The Troubled Adolescence of Video Art

Like a late child of uncertain parentage, video installation has occupied a difficult place in the family of artistic genres. With a gene pool borrowed from film, photography, painting, and sculpture, it took a while to mature even into its moody adolescence: Video artists had to master pacing and point of view; they had to address where in the gallery or museum experience video fit in, negotiating the fact that audiences, reluctant to stop for long, often saw only slices of their work. Then, at some point in the last decade or so, video blossomed, its hormonal imbalances brought under control.Video is still confronting growing pains, however. What, for instance, does a realist video look like? Two intriguing, though imperfect, long-form video installations currently on view at the New Museum of Contemporary Art engage realism with decidedly mixed results. Each is by a widely, and often justly lauded, artist, and each inhabits the long form as a version of documentary.“Refraction” (2005), by the Dutch artist Aernout Mik, plays out on a long white wall that is bent slightly, at an oblique angle, on the right side. In silence, the camera (or cameras – mostly some type of Steadicam, though there are several shots from a crane) follows the aftermath of a bus accident on a highway in the low, rolling hills of the Dutch countryside. The photography captivates. Although the pacing is languid and the shots relatively long, it nevertheless resembles disaster tage on the nightly news.The bus, one of those double-longes with an accordion connection, lies wo parts on the road. Rescue work– orange-suited firemen, EMTs, the ice – pick through the wreckage. A of traffic waits behind an orange t absurdly placed in the middle of the road. A shepherd preceded by a herd of sheep cuts through trundles across the road. Later a herd of goats passes through. Off in a field, pigs root and snuffle, not unlike the rescuers picking through the roadside brush. Cars pass slowly on the other side of the road. Men with dogs search for something, maybe body parts or a bomb. This goes on for 30 minutes – plenty of time to realize that the angled wall is meant to signal that something is askew.The first thing I noticed was that, while the action clearly takes place in Europe, none of the many people standing around are smoking. Highly improbable. There is no gore, no blood. Nobody cries. There is no hysteria. In fact, no one talks at all. The people in the line of traffic are not shouting or angry or even particularly curious. The only truly legible actions are those performed by the pigs, goats, and sheep.It’s a documentary that has intentionally slipped its grasp on reality. Fine. But the strangeness portends something left annoyingly unresolved – it’s like an elaborate setup to a joke with no punch line. And its languorous pace has lulled even Dan Cameron – a curator I admire and the author of the pamphlet that accompanies the video – into inattention. In his first paragraph, Mr. Cameron asserts that there are participants and spectators here, “while still others are conspicuously absent – the supposed victims of this bus crash.” The fact is we’re shown at least two survivors who hug blankets over their shoulders and stare blankly out at the fields.A “documentary” posing as realist while actually altering – or refracting – the real, like a mockumentary that makes fun of reality, can be wonderfully incisive. To do so, however, it must be anchored to certain truths about the world on which it comments. The slippages in “Refraction” drift free of any such mooring point. Mr. Cameron’s take is that the “strange ennui,” the “disaffection” that dominates the aftermath of violence in this video is less a refraction of reality than a telling truth.“Mik,” he says, “reveals to us that, as a society, we have become so deeply accustomed to social barriers that we no longer know how to participate in activities and events that are not staged for us.”As social commentary, I find this assertion utterly hollow. In the video, what makes the stunned participants so odd is precisely the fact that they act nothing like people at disaster scenes, where emotions roil, empathy and energy abound, and social barriers break down. As a premise for art, Mr. Mik’s is a tired trope, a hangover from bohemias past. The problem is that, unlike in centuries past, realism of a particular style pervades our visual life, especially on TV. The chinks left in the everyday wall of images we constantly encounter are smaller now, and artists need to be particularly agile to wriggle through them.Patty Chang uses the grease of fiction to make our ordinary realist modes slip. Like Mr. Mik, she is concerned with refracted reality, in this case the gulf between the authentic and the merely real. “Shangri-La,” her 40-minute video, employs the documentary style to investigate recent developments in rural China.Shangri-La is, of course, the “heaven on earth” in the mountains of Tibet described by James Hilton in his 1933 novel “Lost Horizon.” Apparently, in 1997, a Chinese village called Zhongdian “declared itself to be the place upon which Hilton’s Shangri-La was modeled,” in the words of the inevitable accompanying pamphlet.Ms. Chang’s visit to this newfangled Shangri-La uncovered a dusty and windblown place seemingly obsessed with constructing cheesy, Disney- or Vegas-like simulations of its magnificent natural treasures. From an airplane window view of mountain peaks spiking through clouds, we move to a troupe of Buddhist monks climbing over fake mountains in a hotel atrium. The video could have ended there, point made. But Ms. Chang wants us to know that it’s not just the hotel builders who can’t see the mountains through mists of commercialism and kitsch. Long stretches are devoted to capturing the progress made on another set of faux mountains: The earnest locals try to build a model in Styrofoam, but that breaks – and the wind threatens to blow it away – so they settle on a wood structure covered with glass.Elsewhere a newly married couple (a white man and an Asian woman) is photographed by a ramshackle crew in various locations, constantly interrupted by meddling villagers. The monks file into a sort of decompression chamber for altitude sickness, weirdly built to look like an airplane fuselage. At the village bakery, the couple’s wedding cake is made in the shape of nearby mountain peaks.It turns out the wedding images are in fact part of a TV ad for Shangri-La, and that the ad is a fiction inserted by Ms. Chang into otherwise documentary footage. I think most people would agree that conflating the real and the fictional is not what holds our interest; the misguided attempt to spark tourism by building kitschy replicas of the gorgeous surrounding landscape is the true nucleus around which Ms. Chang’s audience buzzes. I suspect Ms. Chang doesn’t want to push the satire too far because she fears being labeled offensive, insensitive, ill mannered. Unfortunately for her, that’s the sort of risk we ask of artists. Instead, she pulled back, and turned to the fiction of the wedding as advertisement. Had she risked being insensitive, her video might have justified its very long running time.Both of these videos were produced under the auspices of the excellent Three M Project, a series of works commissioned and jointly presented by the New Museum, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago – an intrepid and praiseworthy endeavor. Too bad Mr. Mik and Ms. Chang weren’t similarly emboldened.Until September 10 (556 W. 22nd Street, between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, 212-219-1222).

The Troubled Adolescence of Video Art

The Troubled Adolescence of Video Art

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