Keeping Track Of Video Art

Afterimage, July, 2001 by Alicia Miller

Tracking CCAC Institute San Francisco, California March 24-May 12, 2001

The tracking shot is in many ways the defining characteristic of the cinematic. The effect of the camera moving fluidly through space, omnipresent and omniscient, is in large part what creates the grandeur of cinematic space. It removes the physicality of handheld camera shots, and opens up the world beyond the static frame of a mounted camera. In the tracking shot, the viewer becomes a ghostly guest moving parasitically along with the all-knowing camera as the space of the filmic world is mapped. "Tracking" has many meanings that infiltrate its specific definition within the medium of film. To track means to observe, to follow, to search, to pursue, to pass over. These definitions all imply movement or an action of interrogation. More subtly they impart empowerment--if you follow, you are not followed, if you search, you are not searched for. The tracking shot most essentially connotes a movement through space that is interrogative in its investigation and that reifies this space. In this respect, it has a m onolithic power to define perception.

The video artists in "Tracking" borrow the tracking shot from the vocabulary of film to explore its power to shape perception. Each piece in the exhibition presents a perceptual investigation of the intersection of time, movement and physical space. Disparate in their approaches, the seven artists in the show--Darren Almond (U.K.), Jessica Bronson (U.S.), Claude Closky (France), Thomas Demand (Germany), Zhu Jia (China), Sergio Prego (Spain) and Bojan Sarcevic (Slovenia)--take the tracking shot and turn it on its head, offering us inventive journeys through time and space that examine a range of ways of seeing.

Bronson and Jia present the most radical reworkings of perception in their respective videos, a small infinite (2000) and Forever (1994). Each work uses the tracking shot to destabilize accepted perspectives on the world. Bronson's a small in finite screens on four monitors, each presenting a kaleidoscopic vision of an ever-shifting landscape. Made by digitally manipulating a single track of film shot from a helicopter flying along a Los Angeles aqueduct, the piece presents an image of land in constant transformation. The images play across the screens like a musical composition, carefully orchestrated by Bronson. At once highly abstract and highly ordered, the effect is mesmerizing, hypnotic. The land becomes momentarily recognizable before dissipating into an organic textile passing across the screen.

Reconfigured in this way, landscape is no longer static, trapped in discrete views. Instead it is physically and temporally continuous, and the fragment is never indicative of the whole. In this respect, Bronson argues for the inadequacy of the landscape tradition to offer an existential interpretation of the land that encompasses the dimension of time in its description.

In a similar way, Jia also describes the world in four dimensions, but not ones that viewers immediately recognize. Jia's landscape is urban and filled with all the manic energy of the city. In Forever, Jia mounts a video camera on the spokes of a tricycle and pedals it through Beijing. City life is caught in the vortex of Jia's spinning wheel, and his vision of the world is likely to induce dizziness and nausea if viewed for very long--a tongue-in-cheek commentary on urbanity, perhaps? The tracking performed here is the seamless spinning of the camera, the only constant in the piece. The Beijing cityscape, and all contained within it, is disorienting and overwhelming, necessarily fragmented by the speed of its transformation. Jia posits a world in flux, moving always toward chaos, contained only by the cycling of the wheel. To remember what you see in Jia's video is impossible, for the images are so fleeting that a single moment does not have time to imprint itself upon the brain. What you remember is the s pinning of the image, which makes you think only of the constancy of change.

In both a small infinite and Forever, time is described as the perception of changing spatial relationships, ultimately of movement. The tracking shot immanently embodies this always-shifting viewpoint. It does far more than "suggest the possibility of change," as curator Ralph Rugoff argues, it is defined by change, because it is defined by movement. The tracking shot creates an equivalence between the two. The pregnant anticipation of the next moment that it so aptly invokes in the viewer is exploited by Closky in En Avant (1995), a single-channel projected video installation made up of tracking shots culled from advertising trailers for action films. The images fly by at a ferocious pace, the film speeded up for an intensifying of effect. Like Jia's Forever, this piece has a disconcerting sensational impact that may leave viewers' stomachs in their throats. The viewer races through space, always approaching something spectacular, but the video cuts immediately to another shot just as the scene resolves. C onsequently, there is no satisfaction to be found, just a relentless movement forward. Decontextualized from their broader framework within a film, these shots offer comment on the construction of capitalist culture that is geared toward engendering desire--the anticipation of possession--that ontologically refuses satisfaction. Closky uses the tracking shot to create a space of imminent yet constantly deferred occurrence that cleverly describes the consumer landscape.