Author: Gary Crossey

Video Sample

• Michael Snow – Wavelength
• Robert Smithson
• Joan Joans
• Bruce Nauman

Michael Snow

TITLE: Wavelength

“A summation of my nervous system, religious inklings and aesthetic ideas” Michael Snow

In the first scene, a woman in a fur coat enters the room accompanied by two men carrying a bookshelf or cabinet. The woman instructs the men where to place this piece of furniture and they all leave. Later, the same woman returns with a female friend, they drink the beverages they brought and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. Long after they leave, what sounds like breaking glass is heard. At this point, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters and inexplicably collapses on the floor. Later, the woman in the fur coat reappears and makes a phone call, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

In the end, one can hear what sound like police sirens, but could just as well be a part of the musical score, a distinct piece of minimalist music that pairs tones at random. These tones shift in frequency (and in “wavelength“) as the camera analyzes the space of the anonymous apartment. What begins as a view of the full apartment zooms (the zoom is not precisely continuous as the camera does change angle slightly, noticeably near the very end) and changes focus slowly across the forty-five minutes, only to stop and come into perfect focus on a photograph of the sea on the wall.

Robert Smithson

TITLE: Spiral Jetty

“The earth’s history seems at times like a story recorded in a book each page of which is torn into small pieces. Many of the pages and some of the pieces of each page are missing” – Robert Smithson

Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson

TITLE: Swamp

“it deals with limitations of perception through the camera eye as Bob and I struggled through a muddy New Jersey swamp. Verbal direction cannot easily be followed as the reeds crash against the camera lens blocking vision and forming continuously shifting patterns, confusion ensues.” Smithson said.

“it’s about deliberate obstructions or calculated aimlessness”.

This was attained by having Holt walk through the swamp while simultaneously filming, only seeing where she was walking by looking through the lens of her Bolex camera as Smithson gave her verbal instructions which he recorded as he spoke them.

Joan Jonas

Left side Right side
Jonas translates her performance strategies to video, applying the inherent properties of the medium to her investigations of the self and the body.
Jonas performs in a direct, one-on-one confrontation with the viewer, using the immediacy and intimacy of video as conceptual constructs. Exploring video as both a mirror and a masking device, and using her body as an art object, she undertakes an examination of self and identity, subjectivity and objectivity.
Creating a series of inversions, she splits her image, splits the video screen, and splits her identification within the video space, playing with the spatial ambiguity of non-reversed images (video) and reversed images (mirrors). Though Jonas’ approach is formalist and reductive, her performance reveals an ironic theatricality. Illustrating the phenomenology of video as a mirror, Left Side Right Side is a classic of early performance-based, conceptual video.

Bruce Nauman

Art Make Up
In each of these four related films, the artist applies a successive layer of colored makeup (white, pink, green, and finally black) to his face and upper torso. While he masks himself literally, the title implies that in so doing he also creates himself, “makes himself up.”
Initially, the films were intended to be projected simultaneously on four walls of a room. Although this form of installation was never realized for this piece, Nauman employed the method for subsequent film and video installations.
QUOTE Source: www.eai.org/title.htm?id=605

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