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Review: Moving Image NYC The Contemporary Video Art Fair

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Photos Moving Image New York 2013 © Etienne Frossard

Video art can be up there with performance when it comes to producing near complete bafflement in those not already acquainted with the ideas and norms of contemporary art.

The art-lover searching for a Yoko Ono piece online is in for a shock: YouTube helpfully suggests, as one begins to type her name, that you might be looking for ‘Yoko Ono singing horribly’. I suppose you sort-of might be looking for that, but it rather misses the point. I think video suffers, partly, in that you cannot easily see how to own it. A masterpiece is always priceless. So what is something without a price?

This brings us to the third annual Moving Image Video Art Fair, a brave and fascinating attempt to exhibit and sell video art, which took place in New York earlier this month. Moving Image took a rather genteel, not to say avant-garde approach to sales, and this year it made a few trend-setting waves by being the first to sell a piece of art made on Vine, Twitter’s micro-video service, for a bite-size $200.

To contrast, the vast Armory Show down the road consciously sought to evoke a kind of trendy stock exchange. Not least, Roman Abramovich’s super-yacht ‘Eclipse’ was berthed in the pier alongside throughout, a 160-meter long colossus that provided a kind of Von Trier’s Melancholia-esque looming metaphor for ever present global hyper-capitalism (although I’m sure its really very lovely on the inside).

No super-yachts were hitched to the side of the Waterfront New York Tunnel, scene of this year’s Moving Image. Indeed, one of the first works to confront visitors was Greta Alfaro’s stunning In Ictu Oculi, a classic Spanish study of death – vultures setting upon a table laid out as if the scene of the last supper – which nonetheless invoked the thought of a thousand financiers devouring Spain itself; Orwell’s pigs. You don’t get that at The Armory.

The next piece that really caught my eye was Ted Victoria’s installation, Is Anyone Home, a translucent greenhouse with what appeared to be large bug-like swimming creatures projected onto its inside walls. On closer inspection, it is a gross and fascinating kind of trick: these projected giants are the shadows of tiny, live Sea Monkeys being cast by spotlights behind tanks kept within the tent.

That installation, though captivating, felt retrograde compared to many of the single-channel works on display towards the back of the room. Video art has often succeeded best (the famous Media Burn by Ant Farm in particular) as a discussion of media itself. The embrace of the aesthetic of online video at Moving Image was striking; it felt as if this art form has found a new, natural home, one comfortable for artists (it is completely flexible and free) and for viewers (the experience of watching a YouTube clip, which is not a movie or a TV show but simply a thing to watch, feels natural).

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Emily’s Video
Take Eva and Franco Mattes Emily’s Video, which takes the classic YouTube ‘reaction video’ trope, but instead takes the reactions people are having to art they have created and subsequently destroyed. Or Cathy Begien’s Black Out, in which the artist retells the story of a heavy night out in almost complete monotone, as friends recreate events going on around her. Even in 2004, the format of a video like this might have raised questions: what is it? Now, it seems natural, a proper intervention in a language that people can understand.

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Edin Vélez with Re/Action Part 1
Other pieces, like Tellervo Kalleinen’s Complaints Choir of Chicago (a tongue in cheek video in which a choir sing out various mundane personal complaints) invoked a sense of community and interaction that seem to come hand in hand with the digital form – there is a expectation that, if not the viewer, someone, is involved in the art besides the artist. The most mature study of crowds and technology came from video art pioneer Edin Vélez with Re/Action Part 1, an extraordinary and mesmerizing slow motion study of a crowd, each face a portrait to be studied.

This all created the sense that video is more alive – and has greater potential – than ever, and Moving Image was an extremely exciting place to be. Discussion at the Armory was about the market, Frieze, politics, investment portfolios. Discussion here was about artists, the public, the future. I know where I’d rather be.

Words: Max Goldman

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