Negotiating time

Afterimage, May-June, 2005 by Perry Bard

DIVA ART Fair

New York, New York

March 11-13, 2005

From March 11-13, 2005 30 guest suites in New York City were occupied by international gallerists screening videos as part of the DIVA (Digital Art and Video) ART Fair. Each suite has a bedroom, a sitting room and a bathroom and the first one that I entered used all three to present 48 minutes of video. Negotiating the time base was the viewer's challenge, a 30-minute video requiring a solid commitment. The plus of holding a video fair in such a venue is that couches, chairs and beds come with the territory.

DIVA is the first fair of its kind in the United States. It is modeled after LOOP, a successful event that has been presented twice in Barcelona, Spain. Thierry Alet, a founder of Frere Independent and Director of Exhibitions for DIVA, pitched the idea to Elga Wimmer at Zoo, a satellite to the Frieze art fair in London. Wimmer, who owns Elga Wimmer PCC gallery in New York City, was quick to collaborate, helping to assemble 30 participants, two panels and the press. Her intent was to acknowledge the powerful presence of digital media on the art scene noting that photography had struggled long and hard to finally achieve similar status in the 1980s.

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The fair is billed as a tribute to Bruce Nauman and his influence was solidly felt in the number of performance videos. In Michael O'Malley's video Chair (2001, 7'52, Galleria Fucares, Madrid) a performer hacks a chair apart with an ax while standing on it. The chair moves as the performer strikes, responding to the direction of the gesture. Jill Miller's three-minute video I Am Making Art Too (2003, Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris) elaborates on John Baldessari's 1971 piece I am making Art. She inserts herself into his video dancing with Baldessari to Missy Elliot's song "Work It." Trine Nedreaas (Luxe Gallery, New York) hires performers for her videos. An elderly gentleman dances alone in an empty ballroom in It Takes Two To Tango (2004, 30') a bittersweet image.

At a well-attended presentation on Saturday three panelists with distinct points of view discussed definitions and directions in digital and video art. Michael Rush, author of Video Art (2003), talked about the influence of women in early performance video and of the dominance of performance videos by both men and women in video art practice today. Christiane Paul, adjunct Curator of New Media Arts at the Whitney Museum, defined new media work, giving multiple examples in which the computer is the medium as opposed to the tool--thus distinguishing it from current film and video practice. She also addressed the difficulty of presenting and collecting these works because of the technologies involved. Berta Sichel, Director of Audiovisuals and Film and Video Curator at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain noted changes in the gallery/museum world, citing documentary as an example of works that, until recently, would only have been screened in movie theaters.

While performance-based work seemed to dominate the fair and interactive works were rare (Bitforms, New York, and Pierre Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain, Montreal, Canada, were exceptions, both presenting new media artists) there was a large variety of work including personal documentary, experimental narrative, digital pattern painting, installation, animations, anime.

Galleria Magda Bellotti (Madrid) used the hotel room to its best advantage presenting one work on a monitor in the window onto the atrium, a second work on a monitor in the sitting room and NoMad (1998, by Eva Koch) in the bedroom, a projection of an 11-minute loop that was visually one of the strongest works at the fair. In this video, an expanse of ocean is punctuated by a line of people walking toward a mosque on a narrow, wave-swept boardwalk. Their destination is never shown, their location is unclear, they are in limbo. The sound, artificial noise mimicking real sounds, is both suggestive and contradictory. It helps to create a fictive space in which this endless journey acquires mythic dimensions.

RonMandos Gallery from Rotterdam featured the work of Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck (currently showing at Nicole Klagsbrun in New York). In Coffee (1999, 3'59) two people are sitting at a table in a generic public space oblivious to each other and to their surroundings, a chilling and isolated togetherness. De Beeck's most recent work Places Gardening II (2004, 5'38) consists of animated drawings of gardens in every season, a peaceful hypnotic antidote to Coffee.

Corinna Schnitt's 13-minute video Living a Beautiful Life (2003, Galerie M & R Fricke, Dusseldorf) begins with a 1970 film sequence from the East German production company Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (better known as DEFA) in which naked children are playing in paradise. The image then cuts to a perfect couple in a perfect environment describing, with advertising cliches, their flawless lives. The precision of the artistry (staging, characters, dialogue) effectively bursts the bubble. Trouble in the home is also the subject of Eye of the Needle (2004, 3'30) by Terry Berkowitz and Blerti Murataj (Elga Wimmer PCC, New York). Two intensely personal elements, the pained voice of Lorena Bobbitt from her court testimony and the repetitive action of a woman's hands stitching cloth, combine to create a tense rendition of the abusive relationship between Bobbitt and the husband she eventually castrated.