Video Art

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On 23 August 1994, the K Foundation (Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) burnt one million pounds sterling in cash on the Scottish island of Jura. This money represented the bulk of the K Foundation’s funds, earned by Drummond and Cauty as The KLF, one of the United Kingdom’s most successful pop groups of the early 1990s. The duo have never fully explained their motivations for the burning.

The incineration was recorded on a Hi-8 video camera by K Foundation collaborator Gimpo. In August 1995, the film “Watch the K Foundation Burn a Million Quid” was toured around the British Isles, with Drummond and Cauty engaging each audience in debate about the burning and its meaning. In November 1995, the duo pledged to dissolve the K Foundation and to refrain from public discussion of the burning for a period of 23 years.Read More »

The opening of The Vasulka Effect couldn’t be more apt: Steina Vasulka addresses her husband Woody through various TV screens. He does the same and replies. A perfect image of the relationship between the free-spirited, groundbreaking pioneers of video art. After meeting in Prague in the early 1960s, they relocated from Czechoslovakia to New York, where they later founded The Kitchen, their legendary art and performance gallery.Read More »

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Harun Farocki plunders 40 years of advertising films, which he orchestrates to constitute an ironic 24 hours in the life of typical consumers. Mixing different colours, periods, various “ideologies of well being” to hold up a mirror up to our times, values, worries, hopes.

This collage of “beautiful images”, gleeful and chaotic, deconstructs not only the domestic reference points which punctuate our daily life, but also gives full rein to an off-beat humour in the tradition of Brechtian distanciation.
(Andrei Ujica)Read More »

French artist Ange Leccia’s Azé is made of images that seem to be coming from a terrorist hidden in Middle East.
No subtitles, but you don’t need any.

Azé ne conclut en rien ce périple, même s’il en est la troisième étape. Ange Leccia y expose le récit d’un terroriste parti se réfugier au Moyen-Orient. Mais, à l’instar d’Ile de Beauté et de Gold, le scénario se délite pour livrer à l’intuition un ensemble d’images où les choses prennent souvent un caractère pictural. Cette plasticité traduit la curiosité pour l’espace environnant et le transfert possible des signes sous l’impulsion des émotions. Le soleil est ainsi le guide de cette fiction qui donne une version abstraite des films d’aventures romantiques. Sa chaleur va jusqu’à brûler les paysages et la rétine, c’est-à-dire altérer le réel et lui donner l’incandescence d’un mirage. La lumière est un brasier où le voir et le vécu se confondent dans un tremblement érotique.Read More »

Mark Rappaport’s creative bio-pic about actress Jean Seberg is presented in a first-person, autobiographical format (with Seberg played by Mary Beth Hurt). He seamlessly interweaves cinema, politics, American society and culture, and film theory to inform, entertain, and move the viewer. Seberg’s many marriages, as well as her film roles, are discussed extensively. Her involvement with the Black Panther Movement and subsequent investigation by the FBI is covered. Notably, details of French New Wave cinema, Russian Expressionist (silent) films, and the careers of Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Clint Eastwood are also intensively examined. Much of the film is based on conjecture, but Rappaport encourages viewers to re-examine their ideas about women in film with this thought-provoking picture.Read More »

AMG :
“French director Alain Cavalier ventures into pseudo-documentary territory with his 2002 film René. Purportedly concocted as a means for Cavalier to help actor Joël Lefrançois lose weight while not making a straight documentary about Lefrançois’ ordeal, René instead focuses on fictional children’s theater actor René (Lefrançois) from provincial France who is undergoing a bit of a personal crisis. Having just been abandoned by his girlfriend, René decides dieting is the only way to win back her love.Read More »

Tag Quote:
Von Sternberg is a like Bach or Beethoven: he provides the performer with a form, and the performer creates the emotion and meaning, each performer quite differently, and each performer can say, “I did what he told me to.”Read More »

In Untitled Fall ’95, Bag, at the time an art student, “plays” Bag the art student. In a series of deadpan performances, Bag gathers fragments of pop detritus, fashioning a thoroughly mediated document that is at once a celebration and a record of loss. With the narrative inevitability of a TV serial, the eight diaristic segments trace a woman’s struggle to make sense of her experience at art school. As each installment marks the start of a new semester, Bag’s character addresses the camera with her latest observations and frustrations.Read More »

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The Scream, a 63-minute sequence depicting nude bodies engaged in variations of cathartic experience, is projected on eleven separate channels across five walls, with a three-second delay for each channel at its Hong Kong premiere along with the new gallery installation, The Bare Life.Read More »