A young woman hacks at the cinder-block floor with the sharp metal spikes on the soles of her pumps. Breaking the white blocks in the White Cube, the body must balance out the fissures and shifts in the disintegrating ground. German artist Maren Strack saws for four minutes and two seconds on the base on which she stands. Her Swiss colleague Ariane Andereggen rummages for 4:33 min. in her video effects bag of tricks. She scales a ladder – against gravity – mounts other image elements over parts of her body and delights in the distortions and attenuations as if in a house of mirrors. Chantal Michel, likewise from Switzerland, presents »The Trap«: a dark, contourless room in which a greenish female face is trapped, apparently recorded by a night vision device. With a high-pitched voice and in unexpected, shimmering image sequences, the face seems to be a creature thrown back on its animal instincts – the physiognomy of fear in six minutes flat.

Video as experimental field for exploring the emblematic character and cultural coding of the body, video as female terrain, the subtitle chosen for a 2001 exhibition in Graz: this is how one might describe the narrative threads running through the selection of »art_clips.ch.at.de« shown to date at Kunstraum Innsbruck as exemplars of the theme of performativity. According to curator Gerhard Johann Lischka, the ninety short videos, made between 2000 and the present and strictly divided into thirds between Switzerland, Austria and Germany, create a »Zapping Zone« for emancipated images and ways of seeing. This zone consists of three DVDS, one for each country, which spirit the viewer away to abstract, surreal, digital and analog, animated or largely realistic visual worlds.

A predilection for condensation and brevity can be found today not only in this compilation, but also in various Internet galleries and short-film presentations, as well as in the self-expression forums, not per se artistic, that are currently booming on the Net, such as You Tube. This development can certainly be attributed in part to the minimal production and distribution means required, which make video not only an element of the »urban condition,« as British curator Anthony Auerbach believes, but also part of everyday experience on the computer. In purely aesthetic terms, however, conceptual art clips in pop format also fill the gap left by commercial music television when it relinquished every advanced type of video program. It is true that short film festivals like the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen take pains to include interesting music videos in their programs, but these are usually seen by only a small section of the public. Ironically, just when audiovisual production is not only ideologically, but also in practical terms, based – or could be based – on a do-it-yourself attitude, the venue for low-budget videos has shifted from MTVIVA to the art space.

There, »art« and experimental music videos are largely converging. Consequently, some of the Austrian »art_clips« come from the electronic and improvisational music scene, which has already been presented periodically for quite some time in video series such as »Austrian Abstracts.« Although particularly in this area a tendency toward minimalist décor can be discerned, at least those images shown to date in Innsbruck owe less to the polished surfaces of the sumptuous orgies that pervade today’s major music videos than to the charm and spirit of experimentation found in the work of more or less ingenious dilettantes like the ones encountered on the Super-8 film collection »Berlin Super 80,« released 2005 on DVD. In both cases, regardless of how different the contexts and frames of reference may be, limitation to the short format lowers the makers’ inhibitions to put what are at first only roughly sketched ideas on film. When Thomas Sterna, for example, evokes the strangeness of things by showing furniture revolving through the air between floor and ceiling in his »TV-Raum,« this idea finds a happy home in video »single« format.

What can you actually say in three to six minutes anyway – and what can’t you? Some of the »art_clips« that would be even cheaper and simpler to make as long videos pursue familiar issues explored by what has by now become the video art canon, even if the tight time corset imposed on them attests to a more market-oriented product form. Since the 1960s the medium has been enlisted time and again as a (self-)surveillance and recording device to document certain experimental set-ups. In contrast to their historical forerunners, however, these videos do not focus on what is often a central moment: namely, the often extensively elaborated experience of the temporality of reception itself. The perceptual exercise of repetition, seriality and redundancy, of reduced movement and minimal differentiation can simply not be played out to the same extent in such a short amount of time. Boredom, understood as a conscious denial of slavery to plot and as a thwarting of the cinematic economy of attention, is eliminated as productive category; reflections on the act of filming in its temporality have no place in music video time frames. Bruce Nauman’s nearly six-hour video work »Mapping the Studio,« for example, shows a montage of several one-hour camera shots of his deserted New Mexico studio by night, taken in the course of several months. The appeal of this work, consisting in the concentration on otherwise ignored, inconspicuous sounds like the nighttime rustlings of cats and insects, as well as the confrontation between real time and film time in the scene changes that take place after each hour, could not be conveyed in the short form.

Compared to this, »art_clips are concentrated units, mental precipitates, compact ideas,« as Lischka writes in his foreword. »Next to and following all other artistic genres established to date, they represent an acceleration of life, an art form corresponding with its hectic pace and multiplicity.« It remains to be seen whether the three DVDs with the kind of »acceleration« conjured here can keep pace in the media environments. But perhaps their quality lies not in the attempt to keep up with the speed of circulation enjoyed by technical images, but rather in an aesthetic aspiration that takes a stand against the ubiquitous talk of the acceleration of images. Perhaps even a short-winded »Zapping Zone« of today must also retain a pause button and slow motion control as options for an alternative dramaturgical dynamic, if it really wants to counter the kind of TV and computer zapping that has long dominated our everyday lives with something that is stubbornly different.

The exhibition »art_clips.ch.at.de performativ« was shown from June 24 to July 29, 2006 at Kunstraum Innsbruck. The Video-Lounge was designed by Heimo Zobernig.
The DVD edition »art_clips.ch.at.de – 90 Kurzvideos aus der Schweiz, Österreich und Deutschland,« compiled by Johann Gerhard Lischka, will be released in fall 2006 as part of the zkm digital arts edition series from Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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