feAture reality show
only a few blocks away, and in some respects the project may be a
comment on art in competition with the blockbuster stimuli of the
advertising and entertainment worlds. But what’s compelling about
Sleepwalkers is that a viewer might notice someone riding a bike
down 53rd Street at the very same time the bike messenger is shown
pedalling onscreen; if they had been watching the video in a theatre,
they wouldn’t make that connection. So the viewer is not subsumed
into the video’s world – the video is subsumed into the outside world.
Both Musical and Sleepwalkers recall Jean Baudrillard’s
observation that cinema ‘is all over the city, that marvellous, continuous
performance of films and scenarios’. Aitken himself has noted that ‘the
act of watching a film has an affinity with walking through a city. I see a
moving image like a street, and you’re going down that street making
constant decisions about what to see.’ Situationist Guy Debord’s
concept of psychogeography hinted at something similar, in which the
streetwalker traversed the urban terrain charged with some awareness
of its psychological resonances, but Aitken, unlike Debord, includes the
inhabitants in the cityscape. ‘In Sleepwalkers’, he wrote in the shooting
script, ‘the city becomes a living, breathing body merging with the for long stretches of time, instead of the films’. As with Musical’s secret
diverse and constantly changing individuals who make up the city. The schedule, music performances, readings and screenings at the gallery
individuals in Sleepwalkers, in turn, move beyond their physical selves in conjunction with the exhibition ‘will not be announced by Orchard’.
and are transformed by their surroundings.’ If Debord looks to the Like Conrad, Schneider has a notion of displacing the cinema screen;
assertion of the individual against the environment, Aitken recognises her painting Moviola (2007) outlines the image of a film editing table.
the flux between the two. Meanwhile, stationed across from it, a projector runs without a film,
Debord also made films, the most outrageous being Howlings its white light fitting Moviola’s screen frame (Amy Granat’s film 3
in Favor of de Sade (1952). Consisting of alternating imageless white minutes of paint on 6 minutes of film, 2007, is also sporadically projected
screens accompanied by a soundtrack of non-sequitous dialogue and onto the painting). With the oil painting Landscape (2007), a Hiroshi
soundless all-black screens, it provoked riots at its early showings. While Sugimoto-like ocean horizon (Sugimoto is also fond of photographing
not conceived by Debord in these terms, it might be postulated that empty movie houses) that seems more like a film projection than a
if, as per Aitken, ambulatory human beings create their own movies painting, the interchange between canvas and film screen is complete.
out of the landscape before them, then perhaps movies themselves Schneider’s permutation of art and film media is effective, although
must become a void – or shed their skin. In 1966 Tony Conrad made its significance isn’t quite articulated within the paintings themselves.
the film The Flicker, which alternated only black and white frames Schneider bisected the already narrow gallery space with a wall of wood
to cause a stroboscopic flicker effect. In the autumn and winter of studs and Plexiglas, suggesting either a projection room or a camera
2006–7, Conrad exhibited his Yellow Movies series (1972–5) at Galerie lens. This offered the viewer the choice of seeing Image to Come as
Daniel Buchholz in Köln and Greene Natfali Gallery in New York, projectionist, filmgoer, gallery visitor or documentarian – all possibilities
for only the second time since they were made and for the first time similarly latent in this year’s other examples of perambulatory cinema,
in an art gallery. Created to protest the single screenings of films at and theoretically in everyday life itself.
1972’s Documenta 5 (as opposed to videoworks, which were screened
continuously), Conrad fashioned large pieces of paper to resemble
cinema screens by painting a white square with a black frame around
it, then doused them with cheap housepaint, which would yellow, and
change, slowly over time. As a conflation of screen and film frame (the
Works
(In order of appearance)
housepaint functioned as emulsion), Yellow Movies is problematic as
far as the technical definition of motion pictures goes, but the idea of an
dara friedman
Musical, 2007
image that takes years (instead of split seconds) to move is undeniably
a series of performances
fascinating (and trumps Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, 1993, an
on the streets of Midtown Manhattan
17 september – 5 october 2007
ultra-slow-motion projection of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, 1960, which
photo: amy c. elliott
takes 24 hours to unspool). The idea to use the housepaint came from
courtesy public art fund, new York
noticing a discoloration on a recently painted ceiling, and Conrad has
doug aitken
written that ‘architecture in general can be construed as a kind of filmic
Sleepwalkers, 2007 (installation view)
courtesy creative Time, new York
space, in which the paint on the walls becomes an emulsion that carries
Sleepwalkers, 2007, film still
the human story along a trajectory on the timescale of architecture’. So,
courtesy doug aitken studio, Venice, and creative Time, new York
not only does moving through a city constitute a filmic experience, but
Tony conrad
the architecture itself can be seen as a movie within a movie.
Yellow Movies, 1972–5 (installation view, Galerie daniel Buchholz, köln, 2006)
courtesy Galerie daniel Buchholz, köln
Karin Schneider’s show Image Coming Soon, which opened at the
Orchard gallery in New York last October, finds a new accommodation
for films in an installation situation; the press release promised that films
included ‘will not be looped. It is likely that only light will be projected
51 Artreview
Video Performance.indd 51 4/12/07 15:54:55
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142