“3 VIDEO WORKS” RUNS TO OCT 11. TUE-FRI 10AM-5PM; SAT 11AM-5PM. GEORGIA
SCHERMAN PROJECTS, 300 CAMPBELL, UNIT 307. 416-554-4112.
WWW.GEORGIASCHERMAN.COM.
Does reality become art by sheer virtue of it being recorded? In 2008 the question is stale yet persistent, especially in the visual arts, where video piece after video piece demands us look at amateurishly shot footage with the expectation of impending epiphany. It remains, for the most part, an experiment of the roughest sort. An artist cobbles together results — field recordings, essentially — and presents them to an audience with hope and/or haughtiness: don’t you see why this is important?
Curator Ihor Holubizky’s “3 Video Works,” currently showing at Georgia Scherman Projects, illustrates the many foibles and the small glories of this approach. The works seem rarefied to begin with, as they are from Australia and Germany and have never before been exhibited in North America. Yet Allan Giddy’s You, a long take of a steaming, crow-filled road in the Australian outback, augmented with a tinkling, Lynchian soundtrack, soon becomes boring. It is gothic and, due to the steam’s pixilated effect, somewhat painterly, but that’s it.
Düsseldorfian Mischa Kuball presents Super 8 footage from the late ’60s and provides a period-appropriate setting (pull-out screen, orange sofa, modular coffee table and Melmac ashtray) in which to view it. The too-obvious twist is that he has imposed the shadow of a digital camera on the footage. Go, however, for Shaun Gladwell’s Taranaki Descent, which is really by a skateboarder following his friend as he rolls down to the ground floor of a parking garage in New Plymouth, New Zealand. Recalling Gus Van Sant, it is good mostly because of the inherent formal properties of its setting — ones augmented by the moving-yet-lingering qualities of the skater’s eye.