Go straight to the main content



murmurART

art advisory - looking for something specific or help in finding work by early career artists. contact info@murmurart.com
Review Aug 12 2009 « | »
The art of the online video Reflections on the experience of watching film and video art on the newest medium of presentation and distribution

Emma Bennett

Focus on Pipilotti Rist's I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986)

A woman, or at least the shape of a woman, pulses fuzzily on my thumbsmudged computer screen. A mass of black frizz haloes the hazy oval of her face. She is a near featureless blur, and she is singing. "I'm not the girl who misses much, di di dee dee dee di, di di", it goes, over and over again, in a freakishly shrill, sped-up voice which nevertheless sounds earnest, and somehow fatigued.

I shift in my seat. The blurred woman-outline steps backwards, so that now her whole body is in shot. She is wearing a black pinafore dress, her bare arms flap out to the sides in a loose rhythmic dance. Her breasts are exposed, and they flap too. Blurredly, in time.

This, an early work by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, formed my first experience of video art viewed online. It's the 4.36 minute opener in a 73 minute stream of Rist works made available by ubuweb, as part of their extensive (dizzyingly so) catalogue of artists' film and video. A tutor at my art college showed it as part of a loose lecture on crapness in contemporary art practice.

This was 2006, when the piece was already twenty years old, but I was both disconcerted and thrilled by this first viewing. There's something in Rist's heady combination of physical and technological discomposure which remains powerful. The woman's disordered exuberance mimics the video's distortions; she's fuzzed, fast-forwarded, looped and distorted behind the glitchy swathes which pulse over the screen.

There's a certain violence in this vision of the body, processed and re-processed by the trashy disposability of video. But there's also something undeniably funny, impish and anarchic - something which reminds me of the abject silliness which can result from many hours spent alone, experimenting, testing, repeating, with only a camera for company.

What I'm getting at is, I suppose, the very videoness of this video. For artists, perhaps one of the biggest headaches of video as a medium is the images quality lost through transferral between formats, and the slippage of colour between playback devices. But Rist's work seems to take joy in the mess of transferral; for her, the unruliness of the medium conflates with physical and artistic waywardness (which hovers on the edge of burnout, of sensory overload).

And maybe it is this which makes online dissemination seem like such an apt mode for this kind of video work. Through watching and re-watching, I've developed a profound engagement with this half-disintegrated woman. Along with Paul McCarthy's Painter, she haunts my wireless connection late at night. She's anarchic, hilarious, crap and unnerving. She's my kinda girl.

View extract by clicking above or full work at on this ubuweb page.

Donald Eastwood

"It is important to us that you realize that what you will see is in no way comparable to the experience of seeing these gems as they were intended to be seen: in a dark room, on a large screen, with a good sound system and, most importantly, with a roomful of warm, like-minded bodies." From Ubuweb video.

Criticism of watching video art/film art/experimental cinema online usually focuses on two things, the quality of the reproduction and the medium of the webpage and computer screen. This is curiously old-minded, and suffice it to say that disclaimers such as the one above are important but wrong.

It is important to clearly establish details of materials used and between originals and copies in art. However, it would be wrong to suggest that the details listed above could be assumed as a standard even for all film art or experimental cinema, while video art, DVD or Digital Video art use quick editing processes and imperfect quality knowingly.

Television pixels and colour inconsistencies, different projector lamps temperatures and qualities, the degradation of film transparencies, block information bundles for DVD or film frames - there has always been differences and approximations in this field of art. Meanwhile, High Definition online streaming and home projection cinemas loom large. The notion that Internet distribution implies that their preferred viewing criteria cannot be met seems to be, at most, a temporary concern.

There are more profound considerations at work here: Digital recording and reproduction offers the prospect of zero entropy - no material, no dust and no decay. Sites such as UbuWeb ot Tank TV are resources that within foreseeable technological advancement will instead offer permanent, non-degradable libraries.

The greater part played by the viewer, who is now able to jump ahead in the viewing, pause, to alter the volume, skip to the next video. Watching Alice Anderson's excellent L'Idiote de Lisseville on tank TV, I eventually cannot resist skipping down to the perhaps better Steve Reinke (whose witty, inappropriate, shocking, pop confessionals anticipate the youtube generation hugely). After skipping a few more videos without completing them, I settle to Grizedale's selection.

Like film and video before it, online video has an identity that pre-exists its use as an artistic medium. Youtube, as a moniker for universal free and unedited upload and distribution, has defined it. These sites present a boundless video diary of the global psyche, a new kind of viewing experience and a formidable body of what could be described as 'video art brut'. By contrast, when I select the 'video art' tag on Vimeo, genrally known as the video artist's favourite player, there sems to be only hackneyed imitations of a video art stereotype, like amateur paintings that just imitate old elevated styles.

    Comments

Add Comments

  • CAPTCHA Image