Virtual Scholars
An imagined form of scholarship…Archive for Gallery Visit
InterCommunication Communique
I am sat drinking green tea in the InterCommuncication Center in the Tokyo Opera City Tower. Except I won’t be there now as I upload this, as I am not able to get an internet connection. Despite the cafe being a wi-fi hotspot, I need a subscription to one of the main mobile phone service providers. So, this Open Space - described as ‘a community space that is free of charge and open througout the year’ – dedicated entirely to new media art and culture, has not afforded me the opportunity to write my blog in situ as I had hoped. As an incident of participant observation, I had thought I’d be able to experiment with the open office, to sit here and write online, to create my own digital works, to realise those creative heights we believe new media technologies offer.
Video and new media technology arts both intrigue and disappoint me. The ICC aims ‘to create an environment where one encounters and engages with the progressive experimental activities dervied from the dialogue between technology and art’. It is perhaps one of the best places to go to be inticed by such art. Typically there is a minimal, functional feel to the gallery. As I climbed to the main gallery space, each step on the stairs issued different, playful sounds. It brought a smile to my face and seemed a good start. However, I found myself moving quickly between the exhibits. Any initial appeal seems to last only nano-seconds with me. I ‘get it’ – how it works at least – and then I’m looking on to the next item. What I never seem to find is anything subtle, engulfing, slow, gentle, loving. Except perhaps some of the more static, visual pieces.
It strikes me there are three generic forms:
(1) Mechanical/Sculptural – 3-dimensional exhibits. They tend to use traditional sculptural materials, combined with electronics to make something, which perhaps moves or glows (either according to its own pattern, or related to the viewer’s actions).
(2) Visual – mainly 2-dimensional exhibits, though also often placed as an installation. These works tend to use electronics to re-engineer the formal picture space, making it glow and animate. Bill Viola’s work is perhaps the best example of this kind of work, which is made using fairly traditional video technology. However, it is also often the case that visual works are made through the use of new technologies, such as imaging softwares. As part of the Open Space exhibit at the ICC I saw some work by Keiko Kimoto which interested me (and a fabulous book entitled Imaginary Numbers).
(3) Interactive – environments within which the particpant can manipulate the work of art. Typically these pieces change according to body movements or simple touch sequences. Often there is a screen that the participant is watching, perhaps seeing themselves in the screen or at least some visual element that is identifiable as reacting to their presence.
Whilst the interactive forms would seem to suggest a more dynamic and interesting kind of work, I tend to find these the most disappointing. They might be fun and/or slightly disorientating, but generally they seem only a glorified pavlovian game – ‘look what happens when I do this’, ‘look I’ll do it again, see it does the same’! At best these works can at be stylish and aesthetically pleasing, but generally they are just gadgets waiting to be disgarded. The mechanical, sculptural items tend to be similar, though they can have a little more grace as an exhibit, since they work more within their own formal terms. For me, however, it is frequently the static, or slower visual pieces that I am attracted to.
However, concentrating on the pieces in themselves is perhaps the wrong thing to do. One of the strengths of new media arts is its history, the on-going attempts to bring such an art form to fruition. On entering the gallery there is a lovely timeline exhibit. Glass panels on the floor in the centre of the main gallery space (with the decades listed along the side) hold all sorts of items, books, tapes, gadgets etc, that have accrued – in the name of new media arts – since the early 20th Century. This intrigues me, and the same happens in the bookshop downstairs. All sorts of obscure and usually beautifully designed publications are on the shelves, along with DVDs and magazines. There is a whole intellectual, creative community behind these works and the aspirations they represent. But who are these people and how do you get to meet them!? I was drawn to two books. One, mentioned above, was Keiko Kimoto’s Imaginary Numbers (a beautiful book full simply of freely drawn lines on black and on white) and the other, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani’s LIFE – Fluid, invisible, inaudible. Just the titles tell of the subtle sensitivies at stake, but also these books bring out for me the obvious importance of process and immersion. It is more about experimenting and enaging with new technologies, being with them, which is why it is perhaps so difficult to exhibit the works. Perhaps there need not be such a thing as new media art works, just new media art work…
As I made my way to the gallery, full of expectation, I made a few little film pieces with my phone. They are pitiful in the face of the works I then went on to view, but for me they are meaningful – they are, for me, full of the hopes I had ‘before’ seeing the exhibits, before anything was formalised, before I could write this…
Micro-Shorts Gallery
ICC #1
ICC #2
ICC #3
ICC #4
ICC #5
Helio Oitcica
Series of red squares… (sadly I was not with the one person who would have appreciated this series). Interestingly my visit to see the Helio Oitcica exhibition was due entirely to the fact that I had dinner at the Tate Modern as part of a conference on e-learning. Earlier in the day, during a ‘live-blogging’ seminar I had been quite distracted by some rather nice red shoes… these then entered into the ‘debate’ that the session supposedly sought to engender… for the full details visit the designs on elearning Inter@ct blog.
