EVENTS

NADA VIDEO NIGHTS - Curated by Matthew Lyons, May 26, 2009

High Fidelity (disambiguation)
Curated by Matthew Lyons


Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager, Cloud Cuckoo Land, 2008, video, 16:30 minutes, Courtesy of the artists.
The title of Cloud Cuckoo Land is taken from the Aristophanes’ play The Birds, which first put the possibility of progress and the goal of Utopia into doubt. The narrative tracks a family’s move to a contemporary, progressive commune in which the central character is confronted by her own intolerance and inability to let go of the conventions of individualized life. The familiar boundaries to which she clings call into question how we envision comfort and safety both societally and psychologically. The timing of the footage has been altered to a dissociating effect, with the actors haltingly mouthing their dialogue, their individual voices replaced by a unifying soundtrack composed and sung by the artists, which recalls Robert Ashley’s spoken “operas” and his focus on the sing-song delivery of vernacular speech.

Manon de Boer, Attica, 2008, video, 9:55 minutes, Courtesy of the artist and Jan Mot, Brussels.
With a many-layered approach to the experience of time, this video gives visual and auditive echo to two politically-charged compositions by Frederic Rzewski. The film begins with the final bars of Coming Together, based on a letter of Sam Melville, an inmate of New York State prison Attica, who was among the fomenters of the jail rebellion there in 1971. Foremost among their demands was the recognition of their right “to be treated as human beings.” This ended with more than 40 dead, including Melville himself. First the camera roves slowly among the individual musicians, then rests on the speaker during the introductory monologue to Attica, and finally turns 360° in a long pan shot through an indefinite landscape, underscoring the circular structure of the music and creating an impression of static uprootedness and lack of orientation.

Shahryar Nashat, Plaque (Slab), 2007, video, 6:40 minutes, Courtesy of the artist.
This work was inspired by a televised, 1964 performance on a stage set with three imposing faux marble monuments by the celebrated Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who was notorious for his rejection of the concert hall in favor of the control and editing possibilities of the recording studio. Yet Plaque (Slab) mostly documents the manufacture of a giant, concrete slab, the scale and form of which is based on those used in the 1964 broadcast. The confrontation of these archival images with new footage of the slab’s industrial production highlights the transience of the performance against the permanence of sculptural object. By foregrounding how meaning is creating in the capturing and editing of sonic and visual material, the work also questions the roles and power relations between performer/worker, editor/artist, and viewer.

Jenny Perlin, Ending and Altered, 2007, video, 9:40 minutes, Courtesy of the artist.
This work draws inspiration from John Cage’s 1985 composition ASLSP (As Slow As Possible), the writings on memory and duration by French philosopher Henri Bergson, and Sol Lewitt’s Sentences on Conceptual Art, specifically Sentence #29: “The process is mechanical and should not be tampered with. It should run its course.” Cage’s famous piece is currently being performed in Halberstadt, Germany, as ASLSP/Organ2, by a programmed organ that intends to perform the work over a 639-year period. The mechanical execution in the Cage performance is in direct contrast to the limits of a singer’s physical body in Perlin’s work. The singers have been asked to hold each note of a Bach chorale until he or she runs completely out of air. Only then can the next note be started. Moving musically from consonance to dissonance, they seem to fall into a kind of trance, listening and singing intently as their air runs out again and again. The work highlights complex shiftings between individual and collective, mechanical and organic, experiential and measured, as well as the unexpected possibilities to be found in chance-based methods of creative production.