|
Text fragment from the catalogue ‘Shared Moments’, 2002: Bogers’ video works are also always developed out of their spatial and formal appearance. Already in his early video sculptures like “Portret,” “Fingers,” or “Sacrifice,” he is not satisfied with commercial monitors that are placed on sockets. Instead, he designs his own casings and fittings. For “Fingers,” “Portret,” and “Sacrifice” he made glass showcases in which he hung little black and white monitors tucked in unembellished cases. In “Fingers” two monitors are mounted at the end of a u-shaped case which contains a “magnet.” The video images show circularly arranged fingertips which move synchronously in symmetric formations in front of black background. Sometimes they look at you like eyes as they twist the position of the observer. In “Portret” and “Sacrifice” additional magnifying glasses were mounted which enable us to see the video images. Bogers is playing here with the presence and the absence, the offering and the taking away of the picture. While the little monitors constrict the visibility of the video image, this “impairment” is only seemingly offset by the fortified lenses, for the view of the observer is broken repeatedly by the different glass surfaces – lens, showcase, monitor – and depending on the observer’s position, the video image repeatedly impends to dissolve. In “Portret” and “Sacrifice” the observer has to move very closely to the showcases in order to be able to see the images. Bogers quasi forces the observer to take the posture of a cameraman or artist who wants to focus his object through the viewfinder. “Portret,” however, shows Peter Bogers’ own face; thus he could not stand behind the camera. Here the positions of artist, model and observer are shifted. “Portret” shows the horizontal profile of the artist. A tube leads from his mouth directly to his right eye into which saliva is permanently seeping. This image suggests the absurd presumption of an organic closed circuit. With the saliva seeping from the mouth through the eye directly to the mouth again, it alludes to the head as an empty “Black Box.” In a transmission performance between human being and machine, Bogers seems to make fun of the naïve notion that technological equipment can reproduce reality one-to-one. He does that by prodding the observer directly to the distorting filter. Despite all this transparency of “Portret,” what happens behind the cap of the technological device remains hidden. Would not a look into the intestines of a machine be as unsatisfactory as a look into the inside of a body where no one has ever found a “soul”? Thus Peter Bogers is more concerned with optical filters, those filters close to the surfaces of the visible that place themselves like a veil in front of the eyes, just as if saliva were permanently seeping inside. |