Bill Viola’s Observance (Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield)
(Following a visit on Thursday 6 July 2006)
The Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield, situated at the top of the building of the city’s central public library, is perhaps typical of such municipal facilities. There is nothing on the walls of tremendous merit, but nonetheless, the gilt-edged frames and hard wood fixture and fittings give a hint of grandeur otherwise lacking in the commercial spaces beyond.
I went the wrong way as I entered and so traversed the entire gallery collection before finally coming across what I wanted to see. In the final room, on the deep-red walls, there were five ‘popular’ works by 16th Century Old Masters such as Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Luis Morales, taken from the Sheffield City Collections. However, the real focal point of the room, like a star pulling all around it by the force of gravity, was a single plasma screen. Unusually for a TV screen perhaps it was set on the wall vertically, which gave it a rather pleasing image. Playing on this screen was the work of one of the world’s most renowned and respected contemporary film and video artists, Bill Viola. Some years ago R.V. had given me a VHS copy of Hatsu-Yume, but I had not given it much notice, not least because I found it difficult to know how, or in what mood to watch it. This then was my first proper chance to experience Viola’s work.
The work showing at Graves Art Gallery was taken from Bill Viola’s Passions series, Observance (2002). In the Passions series, Viola investigates how the Old Masters depicted emotional extremes in their art. His video work in turn seeks to elicit a powerful emotional response from the viewer. Observance, for example, is based on two panel paintings entitled Four Apostles by Albrecht Durer and concerns itself with the depiction of an intense and shared grief. Viola asked the cast of actors he assembled to step towards “something they’d rather not see, to say goodbye to someone who’d left them”. As they approach the unseen moment before them, each register individual expressions of grief, bewilderment, shock and disbelief. All of which is played in slow-motion, making for a rather revealing study of gestures, emotion and community. You find yourself watching, for example, not just the faces, but the hands – with each person lightly caressing the next in line, as if to comfort and yet equally to negotiate their movement to the front of the line. In its intensity of mood, resonance of colour and tone and orchestration of the ‘players’ in Viola’s drama pay tribute to the compositions of the Old Masters. (See: Bill Viola – The Passions, ed. John Walsh, Getty Publications, 2003).
I am a little bit late on this one (Bill Viola’s installation of Five Angels for the Millennium at Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 2001 is said to have attracted some 40,000 visitors in just a couple of months). However, I am beginning to understand something of the enormous appetite for his work, and perhaps even I can begin to find a time/place/mood to watch Hatsu-Yume (in fact I had it on in my office a few days before visiting the exhibit in Sheffield. This distracted viewing maybe about right). In one of the books strewn upon a small table in the exhibition (presumably to give you something to do whilst watching the screen!), I came across an observation: what is intriguing, the author suggested, ‘is the extent to which Viola’s work both resists and … doesn’t necessarily need, the kind of explanation that art institutions feel obliged to provide’. Far from suggesting Viola’s work as simplistic in any way, we can understand the works to ‘connect with their audience in ways that are as much visceral or emotional as they are intellectual [...] Viola’s art, if it is anything, is an art of affect’ (Chris Townsend, The Art of Bill Viola, Thames & Hudson, 2004, p.8).
A number of responses in the visitor’s book perhaps bear out this observation rather well:
‘Viola makes me believe that video art has a purpose. I usually turn around and walk out when I see the flicker of a screen (this from a contemporary artist too .. not one of those Daily Mail readers) … The sensibility of this and the Tom Hanks [also showing at the Graves Art Gallery] made me both worry and celebrate the human race’ (Dave Chessie)
‘Viola absolutely appalling as ever. He should learn to paint. Second rate Mel Gibson stuff. No wonder he is so reviled by early collaborators … Forester et al. at Caltech and Buffalo. Expensive kit, full-on investment – Ugh!’ (Adam Sylvester)
‘What’s the plasma about?’ (Ellie)
‘One interpretation or explanation does not necessarily exclude or preclude another. There are layers of meaning to these things which we would prefer not to see’ (Christine Smith)
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