Video - Performance?
Kunsthaus, Miami
The development, in the late 1950s, of the magnetic tape that made it possible to record image and sound, implied a vital democratization of mass culture. The possibility to record and reinterpret our time at a low cost without the restrictions eco nomic and ideological represented by the standards of the TV industry, signified the entrance of a Trojan Horse in the discourse on contemporary society. Video art thus became the symbol par excellence of counterculture. First the analogic image, and then the digital image and the whole universe of multimedia, inaugurated a special poetics employed to interpret, analyze, and denounce our everyday environment.
The exhibition “Video - Performance?”, held at the Kunsthaus, Miami, takes all this cultural baggage as its point of departure, presenting to the viewer the videos of six creators who, through very different treatments, manage to shake the customary every day lethargy, pushing us towards analysis and towards the tak- ing of a position. Particularly noteworthy in this sense are the proposals featured by Santiago Echeverry and by the duo formed by Guillermo Gómez Peña and Gustavo Vázquez. Both works parody cliché concepts that we assume are indisputable.
In No disparen es prensa (Don’t shoot, it’s the press), Echeverry shows us images excerpted from the Colombian television, in which a woman journalist needs to wield this phrase to safe guard her own life. The work poses an interrogation on the supposed parameters of neutrality that surround the aura of the journalistic deed, while at the same time, it induces awareness of the atmosphere of unreality of every piece of news that reaches us in our capac- ity as spectators.
Great Mojado Invasion is a work imbued with sarcasm, parody and fabulation. Gómez Peña and Vázquez have made use of a twist in history that megalomaniac construction of the West that supports it as long as it is the hegemonic culture. The controversial anthropological material attests to the recovery of the ancient Mexican lands, currently in the possession of the United States, and the consequent establishment of the United States of Aztlan. The work constitutes a sharp and effective commentary on discriminatory and authoritarian relationships in that area. The videos by Aldo Guerra, Andrés Michelena and Gilberto Esparza have a more poetic breath. Guerra’s Esfumato is an allusion to the Renaissance technique that is reinterpreted here through the new medium and the cigarette smoke that invades the image of the two characters, whose close-ups are intercalated once and again to achieve the transfer of the cigarette from one character to the other.
In turn, Andrés Michelena’s Countdown recreates a heartfelt parable on the cycle of life. A match burns out in a three-second time lapse. The coundown that takes us from light to absolute darkness becomes a denunciation of one of the many incredible realities with which we coexist daily, unperturbed: the fact that every three seconds a human being dies of star- vation in some remote place in the world.
Lastly, Perejil buscando al sol is a work endowed with gracefulness and delicacy. In it, artifact and plant become one and the same entity. Parsley is carried by a mechanic pedestal that localizes and pursues the Sun, guaranteeing in this way the nourishment and the survival of the plant.
“Video - Performance?” at the Kunsthaus, Miami, constitutes an interesting reflection on art, video, and contemporary society.
