soon.


PS2: I need a digital camera badly,
to enhance this blog with some snapshots.


PS3: I just realized something REALLY DUMB.
This blog was only accepting comments from people
with passwords. HAH. Corrected.

Well Well Well...

Well I'm kinda back.

Kinda.


Gosh this blog is pathetic, it seems no
one ever reads it, makes me look like I don't even
have a friend. ;-)


Thankfully I do have a couple good friends,
they just happen to hate contemporary art
and always wonder why I "loose so much of my time"
caring. Hello, if anyone reads out there !



At any rates, my health is ok
for now. Actually I don't want
to talk about it: I am passing MRI
each 2 months for the next couple years
to make sure I'm ok. All chances are on
my side.


I don't want this blog to be
about babbling details of my personal life
either, because I think that is the wrong
way of blogging, and the reason I started
this was to talk about my artworld endeavours.



Which....Actually might change A LOT, because
I don't think that I need to see that much art anymore.
I feel these days that I acquired through the last 20 years
years a pretty decent idea of its possibilities, if
that may sound pretentious.



Today I went to visit my first gallery exhibit of the year
(and since a good while). It actually wasn't a good idea, I came back
with a big headache and pain.

The fun thing is that I entered the gallery
(Dazibao) and it was filled with photographs of people that I first
thought were doctors (surgeons).

My gosh, is it a good sign?

These people actually work for Hewlett Packard, but
I wasn't feeling great enough to start reading
anything about it. In fact, I left 4001
Berri as soon as I entered, thinking that I would come another
time for other galleries. I think I just got an
average flu, or I'm reacting to the liquids that
got into my body recently, or medication.


The artist is Mark Curran, in case anyone
is interested. "Hello Mark Curran, sorry
for that very lame review".


Personally I think that when we grow older,
they are many cases when some of us will
be loosing bits of our intellectual senses. And so while
walking back home in this half-numbed state
I was in earlier, I was thinking about the sort of art I would make
so that it could be received by people who are
not in their greatest form, intellectually or otherwise.


I was thinking about how an energetic healer
that I went to visit a few weeks back (because I want to put
esoterism on my side, as I do standard medicine
and natural health) told me that my "chakrah energy"
was way too debalanced, and that too much
was concentrated on the cerebral.


My immediate reply was that I was visiting
way too much art exhibits. I just knew it.
I think the kind of art experiences that artists propose me
these days are not the ones that can really help someone feel better.

Art can make you think, it can mirror back or extirpates
your deepest emotions. It can also, at times, make you
feel all sorts of sensation.

But can art really help someone "feel better" ?
Hmmm...Maybe when it's humoristic.


I think a doctor would reply that if you're
the one making the art, it can help "you" feel better.


That's the option I'm considering the most right now,
if I can pull back a bit of all this energy
that seemed to have drained from me recently.



Expect a slow blog here, but
hopefully at some point that would
mean that I'm just very busy.



Cheers,

Cedric Caspesyan
centiment@hotmail.com