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Weekly UpdatesMediated
California Museum of Photography, University of California
Riverside, California
January 31-April 4, 2009
"Mediated" at the California Museum of Photography was a blend of single-channel videos and installations by seven artists who drew their inspiration or materials from our mediated culture: movies, TV, internet, and video games. These artists borrowed, re-mixed, and retold scenes from our collective knowledge of moving images, nudging up against definitions of fair use and challenging the cultural context of the original source. Like most appropriation artists, these artists benefited from our familiarity with much of the source material and thus, the approachability of the artworks.
This is the case of the finely nuanced video projection by the Asian American video artist Bruce Yonemoto. Yonemoto's 2005 video is a tender recreation of the opening scenes from the 1965 film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical "The Sound of Music," in which a young boy dressed in a red sweater and cargo pants sings a translation of the title song lyrics in scenes restaged in a mountainous South American landscape. The boy sings softly as he swings himself around the trunk of a tree, arms outstretched, or crosses a stream in a sweetly directed recreation of the enduring scenes from the original film. Sounds Like the Sound of Music is an apt title for the piece, as the viewer has to watch the video twice before coming to this understanding. Yonemoto's recreation rises above mere parody or satire, which is so often the function of revisiting a movie line by line. Instead, his restaging with an Andean youth as the central figure is a tender means to question issues of representation, place, and opportunity. However, it is not apparent to the typical gallery viewer that the language the young boy sings is the disappearing indigenous Incan language of Quechua, which is also the language George Lucas chose for his villain Jabba the Hut in Star Wars. In this way, the video further removes itself from the original and introduces the complicating notion of good versus evil into an affectionate commentary on authenticity and cultural hegemony.
Crossing disciplinary lines, the inclusion of British vidder artist Lim's 2007 fan video Us added a refreshing dimension to an exhibition of mediated materials. A vidder is someone who creates fan versions of music videos, often using imagery and video clips from popular culture, typically without the copyright owner's permission. Us is a video set to the music of Regina Spektor. In this fan video, Lim takes a charcoal sketchbook approach to a mash-up of video clips from Star Trek, The Matrix, Batman, and other sources. Utilizing a sophisticated and intelligent sketch effect to bridge the various source materials, Lim freely adds to the original material by endowing the imagery with her own cultural sway: such as when a beacon of light illuminates the copyright symbol instead of the Batman logo. An artist who uses copyrighted materials in her work obviously takes a liberal stance on the legal issues of copyright, and Lim's videos are available on YouTube and www.imeem.com. In this regard, it was interesting to consider the typical viewing context of this music video and how this has an effect on meaning. The inclusion of a fan music video was a lively and unsentimental challenge to the cultural confines of an an exhibition.
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Integrating machinima and the gaming world into a live theatrical performance, the collaborative team of Antoinette LaFarge and Robert Allen created a multimedia performance titled "Playing the Rapture" which took place in March 2008 for the Baltimore Theatre Project. The original theater production was performed by the actors John Mellies and Jay Wallace as they interacted and played a video game projected onto the theatre stage and background. Throughout the performance, the two actors questioned the events that led up to the end of the world in both the real and virtual gaming worlds. LaFarge describes the work as examining the "American evangelical belief in the Rapture a moment when every true Christian will suddenly vanish from the earth, leaving the rest of humankind to struggle through a period of extreme tribulation." For the "Mediated" exhibition, LaFarge and Allen created a table-top video installation titled, "Playing the Rapture: Tiny" (2009). The all-white table-top model of a theater environment, complete with two tiny chairs and computer desks, provided the screen for an edited projection of the original performance. In its live iteration, this was obviously a rich theatrical piece; then, the interaction between the "real" actors, the machinima projections, and the stage-craft created a definitive contrast between what was real or imagined. In this way the struggle between post-Rapture and pre-Rapture worlds would have been heightened. In the gallery version, the projected video renders the actors with a similar light quality as the projected gaming elements that blur the distinction between the real and virtual elements. With both elements projected now as video, the question arises whether this second-generation installation of a theatrical event provided a strong enough statement relative to the original less-mediated event.
Kelly Mark's two-channel TV sculpture "Kiss" (2007) consisted of two CRT (cathode ray tube) televisions placed screen-to-screen, their convex glass almost touching. In this silent installation, the screens glow in a slow-moving color progression from pink to orange to red. This colorful radiance establishes a sense of warmth and intimacy between these two inanimate objects, asserting the emotional relationship we have with our televisions. Once again, further research gave the artwork a richer meaning not apparent in the gallery. To create the video for this piece, Mark filmed the glow from a gang-bang scene from a pornography film--filming the projected light on her apartment wall as the 15-minute scene played out.
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More completely understood in the gallery environment was the Australian artist Tracey Moffatt's 2003 film Love. Slickly edited by Gary Hillberg, this is an exhilarating plethora of clips mined from Hollywood's most romantic movies. At a bracing pace we traverse the archetypal failed-relationship movie are from the initial passionate clinch, to the waning of desire and the accompanying violence. This is a tour-de-force of clip selection, illuminating gender struggles and cliche Hollywood relationships. Moffatt and Hillberg make smart use of the repetition of these cliches to good effect. For example, diverse clips of a slap across the cheek are repeated in quick, staccato succession until the next predictable tableaux. The video swings between love, reconciliation, and aggression and from the male perspective to the female and back again. Love is an invigorating 21-minute film of desire and revenge. The similarly edited but shorter video from 2007, Doomed, by the same collaborative team, likewise consisted of smartly edited scenes, this time culled from disaster movies.
The exhibition as a whole was dominated by an installation by the West Coast artist Daniel Nord, who built a stack of forty outmoded televisions into a visual monument of remembrance for past television and film technology. At approximately 10 feet high, Nord's "Monument" loomed large in one corner of the exhibition space and the deliberately cacophonous sound of Hollywood endings permeated the entire space to the detriment of other works on display (particularly the LaFarge and Allen piece). Each of these TV sets displayed a loop of images and climactic audio from the final few seconds of a film when the words "The End" or "Fin" were superimposed over the scene. Some of these loops appeared on multiple TV sets concurrently, creating a repetitive edge to the piece, but lessening the possible multiplier effect of the sheer quantity of Hollywood endings. The result was less a monumental tribute than a discordant tombstone for outmoded film techniques encased in one huge, loud pile of discarded technology and culture.
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In a catalog essay accompanying the exhibition, the cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch, who is supportive of the collaborative and creative nature of the digital community, reminds us, "Any remixing is basically illegal. We have fair use laws that should protect it, but the simple act of ripping a DVD is illegal, which makes virtually everything we do illegal." (1) The artists in "Mediated" freely make use of material generated by others, flirting with the doctrine of Fair Use. By borrowing and reworking these sources, giving them a rebirth, the artists in this exhibition used their ability to re-mix and reconceptualize to create new works that appeal in their freshness and add to the cultural debate.
JULIA BRADSHAW is an Assistant Professor of Photography at California State University, Fresno.
NOTE (1.) Excerpts from "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube," published in the Meidated, exhibition catalog, Lisa Tucker, ed. (Riverside, CA: UCR/California Museum of Photography, 2009).
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