Still motion - Reviews - visual arts

Hosfelt Gallery

San Francisco, California

January 25-March 1, 2003

While motion detection, surveillance, GPS technologies, network structures and other such spatial devices and categories have dominated much of the criticism of contemporary media art, the theme of movement in visual art is not a new one. From the implied movement of a painter's body to the arrested motion of a photographer's subject, motion has long been a fascination. The work in the exhibition Still/Motion is emblematic of this varied and long art-critical tradition of privileging motion, extending its reach from LED panels, video and photography, to painting, sculpture and installation, while presented in the context of the inherence of motion to video and stillness to photography. In each case, motion comprises the work, yet the concept of motion and, often, motion contributed by the viewer, overrides the context and import of the original movement.

Aaron Parazette's paintings Slider and Site 1 (2002) are slickly clean images implying focused personal movement. The romantic notion of the line living as a trace of the painter's hand is updated by the reminder that motion implies space. The works marry motion and space in a formula akin to "rise over run," and their precise curvature demands motion of the viewer, too, if only ocular. Guy Hundere's video demands even more participation from the audience. Housed in a wooden box, one must flip a switch to activate Impasse (2001). Upon so doing, one sees what looks like an infinite car window tracking shot of a far-off barn house that never leaves center screen, despite the rapid movement of the foreground.

Kirsten Bahrs Janssen presents two more projects of the "red button" ilk. In this case, pressing the button activates wall sculptures that unravel or weave together spools of thread. The Length of DNA and How I Measured Up to the Moon (2003) does not, in fact, complete its task until its tiny motor has spun and twisted 69,544 spools of thread. This length is equivalent to estimations of both the length of a strand of DNA and the distance from the Earth to the Moon. While the latter piece will far exceed the artist's lifespan, Days of Sunshine in a Native Californian's Life (2001) presents a surprisingly meager 48 spools of yellow thread, to be unraveled in a conical pile, each representing one of the few sunny days in the life of the artist's mother. Just as time can be measured in relation to a person's lifespan, so too can motion. While the thread in use has a specific, physically-manifested length, stillness and motion are cast as cyclical, ephemeral qualities in Janssen's work.

In Westward (2003), Lordy Rodriguez created a fictional map representing a recent move from Texas to Los Angeles. At first glance, the map appears genuine. A carefully drawn grid and segments of various colors recall GPS technologies and topographic cartography, yet the viewer soon realizes that there is no decipherable logic to Rodriguez's details. An Etch-A-Sketch-like, indirect path is drawn, connecting starting point and destination, tying landscape to vision by virtue of the fact that those locales not visited are not seen by the viewer. At the exhibition's opening, visitors were convinced that the map represented a path traveled from West to East, as a Westerner would read a text, and that the piece documented a long road trip from California to New York. The Great Lakes were "recognized" in the Gulf of Mexico and the San Francisco peninsula was spotted off the coast of Los Angeles. Memory and the projection of human experience comprise the logic imparted to Westward by spectators.

Julianne Swartz's seemingly ramshackle, site-specific installations are similarly dependent upon a sense of spatial (mis)recognition, though her punch line is literally see-through. Lenses, wires, sheaths, adhesives, found objects and other sundry materials comprise gaze-directing armatures that are self-reflexive in their lookingness. Sparkly silver pinwheels spin and thin mylar tinsel twists in the wind as viewers are confronted with their own misinterpretation of the lens' ultimate vanishing point.

Rather than constructing a motion, Jona Frank meticulously tears several apart. Inspired by Eadweard Muybridge's early motion studies, Frank presents a video of young "star" skateboarder Cor-E skating next to four C-print panel contact sheets of the film strip on which he "moves." Actually the converse of Muybridge, who never saw his pictures in motion, Frank's skater, and the language of cinema, are deconstructed as vignettes to slowly reveal the many levels comprising Cor-E's motion. In the case of a segment in which the skater opens his mouth to bite on his skateboard, shaking his head as a dog would, it seems that the arrest of motion reveals the conceptual hinges between frames and reveals the very conception of the thought "chew skateboard." Despite their time-based medium, the Cor-E DVD (a 5245 analog transfer) and Filmstrips appear timeless in the absence of visual or auditory clues as to the year of the film's construction. As in previous works by the artist, her subject's clothing and physique are f undamentally demonstrative of his identity, yet they are so personally-stylized that he could just as easily be from 1975 as 2003. Again, invoking the temporal motion of cycles (the fashion system, lifespan, the state of current technologies), the context of skateboarding, with the waxing and waning of board, wheel, clothing and even movement styles within a specific constellation, proves the perfect backdrop for such a study.

Both Bob Linder and Anthony Discenza take video self-reflexivity to almost manipulative extremes in elaborating on the theme of motion. Discenza's The Nighthouse (2003) is a continuous loop of a single shot. The artist has so manipulated his camera that, within the blacked-out edges of the white plastic house framed in the shot, there appears a fuzziness akin to television static. It is not difficult to imagine this as a comment on the ultimately contentless, but infinitely broadcast, television media that take over so many of the suburban cookie-cutter homes Discenza's resembles. Soon the static makes sense of the house, more than its inverse. The piece includes an eery audio track that is a natural byproduct of the camera's contortions. To create Where the Land Ends (2002) video stills, Linder violently shook, threw then caught and often dragged his video camera across the ground. The result of this violence against the equipment, against the pristine nature of the medium, is an interference with the camera 's ability to "correctly" process signals. His images are so decayed that erratic pixelations erupt within otherwise banally normal landscapes, archiving moments of interrupted serenity and stillness, somewhere at the edge of unspecified spaces.

The contributions of Alfredo Jaar and Jim Campbell initially seem diametrically different presentations from Linder's and Discenza's active works. Jaar's Walking (2002) presents a light box-displayed photo of a Rwandan refugee departing from his destroyed homeland. Thick brushstroke-like lines--the after effect of photographing a subject in motion at a slow shutter speed--appear to run opposite the walker's direction. Adding to the layers of implied movement is the political connotation of the movement of cultural and state boundaries in a time of active civil war. Jaar draws the viewer in (more motion) with a fascinating image that reveals a situation that is anything but. Bearing formal resemblance is Jim Campbell's Dynamism of an Automobile (2001). Part of his Illuminated Averages series, another blurred image in a light box presents the still, mathematical equivalent of the overlapping of each frame in a film of a car's motion. It is difficult to resist forsaking one's own knowledge that the car is not in motion, as our minds are tempted to "dither" the parts of the averaged frames into a translated movement. Ironically, Campbell's 7,344 Stills (2003) displays no obvious signs of movement, though its "subject" does, indeed, walk. Equipped with motion sensors, the piece is LED panel effectively displaying a figure walking only when no one is in the room in which it is installed. (Curator Dianne Hoover is sure that the figure moves because it is in a different position upon her daily arrival and departure from the gallery.) In a style very particular to Campbell's work, the piece is reactive to viewers, yet refuses to give them the image they desire from it; it is reactive in a way that at once denies and underscores our expectation for the experience and display of a work of media art. In the end, we are called to perform what is revealed to be a most poetic motion: that of leaving the gallery.

MARISA S. OLSON is a San Francisco-based artist, writer and curator. She is the associate director of SF Camerawork and serves on several boards, including the SF Media Arts Council as founding editor of their zine, 'SMAC!, She has written for a number of publications including Wired, Mute and Art on Paper.

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