Sachgebiete

Beschreibung:

142 S.; zahlr. Illustr. (s/w); 23 cm; kart.

Bemerkung:

Gutes Ex.; Einband etwas berieben. - Englisch. - ... Alexis Smith, Eleanor Antin and Robert Cumming have produced narrative works employing sculptural elements as the central focus of the videotape pieces. Smith extends the literary sensibility of her illustrated wall/text pieces by introducing a reader (herself) telling A Tale of Two Dreamers taken from the Borges rendition of Tales of the Arabian Nights. Her voice is simply dubbed over a succession of images animated by camera movement. The desert travel sequence, for instance, shows a standard pack of Camel cigarettes set in a bed of sand as the camera pans by to indicate motion. As opposed to the wall/tableaux version of the same work, the videotape viewer is forced to experience the cigarette pack (essentially the image of a walking camel) in time with the reading, and without the surrounding context of the rest of the work. But perhaps more importantly, the video version of the work ascribes a kind of surreality to the Camels by transforming the cigarettes to a lo-fi black and white image as removed from reality as the story itself. Eleanor Antin's performance works have always employed a great deal of artifice in the creation of her alter-ego characters. Video, for Antin, is perhaps the most effective way of framing her work and directing her audience. In The Adventures of A Nurse (1976), Antin presents a series of fantasies set within the overall fantasy/character of nurse Eleanor. In the live version of the performance, nurse Eleanor sits on her bed and acts through several socially and sexually loaded situations using a set of paper dolls as players and another set of hand drawn dolls as audience observing from a shelf. In the taped version of the work, we see more than a document of the performance, as the soap opera quality of the piece suddenly attains a curious sort of credibility through the imposition of the structured language of camera shots and cuts that we have come to know as television reality. In the act of taping the performance, and in fact removing the story and storytelling from reality by one layer, Antin manages to set the performance and the content of the performance inside a context that we read, as a result of our experience with "real"soapopera, as somehow more "believable." Robert Cumming, who has previously produced primarily conceptual photo/text works and a series of books, explores the nature of artifice in his taped work, Outdated Autobiography, (1976). Set in a familiar talk-show format, Cumming is interviewed by an obscured on-screen figure. The conversation is typical talkshow banter revolving around Cumming'strip across country and leading to a comment about how, as an artist answers a question about how many books he has written, and as he answers, an obviously prepared sign bearing Cumming's exact response slides in behind him as he speaks. The effect of this visual punning is compounded as he stands and begins to play with the motorized punctuation in the elegant handmade sliding sign, while discussing how the next take should be executed. The overall effect is similar to that of his photographs: the exposure of the inherent artificiality of work in any medium, as well as the prevailing bias that accompanies all such directed communication. The veracity of the colorvideo image serves to underscore his assertion, in much the same way that the incredibly well-crafted construction of the sliding sign prop indicated the "phoney" veracity of the conversation itself. Charles Frazier and John Sturgeon have created tapes that explore mythical and archetypal imagery in transformation. Frazier'stape Variations on Manifest Destiny (1976) is a record of the variations on the pyramid/triangle image in relation to natural processes. A series of highly symbolic gestures (such as the pouring of honey over a sugar pyramid and the subsequent burning of the mixture) is placed in juxtaposition with the political mythology of the pyramid as the Great Seal of the United States. In contrast to the objects themselves, Frazier uses the videotape to produce ordered relationships which are only inferred in their "natural" state. John Sturgeon's tape Shapes From the Bone Change (1975) engages the viewer in a heavily edited video collage combining Sturgeon as a neo-primitive figure assembling and re-arranging a group of bone fragments in a series of triangular and crossed-triangular configurations evocative of astrological and Cabbalistic diagrams. Sturgeon relies on the strangeness of the use of state-of-the-art techniques in combination with objects whose off camera life would seem to be more archeological than sculptural to produce an almost religious aura that pervades the work. Though the objects and diagrams when seen directly undoubtedly have a life of their own, it is through the transformation onto tape that the piece derives its ultimate power. In this first segment of the Southland Video Anthology series, then, we are presented with seven artists whose work provides the framework for a discussion of the transformation in seeing and experiencing artists' realities that the use of videotape initiates. ? (Vorwort)