Out in Public

I was driving home from the opening of Natalie Bookchin‘s amazing multi channel video installation, Now he’s out in public and everyone can see with fellow “video artists” Rachel Mayeri and Anne Bray and we were commenting on how hard it must be to make something that eloquent and prescient and beautiful—the result of two years of hard thinking and feverish work—and to live with the knowledge that the only people who will ever really see it are those lucky enough to walk through the doors of Hollywood’s LACE Gallery between the dates of March 8-April 15, 2012. Just look where YouTube has taken us to …

We want to believe that (like “video art” but so much more) all of our work can and should  last forever, move where it must, and be seen by all who need it. This promise—that each and every one of our words, opinions, and voices will play a part of the cultural dialogue—is also (one of) the sad stories of Bookchin’s piece: a minimalist, refined statement upon the current and changing power of place and placenessless, circulation and stagnancy, video and sculpture, and voice and agency via YouTube. Eighteen monitors seem to float, hanging elegantly as they do from cables and hooks, suspended across a large blackened and muffled gallery in a dumbfounding materilazation of circuitry, a compelling literalization of cyberspace, freeing visitors to walk into and through the multiple competing screens that usually sit so flat in front of us. While her other recent work (seen most recently at LACMA) begins to disperse one story across a sea of embodied voices—none of them her own, all of them eerily in synch, mouthing one way of being and knowing, even as each one of us retains our autonomy or not, lost as we are in a sea of undifferentiated testimony

the new project fractures and sprays these “scatter-shot online voices” across the room, forcing the viewer’s body (not the computer screen) to hold all this variation, and pain, anger, desire, and loneliness. By forcing the work to be and stay room-, place- and time-bound, known as it will be only in and through our bodies (and sometimes those bodies dancing together across the room), Bookchin reminds us that speaking into the void (and being saved by the Internet) is no replacement for the beauties of ineffable place.

Voice as Structure

Yesterday afternoon, I had the decided pleasure of partaking in a conversation with Natalie Bookchin, the amazing new media artist who is my friend and even sometimes collaborator. We spoke together with the Critical Digital Humanities group at UC Riverside about space, quotation, and community in relation to our critical media practices.

A highlight in our conversation addressed how we both conscientiously move and link our work between “real” and “cyber” spaces always anticipating how they are co-constitutive (thanks to April Durham for this clarification) while trying to maintain a shared, and admitted commitment to the “real” in the last instance (what I called a complex three-way). But I was most inspired by our interactions about the voice, body and structure: how Natalie explains the ways that her voice is visible in the system, tensions, arguments, and connections she draws from the indexical images of faces and words of others from YouTube, while my online feminist mantrafesto didactically insists that the (feminist, raced) body of the user must be seen. Bookchin’s unseen but anchored presence as artist may be the out I’ve been looking for, as participants at my road show have consistently been critical of these lines:

All voices want a body. A body needs to be visible
Visibility allows for warranting

Share Your Depth

We opened PerpiTube with Natalie Bookchin‘s brilliant piece about isolation within community and the public nature of private pain:

Pitzer Galleries curator, Ciara Ennis, noted how the depth of this pain was best articulated through the video’s formal distractions. Then, twelve gallery visitors from Italy responded:

Video Art(ists) of the YouTube Archive

“The many types of video art have been made with a variety of intentions, ideas, working styles, and structures. Some address pure aesthetic concerns, where others prioritize content in less formal but still original and more deeply personal ways.” Kate Horsfield, “Introduction to the Video Data Bank Collections,” Feedback, 2006.

(Here you should see Kate Horsfield interviewed in the 1970s about video, but Google video won’t let me embed. You can also see my interview with her for the 1990s Women of Vision, here.)

If everything on YouTube is video art (at least the stuff made by individuals and not corporations), but very little of this art can be ever finally understood as such because it wasn’t really made to be art and won’t be recognized as such either, even if it was (unless it goes off YouTube gaining sanction, context, and community along the way), then it is the archivist (the curator, the choreographer, the tour guide) who becomes the final, visible, verifiable YouTube artist by herself making visible the links (to other forms, communities, ideas) that the artist alone might once have made (off-line in a place on a box for an audience). See the work of Natalie Bookchin, for example:

Resolutions 3: Thinking Context, Place, and Gender

I had the pleasure of attending 2/3 days of this impressively large and diverse symposium organized by my friends and colleagues, Ming-Yuen Ma and Carol Stakenas from LACE. This post is not a review, but rather an attempt to crystalize connections between some of the work and conversation that I found most provocative. After this word, I couldn’t help but begin where the conference did, with the work of Wafaa Bilal who has created several interactive media projects based upon a shared logic and structure of first-person shooter games and our current war in Iraq.

Waafa’s work inspired fruitful dialogue at the symposium about the significance of context and other authorial controls within the field of contemporary video art or video art within a new media environment, (here meaning video practices that are networked, mobile, and viewable across platforms rather than stand-alone in a museum or monitor). Whereas some “old-school” video artists might have been done when they crafted the discrete piece, new media conditions have forced focused artistry around extra-textual questions–about building (and managing) audience and supporting information, as well as systems of interaction and engagement–that might have only once been on the map of “activist” videomakers. Waafa explained that he made “dynamic” not “didactic” work that created a new public forum, mirroring life, where critical questions could be played out and with. While many of us were concerned that this allowed participants to primarily publicly restage their already strongly held positions, desires, and commitments Waafa seemed satisfied with this outcome (that, for instance, a large portion of the players on his piece, Shoot an Iraqi, came to it–and him–as paint ball enthusiasts rather than through an engagement with  war, zenophobia, or racism).

I continued to think about these questions contextual in relation to seeing Natalie Bookchin’s Trip (2008), a 63 minute video installation composed of moving landscapes shot from cars, often with music accompanying, and culled from Youtube. Bookchin told us that after many years of highly successful tactical media work with the groups @rtMark and Yes Men, she’s needed to move things OFF of mainstream media platforms, to restage them in the real world, where there is less noise, and in counter-distinction to Waafa’s work, more room for authorial and spectatorial structure (and perhaps contemplation and even dialogue). Later, we also spoke together about the waning power of satire (a staple for tactical media) as it becomes the dominant tonality, and my recent concern (expressed in posts below) that YouTube media, specifically, has to strive to say what it means, rather than relying on smug reference and repetitive asides.

Finally, along this vein of context, place and tone, I watched a productive encounter between video artists Maria Diaz and Alex Villar.

Both artists videotape the placement of their own bodies into difficult spaces. However, where Alex’s are the hidden in-betweens of generic offices and city spaces, where he uncomfortably but artfully wedges his body, Maria’s are entirely personal and local sites: a field in Guatemala where she walks and carries her pre-adolescent daughter, a central town square where she produces poetry for passers-by. The project of inserting oneself tactically into the ubiquitous flow of daily media military corporate life is quite distinct from the intervention (Jennifer Doyle’s term) of a specific body, with an overt position, into a particular place.

It seems critical, but also a little difficult, for me to note how highly gendered these divergent (but related) practices played out for me at the symposium: women artists insisting upon the specificity of their bodies and beliefs (ho hum), and male ones making larger more open-ended claims about the gendered and raced but mediated body (we’ve been here before!). Men using humor, women getting serious. I am the first to acknowledge that none of these strategies are in and of themselves gendered, but I will also affirm that for the three days of Resolutions3 they played out for me, fruitfully, in these terms.