Still motion

Afterimage, March-April, 2003 by Marisa S. Olson

Both Bob Linder and Anthony Discenza take video self-reflexivity to almost manipulative extremes in elaborating on the theme of motion. Discenza's The Nighthouse (2003) is a continuous loop of a single shot. The artist has so manipulated his camera that, within the blacked-out edges of the white plastic house framed in the shot, there appears a fuzziness akin to television static. It is not difficult to imagine this as a comment on the ultimately contentless, but infinitely broadcast, television media that take over so many of the suburban cookie-cutter homes Discenza's resembles. Soon the static makes sense of the house, more than its inverse. The piece includes an eery audio track that is a natural byproduct of the camera's contortions. To create Where the Land Ends (2002) video stills, Linder violently shook, threw then caught and often dragged his video camera across the ground. The result of this violence against the equipment, against the pristine nature of the medium, is an interference with the camera 's ability to "correctly" process signals. His images are so decayed that erratic pixelations erupt within otherwise banally normal landscapes, archiving moments of interrupted serenity and stillness, somewhere at the edge of unspecified spaces.

The contributions of Alfredo Jaar and Jim Campbell initially seem diametrically different presentations from Linder's and Discenza's active works. Jaar's Walking (2002) presents a light box-displayed photo of a Rwandan refugee departing from his destroyed homeland. Thick brushstroke-like lines--the after effect of photographing a subject in motion at a slow shutter speed--appear to run opposite the walker's direction. Adding to the layers of implied movement is the political connotation of the movement of cultural and state boundaries in a time of active civil war. Jaar draws the viewer in (more motion) with a fascinating image that reveals a situation that is anything but. Bearing formal resemblance is Jim Campbell's Dynamism of an Automobile (2001). Part of his Illuminated Averages series, another blurred image in a light box presents the still, mathematical equivalent of the overlapping of each frame in a film of a car's motion. It is difficult to resist forsaking one's own knowledge that the car is not in motion, as our minds are tempted to "dither" the parts of the averaged frames into a translated movement. Ironically, Campbell's 7,344 Stills (2003) displays no obvious signs of movement, though its "subject" does, indeed, walk. Equipped with motion sensors, the piece is LED panel effectively displaying a figure walking only when no one is in the room in which it is installed. (Curator Dianne Hoover is sure that the figure moves because it is in a different position upon her daily arrival and departure from the gallery.) In a style very particular to Campbell's work, the piece is reactive to viewers, yet refuses to give them the image they desire from it; it is reactive in a way that at once denies and underscores our expectation for the experience and display of a work of media art. In the end, we are called to perform what is revealed to be a most poetic motion: that of leaving the gallery.