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Review in ‘Frieze’
issue 104 January-February 2007 Exhibition: ‘Play- Rev.-Play The
Netherlands Media Art Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands In
late 2004 the Amsterdam-based World Wide Video Festival, founded 30 years
earlier, lost its funding and essentially closed its doors. Although
decisions such as these are always to some extent political, one of the
deciding body’s more salient complaints about the WWVF was that ‘video art’
as such had become so incorporated info the mainstream that the continued
need for a specialized festival had evaporated; video art, in other words,
had become art. The same can perhaps be said of its
inchoate cousin, media art: a bank of flatscreen monitors, a recording of a
dance piece, an interactive Internet project, some live VJ-ing - it’s all
good, and it’s all media art. And centres that house and display these works
are becoming equally ubiquitous, from Banff to Vancouver, from Karlsruhe to
Gifu. A case in point is the Netherlands Institute for Media Art - or, to
give it its full name, The Netherlands Media Art Institute/Montevideo TBA,
with TBA standing for ‘time-based art’. That gangly mouthful speaks volumes
about the cloudiness of any such institute’s mission. One wonders how much
its brief would change if the word ‘media’ were deleted from the name. Is
David Lynch, who recently switched from celluloid to digi-camcorder for his
2006 film Inland Empire, now a media artist? Does Beck’s release of
interactive music DVDs make him a media artist too? Foregrounding the
technical details of production seems a spurious blueprint for
categorization. Like video art, media art is neither a genre nor a movement, and
classifying art works in this way is as arbitrary as arranging them, say,
alphabetically. Perhaps more instructive today would be a grouping based on
congruent affinities, instead of hardware predilections. But fortunately the widespread absorption
of media art’s infrastructure into the background of everyday life means that
in works such as those of Peter Bogers the hardware doesn’t become the focal
point, or a tool for spectacular presentation, but rather a way to examine
our world in more detail. Bogers began using video in the 1980s to record his
live performances, initially as a means of coping with stage fright, but he
has since grown into a multimedia maestro, seamlessly integrating video,
performance, soundscape, sculpture and installation. Yet the technology is
never employed for its own sake; instead, it illuminates details that would
otherwise remain imperceptible. In much the way that time-lapse photography
has revealed starfish to be infinitely more mobile than previously assumed,
and filters have allowed humans to see the otherwise invisible images beamed
to Earth from the Hubble telescope, Bogers uses technology to zoom into the
granular level. In Retorica (1992), for example, he mimics his baby’s
murmuring, searching for the generative grammar at the roots of all language.
Likewise in Chorus and The Unified Field (both
2006) dozens of voices in nearly as many languages speak, sing and breathe in
concert, lending these pieces a liturgical quality that transcends language
by first deconstructing it. Trying to decipher the individual snippets, which
were collected via satellite radio and the Internet, is possible, but
ultimately a fool’s errand; the grains themselves are meaningless as
‘content’. It would be easy to view pieces such as these two, which are
compiled from hundreds of unrelated slices from the media maelstrom, as more
tedious ruminations on information overload or on the inanity of TV in
general. But no judgement is taking place here, just an attempt to distil
from these ingredients the features that are common to all cultures - such as
language or time or violence - and a chance for us to comprehend better the
smailnesses that compose them. Bogers has in fact been breaking things
down into their component parts for years - not only sounds and images but
also the human body: mouths and ears and hands and eyeballs appear throughout
his works, suddenly untethered. This is done in part to challenge people’s
reflexive need to impose order on the parts they see, the way a grandmaster
will immediately see a chessboard not as individual pieces but rather as a
whole, a unified field of sorts. Bogers highlights this desire to unify
disparate elements by continually atomizing and then reassembling them. But
instead of becoming a Babel-like chaos, the result is a universal chorus, a
media-art Esperanto that’s refreshingly apolitical. Douglas Heingartner |