M A R C H 9,
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SOMEONE'S BEEN
sneaking around the video libraries late at night. Against a
barrage of video clips by art-world pranksters like Bruce Nauman and Alex
Bag, and narrated by the sotto voce of a Mac's synthesized "Victoria" voice,
Untitled #29.95 makes its debut tonight at the New York Underground Film
Festival. The film, by a group calling itself the Video Aktivists, traces a
brief history of video art as it travels from rags to riches. Featured in the
finale is "The Great Video Art Give-Away," which hawks bootlegged copies of
Matthew Barney's Cremaster 5 and Lucy Gunning's Climbing Around My Room. These are not dubs, mind you, but clunky videocam recordings of a screen at an exhibition. A copy of each video -- recorded from works that sell for upwards
of $25,000 at the artists' galleries -- will cost you, yes, $29.95, and is
available from the infamous ®™ark (www.rtmark.com), the anti-corporate hacker art collective that has sponsored such past subversions as the Barbie
Liberation Organization. It's another installment in the underground's long history of lo-fi artistic shoplifting, but it's time for culture-jammers to develop new methods. When apprised of the pirate video's existence, a representative of
the Barbara Gladstone gallery, which handles and distributes Barney's
Cremaster series, offered this response: "Whatever."
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Untitled #29.95 locates video's roots in the more antimaterialist and
radical sectors of the sixties and seventies art world. It goes on to mourn the NEA's
trials of the eighties and nineties and how nonsubsidized art remains
ever-beholden to the elite. Listed in the evidence is the way that video,
arguably the most reproducible and therefore most "accessible" art, has been
gentrified by the market: pieces like Barney's and Gunning's are sold
on DVD and VHS for tens of thousands of dollars while more alternative pieces
released in the same format may be falling by the wayside.The real irritation under the Aktivists' skin is that the once-outsider status of
video art is now dressed up and installed among the sidereal works of upmarket
galleries. Usually dedicated to smashing the corporatized state, ®™ ark's
foray into gallery crashing seems apt when you consider the kind of
meta-theft they've sponsored before, particularly Deconstructing Beck, an
obverse homage that samples and reworks Beck's own samples, the sine qua non
of Whitman Sampleresque cultural looping. The filmmakers' coup, of course,
is to have captured most or all of the two major works by Barney and Gunning. But the bootlegs flicker like any illicit video sold on the street -- the
fiftieth-generation of a copy of a copy of The Sixth Sense taped by a drunk at
the local googolplex -- and you start to wonder how effective this clever
pranksterism could possibly be. Beyond presentation, the Aktivists need to
hone their complaint: The art world has and will always be a tyranny of the
elite, a struggle of the unknowns, and subcultures have and will always be
absorbed into the mainstream. And, in the case of video art, the little guys
are armed with new tools and distribution methods, and are more empowered than ever
before. In addition to lower costs, videomakers can now create on the road: Apple
introduced a PowerBook capable of running a high-end editing system
previously available only on desktop boxes, and its advertising push for the
iMac DV is all about the video. The battalion of palm-sized-camera-carrying
art wunderkinder is growing like mad. Partly as a reaction to the big-ticket
items the Aktivists rail against, the NYUFF, and hundreds of smaller and more
under-funded fringe festivals like it, are going stronger than ever.
Philip Higgs is a writer living in New York.
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the
FEED Daily Loop. For discussion of other recent FEED Dailies, check
out last month's Daily Loop.
Check out ŪTMark for some insurgency on the internet.
Lingua Franca goes to the Love Lab:"We're in the control room of the so-called Love Lab, deep within a nondescript tan brick building on the University of Washington campus--the quantitative heart of psychologist John Gottman's twenty-eight-year-old body of work. His goal is to solve that long-standing mystery: What makes some marriages thrive and others explode into shards of acrimony and loneliness?"
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