The place for Video...

You walk into a humongous, white lobby in a gallery. It reminds you of a drawing room you visited sometime back with sounds of crystals, chinaware and spotless linen. The colours are pastels and gold. You see an artwork and find it closed in terms of how you are trying to read it. This inability humbles you down even more. The gallery space in that moment asserts a kind of territoriality that fixes you as a viewer and just that. It also crystallizes ideas of High Culture, Intelligentsia and Elitism; all in one.

The world was a very different place post the Second World War. Rapid urbanization meant an increase in the speed and stimuli of human interactions across territories and topographies. Isolated places opened up in minds and maps. It was a world of Leopold Bloom, the shell-shocked character from Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’. In an era of overarching fragmented- ness, what were the key ideas through which art making was to be redefined? How were art works not to look like ‘lordly luxury items’ in this new urban context?  Baurriaud proposes the idea of ‘Relational Aesthetics’ as a key concept that defined practice for many artists who emerged in Europe through the 1990s. Relational Art, as he points out, took as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and social contexts rather than an assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space. In that sense, it meant an ‘urbanization of artistic experience’. It also meant a breakdown of the traditional ways in which art was to be exhibited, seen and displayed. To be taken around an artwork, in many ways is to be taken around that big house of whose drawing room you were reminded in the beginning.

Contemporary Art resembles a period of time that has to be experienced, or the opening of a dialogue that never ends, suggests Borriaud. The City, in contrast to Nature, becomes the ‘tangible symbol and historical framework of the state of encounters imposed on people’. More so because of possibilities of lasting encounters. This gave rise to a form of ‘art with intersubjectivity as its substratum’. The position of the viewer and the viewed interchanging, mirroring and being mirrored, like a kaleidoscope. The moment of the encounter between the viewer and artwork becoming as much a part of art making because now there is an engagement with the process. There has to be a ‘collective elaboration of meaning’. In that sense an art exhibition becomes a site of an encounter, very much like the City, where waking around can lead to utterances, whims, fancies and trigger memories. In that sense, an art work represents a ‘social interstice: a free space and periods of time whose rhythms are not the same as those that organize everyday life and they encourage an inter-human intercourse which is different to the ‘zones of communication’ that are forced upon us’. With ATMs, automated systems, computerized helplines, the overall shrinking of the relational sphere, contemporary art becomes political in its engagement with ways of problematising it.

1960s also saw the emergence of what John Hanhardt calls the emergence of the Video Art. In an increasingly hyper-meditated world, the almost instantaneous quality of video to be shot and transmitted became a way ‘to reject the notion of the heroic, existential artist self portrayed in abstract expressionism’. In this, Video became one of the primary modes of work and expression for Contemporary artists characterized by a quality of ‘liveness’.  There was a way in which Video was undeniably ‘real’ and yet it was possible to alter real time and create a spatial and conceptual distance from the televisual or cinematic experience.

For contemporary artists of the time, who were trying to situate art practice in the everyday and work with perceptual dimensions, Video became a means of working with notions of intersubjectivity; almost simultaneous, fragmentary and ever changing. Video installations became spatial –temporal art forms that cold include the vast heterogeneity of making and viewing artwork. As Chrissie Lies notes that an installation as a hybrid work of art demands a critical distance and physical presence of the viewer to complete the work. Critical distance enables viewers to move between immersion and contemplation, so that she can both experience and analyze the work’s intention and content. The viewer’s physical presence is crucial because the elements of video installations are arranged by the artist as part of a gestalt in a complex cybernetic loop of technology and mid/body that form a conversational communication system between the artist and her viewer. As an ‘expanded art form’ to use Hanhardt’s term, Video made it possible for the ‘representational’ to extend into the ‘spatial’. The ‘collage’ and ‘de-collage’ that the placement of monitors in 3D spaces created, there emerged a possibility of an intertextual dialogue of the viewer with the material and herself.

As Bourriad notes, Gabriel Orozco’s opening of the ‘social infra-thin’ (inframince); that tiny space of everyday gestures that is determined by the superstructure; Braco Dimitrijevic’s Casual Passer-by series and Sophie Calle’s engagement with strangers point to a larger trend that emerged at the time: the formalization if convivial relationships has been a historical constant since the 1960s. the generation of the 1980s picked up the same problematic, but as against the 1960s emphasis on relationships internal to the world of art that called for linguistic subversion and privileged the ‘new’ , the emphasis was on external relationships in contexts of eclectic cultures. All of this was to be eventually directed towards what Guattari suggests-aesthetics must above all accompany societal mutations and inflect them. The poetic function, which consists in reconstructing world of subjectivation might therefore be meaningless unless it too can help us to overcome the ordeals by barbarism, by mental implosion and chaosmic spasm that loom on the horizon and to transform them into unforeseeable riches and jouissances.

And if the live quality of video could transform the landscape of contemporary art so tremendously, my current engagement remains what could be the newer modes of artistic articulation in times where technology is more omnipresent than ever. The Sony Portapacks and the Bolex are now replaced with Cellphone Cameras with which we shoot and archive almost instantaneously. In the same moment, we encounter thousands of mega bytes of data and ton loads of image pixels on youtube that for me potentially alters the notion of found material. And everyday, we meet so many more strangers.