video art · 2008-07-27 21:22
I saw two wonderous films by Simon Martin at Tate Britain today. I’d like to see them again. I’d like to be able to show them to you, too. But in the crazy world of art, this is impossible. Art can’t decide if it’s trading in ideas or artefacts (something Martin Creed touches on in his interview about work 850, also currently at Tate Britain.)
Martin’s films are close in style to those of Patrick Keiller and Chris Marker, even directly referencing Sans Soleil in Wednesday Afternoon. Narrated documents. But they’re declared art, and not film, and therefore there’s no DVD, no BFI screening. It’s catch them in an exhibition, or nothing.
More well-known video art exists in an even more quasi-state: Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is ripped to pieces on Youtube, there’s an official DVD of a small part of one of the films, and, there’s a small band of video art filesharers. It gets shown in galleries and shown in cinemas.
I think there’s room to shake this up. Many galleries are starting to digitize their collections, of still work at least. Either the galleries do the same for their video, or the artists realise that the art itself/the idea makes them no money – only the physical object (like the 20 sets of Cremaster Cycle DVDs, or say the DVDs of San Soleil and The London Nobody Knows) or the ephemera (the Cremaster props). In fact, putting the art somewhere online would no doubt increase the knowledge of many artists.
As an aside, I think Tate Britain’s Lightbox is a great idea, but most people don’t know how to watch video art (which can, admittedly, be antagonistic to viewers – nothing is more soul destroying than seeing a piece billed as 4 hours, 23 minutes). Also, the showings didn’t even warrant an exhibition page on the website.