|
Though the medium of video brings with
it expectations of entertainment for the viewer, oftentimes contemporary
video art is anything but entertaining. After consciously avoiding
it for some time, Philadelphia-based artist William Larson took
a risk and began working in video three years ago. In the three
video pieces on display at Arcadia, he drew themes and ideas from
his 30-odd years of experience making evocative still photographs,
and what he calls an "ongoing, perhaps stubborn, concern
for depicting time in static space." Larson's story lines
are without twists and turns and mostly involve the imprisonment
of characters and images in time, as well as the creation (or
destruction) of those images.
Mallare, the mesmerizing first
video in the installation, consists of the text-covered screen
of a computer monitor projected at a scale similar to real life.
We soundlessly witness the slow and steady erasing of an entire
novel about love, death, sex and madness, Mallare, written
by Ben Hecht and published in 1922. Because of the format of this
video, the viewer is seduced into reading the novel backwards.
The words directly behind the cursor travel upward and morph into
different combinations, such as "I am the mirror and the
image" and, later, "I see and yet like my memory what
I look at remains." Behind those phrases, several lines of
mathematical equations (a theme in the novel) follow the consumed
text upward at a steady pace. Observed closely, the text seems
almost lifelike, and its destruction by the protagonist cursor
reads as a bizarre, but methodical, tragedy.
NOTime, on the other hand, is a self-referential piece
about film and video processes, and is not without humor. Larson
rather cleverly juxtaposes two video loops on adjacent walls of
the gallery. The larger of the two projections is a 16mm film
projector that sits on a table in an empty room and starts up
by itself. It quickly runs into trouble, as the film detaches
and begins to spill out over the take-up reel and onto the floor
(the bane of any projectionist). Meanwhile a smaller image, a
1923 film showing two men repetitively circling up one ramp and
down another, is projected on the wall to the right of the first
image, as if it were produced by the errant projector. A loud,
clickety-clacking soundtrack accompanies the visual imagery, as
if to underline the slapstick narrative.
In the last of the three video pieces,
STILL and yet, Larson has compiled a series of nine silent
video projections of motionless figures in interiors, all with
the bright harsh lighting of snapshots. The piece has still photography
as its theme -- a stillness made more real bcertain moving elements,
such as rippling leaves, blinking eyes or a television screen,
and as time lapses we empathetically witness the actors wobble
slightly or breathe heavier. Like Warhol's film of the Empire
State Building, Larson captures each unmoving scene in order to
help us see something we would otherw otherwise take for granted.
One segment shows two women seated together at a kitchen table
and another shows a young man stoically holding an infant with
wriggling appendages. In one a middle-aged man (the artist himself,
I was told) steps out of a bathtub, frozen just as he begins to
dry his foot with a towel, and stares directly at the viewer.
The voyeuristic aspect of STILL and yet is intense. Using
his full powers as an artist and a photographer, Larson composed
the piece from the most ordinary scenes of daily life, transforming
them into a series of extremely compelling tableaux vivant. Ironically,
the duration (about eight minutes each) of the tableaux makes
them endless, eternal and full of potential. In this and the rest
of Larson's new pieces at Arcadia, the work of the photographer
is seen in real time, and turns out to be not entertaining --
but profoundly and deeply engaging.
-Susan
Hagen, April 2002
for
more information on this exhibition, click
here |
