Big Brother Is Watching You at the Rose Art Museum

Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art

By: Charles Giuliano - Dec 09, 2006

The Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University.

A view of the installation.

As seen from above.

Library by Jim Campbell, 2004, tracks the shadows of visitors.

Jenny Marketou's "99 Red Balloons" 2005.

Mike Dukakis as a Ninja Turtle.

George Bush supported the Death Penalty.

Dukakis opposed the death penalty.

The famous anti Dukakis Willie Horton ads.

The Dudakis prison furlough plan proved costly to the campaign.

Papa Bush promised a thousand points of light.

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Curated by Michael Rush Including: Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, Bruce Naumann, Jill Magid, Tim Hyde, Sophie Calle, Jim Campbell, Peter Campus, Jordan Crandall, Harun Farocki, Subodh Gupta, Kevin Hamilton, Tiffany Holmes, Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar, Kristin Lucas, Steve Marin, Jenny Markatou, Jonas Mekas, Muntadas, Martha Rosler, Julia Scher, and Kiki Seror Organized by Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, October 23 through December 11, 2005 and traveled to the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, September 20 through December 17, 2006

    As Michael Rush, the director of the Rose Art Museum and curator of  "Balance and Power: Performance and Surveillance in Video Art" informs us in the twelve page, illustrated pamphlet that accompanies the exhibition, the first presentations of video art as we have come to understand the medium occurred within months of each other in 1965. "On September 29, at a party in an underground space below the Waldorf  Astoria Andy Warhol showed raw footage of  conversations with his collaborator Edie Sedgwick tapes using a Norelco slant-tracked video recorder. On October 4, at the Café Au Go Go,  New York, Nam June Paik played a tape he had made that day of the Pope and his entourage parading down Fifth Avenue."

    By the end of the decade artists had broadly embraced the medium although initially it was cumbersome and expensive. Significantly one of the first applications of the medium and an impetus for its manufacture and distribution was for the purpose of security surveillance in banks. It was quickly embraced to spy on radical activities and protesters and became standard equipment for law enforcement. Rush informs us that some 500,000 high resolution cameras track the streets of London.  Anyone who watches TV dramas knows all too well the capability of space station cameras to zoom on the license plate numbers of an automobile virtually anywhere on the planet. In addition to Big Brother we are all subjected to corporate observation for example medical records and other information that are transmitted and sold without approval. And the all too familiar and disturbing use of video cameras and cell phones by stalkers and sexual predators. The technological explosion has proven to be both friend and enemy and the artists have responded to all aspects of this empowerment and exploitation as this timely and insightful exhibition neatly postulates.

    As Rush states "…It is not news that Big Brother is watching. He's been polishing his binoculars for a long time and now he's taking up residence inside our heads. While some of these trends can be catnip for anti-government isolationists, they can also be material for the tireless probings of artists whose interests in the full extent of the human condition can lead, at times, down dark paths…Much of the first decade of video art was preoccupied with critiques of television, movies and political systems."

    It is interesting to view an ambitious video exhibition at the Rose which recalls the pioneering efforts of an earlier curator for that institution, Russell Connor, who staged a video survey in 1970. The Rose has long championed the medium and I recall a performance some years back when Charlotte Morman performed on cello while wearing Nam June Paik's  TV Bra which one regarded at the time as an avant-garde take on the boob tube. In the late 60s in New York I first experienced video art directly when Howard Smith's Scene column in the Village Voice induced me to attend a Happening with the visiting German artist, Wolf Vostell. In the office of a small publishing house not more than a couple dozen people gathered to view a phenomenon; video that he and Nam June had shot that very day. Remarkable. But at the time I could make no sense of what it all meant.

    Yes this is an important exhibition but it suffers the generic problems of video oriented multi artist projects. The installation itself, divided into tent like projections of enlarged individual works by several artists,  clusters of  monitors on stands and a  couple of wall and table mounted monitors, is not, inherently, other than the  information of each video, a particularly visual experience. The overall concept of the installation was created by Antenna Design Group from New York. They did avoid one common irritation of video installations where the sound of one work did not carry over and disturb the appreciation of other works. By standing before or slightly entering into an individual 'tent" one could concentrate on that specific work with the volume of the sound track, if there was one, maintained at an intimate level.

    While one engaged with a range of individual works there was less of a sense of the impact of a whole as compared to the sum of parts. There are always issues of time, engagement and creature comfort. For example, no seating was provided and some of the works take considerable time to unfold. The quality of the blown up projects was often poor particularly vintage works which now seem quite primitive. One always wonders why the work is not presented in a theatre setting as is the case, for example, in projects at the Whitney Museum which has limited but at least some seating. And one wonders why there are not efforts to present the work on public access TV which one might view at home or through publication and distribution of DVDs which would also access the work for educators and classrooms. These discs, when  available, are prohibitively expensive. What if they were rentable through a kind of avant-garde Netflix? Or could be downloaded off the internet? When I make these comments curators and artists take me to task for not being patient and that there is no substitute for experiencing the work in a museum or gallery exhibition. That video art is not created for couch potatoes and to ask to view it in the comforts of home is to deny its site specific ambiance. It's the difference between viewing a film on the silver screen at the Megaplex, the ideal setting, vs. the ersatz experience of TV at home.

    Always the primary issue for projects such as this devolves to time and patience. Just how great an effort are we willing to commit when experiencing the work? Of course that is a measure of the compelling nature of the work itself. Frankly I found "Political Advertisement V1" very absorbing and saw most of it. As is typical of Muntadas, here working with Marshall Reese, it is deadpan and informational. The piece consists of a chronological sequence of TV advertisements for Presidential campaigns. There were clips for fringe candidates such as George Wallace and Jesse Jackson. But most riveting were the dirty tricks ads against Michael Dukakis launched by George Bush the Elder. It was stunning and sad once again to view the devastating Willie Horton ads or to see unfortunate Mike looking so much like a Ninja Turtle with his head sticking out of the top of a tank. Or the smear against him for opposing the Death Penalty. All the time George was babbling about "A Thousand Points of Light." What the hell did that mean? How great it would be for PBS to pick up this project. It would be a stunning shock to mainstream America as with hindsight we clearly see how we got duped by clever marketing.

    The 1963-1990 piece by Jonas Mekas "Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol in Visions of Warhol" was nothing more than a reference and time capsule. Then and now one doesn't have to really look at or pay attention to Warhol's videos, or works related to them, to understand what they are about. You don't actually have to sit through the long and soporific "Sleep" or "Empire State Building" to grasp their meaning. They are more  about time and patience than the actual subject or action presented. So you just have to glance at and reference the work and not much more. Ditto classics like Bruce Nauman's "Thighing" 1967 in which we see a sustained shot of a thigh being rubbed and kneaded by the artist's hands, or, "Centers" 1971 where Vito Acconci just points at us from the center of the picture plane.

    There were absorbing individual works such as "Library" 2004 by Jim Campbell. It entails a wall mounted view of the grisaille steps of the New York Public Library in sharp focus and the fleeting shadow of traffic entering and leaving the building. Jill Magid's "Lobby 7" was also amusing and absorbing. She is working a small video camera under her clothes and that body image is projected on monitors being watched by shocked and aghast people passing through the area who seem oblivious to the source of the action.

    With its mix of old and new work exploring an important and provocative theme this project may be considered as successful. But the usual problems of presenting multiple works and artists in a group context persist. In some aspects the superb and brilliant essay by Rush, his vision and intentions overall, may prove to be more enduring than actually viewing the exhibition. That experience was at best, mixed. Smile. You're on Candid Camera. Not.