Temps de video 1965-2005
Originally published on Barcelonareporter.com

Time is plastic in video. It can be slowed down, chopped up, and juxtaposed in countless ways. No wonder it has been embraced by some of the most emblematic artists of the last forty years.

Temps de Video (Times of Video), the current exhibition at the La Caixa Foundation, is composed of about 30 installations and viewing areas from the Pompidou Center's New Media Collection - each of which have helped promote video as an artform and method for serious social criticism.

This versatile and omnipresent medium has been around since the sixties, when it was primarily used to document live performances and news. As early as the seventies, with pioneering works by artists such as Nam Jun Paik, its use had grown beyond strictly utilitarian confines to the abstract realms of aesthetics, criticism and experimental documentary.

A recurrent theme in this exhibition is video as a mirror for reality (sometimes a distorted media reality, like in Walid Raad's "Hostage") and conversely as socio-criticism, as can be seen in a "Detour Ceaucescu", by renowned filmmaker Chris Marker. With acid vision he presents the trial and execution of the eponymous tyrant as an orchestrated media spectacle. Similarly, Johan Grimonprez, in the excellent "Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y" depicts the phenomena of airplane hijacking through the last half of the 20th century as directly correlated to the impact of television.

Another theme is video surveillance, from hidden cameras recording women in an Asian nightclub bathroom going about their mundane business (Cui Xiuwen, "Lady's"), to actual surveillance cameras within installations, such as Dan Graham's "Present Continuous Past", or even the camera/monitor set-ups in the hallways. De-contextualized, you get a sense of how surveillance is still only a representation of the truth. Highly subjective terrain - much like the Rashomon concept of perception and memory.

There is also the duality of video and cinema. A "making of" uses video to capture the reality of making a film, as is the case of Godard's "Scenario du film Passion" in which he makes an analogy between a film shoot and work in a factory. Artistic creation becomes a bridge between religious revelation and the rote of production. Additionally, John Wojtowicz, the real villain and inspiration for "Dog Day Afternoon" tells his own version of a failed bank heist in Pierre Huyshe's "Third Memory".

Time also stands still in video, as in Chris Marker's "Immemory", an interactive database of his archived images. In another installation by Mark Leckey, "Fiorucci made me hardcore", dancing becomes an animalistic ritual, both bizarre and fascinating with the use of incongruous sounds and modified speeds.

Ultimately "Temps" presents video for what it really is: a stylization of our reality.

Others in the exhibit: Tony Oursler, Aernot Mik, Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, Samuel Becket, Jun N'Guyen-Hatsushiba, Gary Hill, and more …

Open to the general public.

Tuesday - Sunday, 10:00 AM - 8:00PM
Closed Monday, except for holidays
Christmas: the center will be closed December 26 and January 6

Price: Free

From: 28/09/2005 to 08/01/2006