Agony, thy name is Video Art

First off, it looks like I have a job. I'll be starting part-time this week which is supposed to "develop" into full time over a month.

In light of the recent damage I've sustained, this is small blog potatoes.

I guess I will have to explain that I will be doing the marketing and PR for Machinima.com

There was some Machinima and a panel on said machinima at a film festival right up the street from me this Sunday. My boss was on the panel and asked me to come, and I was thrilled to go in support of my new job.

The Machinima was -for reasons completely unknown to me or anyone- preceeded by some "video art". I didn't say short films because video art is to short film what a bag of broken glass is to a tasty beverage.

Here is, word for word, a description of the "Technologized Bodies/Embodied Technologies" section of the film festival;

"Presenting new work by a group of international artists. The works represented are linked through thier attempts to convey and solicit embodied subjects and/or embodied responses, potentially rupturing the notion that acts of viewing cohere us as the discrete and transcendent origins of vision and knowledge."

It goes on, but you get the idea...or actually, the lack of ideas which are about to be presented.

One of the greatest joys of leaving film school was the knowledge that I was never, ever, under any circumstances, going to be exposed to the painfully incoherent nonsense that is video art.

Here are some of the films that I recall. I tried very much to fall asleep for part of this 55-minute assault on the senses. I have the schedule so the titles and artists are precise.

Jennifer Porter- THE PUDDLE VIDEO (9 min)

The puddle video was all one single shot. The camera was low to the ground and a puddle filled the bulk of the frame. A girl falls into the puddle. She lays there more or less motionless for about 4-5 minutes. She slowly rises up and pulls in dry dirt from out of frame for the next several minutes and changes the puddle into dry ground. End of video.

If you can’t paint, dragging a video camera into your artistic aspirations is not going to help your art. As a matter of fact, you’re hurting art. Art is crying out in agony for having to claim this. For once, “Entertainment” laughs loud and long at “art”, for art is surely the shittier product

Lara Odell and Monica Duncan- VIDEO PAINTINGS: OUTSIDE THE LAUNDRYMAT. (7min)

An external night shot of a laundrymat shows a girl sitting just inside with her back to the window. She doesn’t do anything or move. Occasionally, somebody would walk in or out of the laundrymat. End of video.

Dear Lara and Monica, please see my advice above to Jennifer about really, really wishing you could paint. I wish you could paint too, because then I could walk right past your painting and move onto one I found interesting. Now your statement is as temporal as it is painful.

Mary Ellen Strom, NUDE NO. 3 (6 min)

A nude woman lying on her side in front of a plasma screen TV showing waves on a beach. A large ball sits in the foreground. She moves her arm over a one or two minute period from her hip to her stomach. End of video.

Mary,

Learn to paint and suck curator cock. I’m sure you’ll make a fine living as a terrible painter. Your video art, however is doomed to be forever burned into the six minutes that I, and about 100 other people will never get back for the rest of our lives.

Jose Carlos Teixeira, IT’S OK (UNITED) (4 min)

A face appears on the screen saying over and over “It’s O.K. Everything is going to be alright. It’s OK”. The face takes up about 1/16 of the screen. It’s joined by the same face saying the same thing, slightly out of sync. Soon the screen is filled with 16 identical heads saying the same phrase out of sync for 4 minutes. End of agonizing fucking video.

I knew how this was going to go down the moment the first face looped. I was overcome with a desire to run through the theater, find this guy, and punch his eyeballs out the back of his skull.

Eva Drangsholt ALL SHALL BE WELL (3 min)

A collage of images of war, bombings and shootings. An African mercenary/thug chases an unarmed man into the streets and machine-guns him down. A bomb explodes in a busy intersection. A woman displays her arm, nearly fully severed at the wrist, the wound still bleeding and raw. All the while a pleasant song sings “All shall be well”. End of video.

Holy assburgers in Hades that’s clever. The song is optimistic and serene, yet the images are beyond horrific. I thought this was juvenile, trite, and simplistic when I saw it in college multiple times. Nowadays, I’m dumbfounded that something like this is not only made by an adult, but certain sectors of society will nod their heads in agreement –to what- they have no idea.

I’m sure a deconstruction argument could be made at how horribly racist this piece was since every atrocity showing actual people was in Africa or the Mid-East. Brown and Black people blowing each other to smithereens for three solid minutes. Is everything going to be alright because these people are going to wipe each other out? That’s terrible Eva Drangsholt! You ma’am, are worse than Hitler!

While I can’t place this one with it’s proper title (and thus, wouldn’t want to place undue blame), it must be mentioned. It was a very tight close-up of an anus… for about a minute. End of video.

I don’t know what to say here that hasn’t already been said by the video. It’s an anus.

Video art is very easily one of the most grueling trials a human being could endure. It should be used to determine which humans can withstand the hardships of outer space. Space certainly couldn’t be more vacuous than video art.

Video art is so terrible, the British cook it.

Video art is so bad, the New York Times reported that George Bush had something to do with it.

Video art is so terrible, Ben Affleck asked to star in it.

Video art is so appalling, the French surrendered to it.

I understand wanting to express yourself. I don’t understand the point of creating something so vague and inane that it’s beyond uninteresting, but actually agonizing to watch. It’s like they’re all trying to recreate REQUIEM FOR A DREAM.

If the desired effect is to be so Po-Mo or so ambiguous that people presume it must have some significant, higher meaning and try to assign it one…well why are you trying to say anything at all if you don’t know what you’re saying?

If your art has no statement from inception, it’s certainly not going to find one in the musings of the LA art crowd.