Fall Season Videodrones On
The scorch and sweat of July and August are history now, moved to the back of the mind like a box of old clothes. The mental paperwork surrounding that Hamptons social weekend is filed under "F" for forgotten already. The European jaunt to visit this year's spate of contemporary art festivals?Basel, Documenta, etc., and their attendant ancillary exhibitions?has receded, like so much curatorial pabulum, into wavering memories of too much weissebier under the German sun.
In September, the New York art world shifts from lazy summer impressionism into hyperrealist high gear. New artists debut with new work. Older artists present ambitious shows that look like career retrospectives in miniature. Some galleries, seizing on the opportunity to toss their considerable weight around, put on group shows that are the envy of many museums.
In Chelsea, the neighborhood that packs most of the city's commercial art spaces and at least a few of its best public institutions into 24 square blocks, the start of the Fall Art Season is as liable to present genuinely great exhibitions as alarmingly terrible ones. Expectations abound, chasing intently after the year's few surprises. More often than not, the new thing in the art galleries is just a shade different from the old thing. Beyond that, there are no other requirements, and no deeper pattern is knowable.
The launch of the 2002/'03 art year, like any other, presents its own set of peculiarities, chief among which are the absence of a single, truly important museum exhibition in this city of museums and, also, the overwhelming prevalence of video work on view in a disproportionate number of galleries. About the first, little need be said except the obvious. Important shows have been cancelled, like the Eva Hesse retrospective at the Whitney and the Matthew Barney and James Rosenquist exhibitions at the Guggenheim, and New York, as the world's first art metropolis, is the worse for it. Throw in the fact that the city's major museums have inexplicably passed on brilliant surveys organized by other institutions and you have an upcoming year with holes on the wall large enough to fill Yankee Stadium.
On count two, this year's crop of inaugural gallery shows presents nearly a dozen exhibitions of video or video-inspired installations in Chelsea alone. Less an indicator of a trend than a perfect demonstration of how the art world runs on default, the number of videos on view this month in the city's galleries registers far more as a long-awaited happenstance than an extraordinary event of some kind. As the toilet said to the flower girl, let us reflect on this.
No longer the esoteric province of techie, uncommercial artists, video has boomed over the last decade thanks mainly to its increasing ease of use and partly because of its improved commercialization (Oh, those Sony flat screens!). Still an art form in search of an author, video has turned from complicated specialty into the crutch of preference for young artists and impatient MFAs. Add to this the thin content of video's formal and technological pioneers and their noxious influence and you arrive at what has essentially become a license to bore. Witness Chelsea today, chock-full as it is of banal Paul McCarthy imitators, Warhol-inspired narcoleptics, pocket metaphysicians and textbook-parroting Foucault drones. A sort of romantic comedy for the artsy set, the artistic vehicle of video has rarely looked so vapid and so patently formulaic.
A perfect case in point is the work of Gary Hill. Less a pioneer of video per se than the Magellan of Cinennui, this artist has, thanks largely to the comfy sinecure provided by his dealer Barbara Gladstone, perfected the art of saddling moving images with a graduate seminar reading list that passes for content. His latest exhibition features, characteristically, multiple digital projections and various tracks of dissonant audio, all pumped full of a phenomenological imposture so bloated it floats upward. Generally, Hill is on about language, verbal and nonverbal, as codes for the construction of the self. But he rarely if ever tells us something that we don't already know from the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Wittgenstein. With Hill, there is no avoiding the judgment that his stock in trade is the philosophical chestnut. In the guise of the obscure moving image, his swag-bellied symbolism makes for the sickliest arts version of marron glace.
Julia Scher is another mid-career artist burdened with the problem of having something too important to say to come up with an adequate form for it. Currently in residence at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Scher's ugly chainlink fence installation sports several cameras, klieg lights and video monitors that are supposed to critique?guess what??surveillance. In the age of Tom Ridge, an artist like Scher could seize the moment to revive her career. The fact that she has been making exactly the same kind of work since the mid-1980s gives her a corner on subject matter that, as she narrowly understands it, was DOA 20 years ago.
More successful were a few of the artists in "Continuous Play," a somewhat more lively group exhibition that just closed at Luhring Augustine. Past the irredeemably idiotic video of Paul McCarthy punching himself in the face and the dry display of framed monitors by German artist Reinhard Mucha is a rare poetic work by Janine Antoni, an artist better known for gnawing blocks of chocolate in apparent sympathy with female overeaters. A floor-to-ceiling image of a beachscape complete with sand and crashing surf, Antoni's projection of herself walking a tightrope fits neatly over the ocean's horizon line, making for an image memorable enough to compare to childhood experience: a joyful adventure made larger than life by its direct conveyance. In a more ominous but less interesting vein, the talented young artist Pipilotti Rist overlaps roving images of women onto a top corner of the gallery to disorienting effect.
A last exhibition that confirms the rule, Anneé Olofsson's set of six photographs and three videos set up an Oedipal psychodrama that is saved from the edge of cliche by a cultivated tenebrism and an original knack for metaphor. A thirtysomething artist, Olofsson's second solo show at Marianne Boesky Gallery features pictures of the artist's back with her father's hands running incestuously under her sweater. Olofsson's weird photos, unburdened by either critical textuality or artistic quotation, segue seamlessly into the eerily volatile spell cast by the videos. "Trick or Treat," the principal work among the troika of projections, presents a bizarrely frank conversation between the artist and her dad. Talking through rubber Halloween masks and driving aimlessly around the Swedish countryside, they ask each other questions like, "Have you ever had sexual feelings for me?" and "Have you ever tried to commit suicide?" Beyond creepy, the video hits its high note when the actors move beyond the script toward a staged honesty that, while uncannily alien, feels instinctively like a vulnerable, masked, cathartic version of the truth.
The overwhelming presence of dull, copycat video is to the art world today what bicycles with banana seats are to spiky-haired twentysomethings: a largely faddish formula that wandered into the breach when no one was really looking. Video, like the ever useful two-wheeler, depends entirely on who's using it. So why should one settle for the three-speed when there are a few 10-speeds out there worth riding?
"Gary Hill," through Oct. 19 at Barbara Gladstone, 515 W. 24th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 206-9300.
"Julia Scher: Security by Julia XLV," through Oct. 12 at Andrea Rosen, 525 W. 24th St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 627-6000.
"Anneè Olofsson," through Oct. 5 at Marianne Boesky, 535 W. 22nd St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 680-9889.