G.H. Hovagimyan - misc. notes, project development, gh_news

Video at Art Basel

By G.H. Hovagimyan (for [PAM])

One of the great pleasures of Art Basel Miami is the discovery of galleries from Mexico and Latin America. I’ve seen several booths presenting fresh perspectives on conceptual art, body art and video art that have been somehow overlooked by the mainstream art press.  The perspective and voice is a presentation of Post Colonialism filtered through a very rigorous poetry that seems to pervade all Latin American works. I’m not a big fan of the standard sort of surrealist painting mural style techniques. I find that area of art to be boring repetitive and exhausted. I am however enthralled at the Latin perspective of media histories and narratives. I find them to be more inventive and insightful than all the Chinese neo-conceptual art that the mainstream art word is so enamored of.

I happened upon a gallery called Proyectos Monclava http://www.proyectosmonclova.com I was immediately attracted to a video installation piece by the artist Mario Garcia Torres.  The piece looked like a 1970’s video installation/minimal sculpture piece. It had a steel frame that held two Sony B&W video monitors one on top of another. On the monitors were playing two B&W videos that looked like 1970’s earth art or body works.  The video was grainy and I realized it was shot on film and transferred to video. I asked the dealer what the process was and he told me that Torres had shot super 8 film and transferred it to video.  I thought this piece was quite intriguing. It used outdated technology and tools to evoke another epoch in art.  I sensed the nostalgia and poetry of the work.  The piece was very subtle. It could have been ignored or overlooked. This seems to be the case with a lot of contemporary Latin American art and artists with the exception being Gabriel Orozco.  What I found is that the idea of a US style conceptual/minimal canon has been viewed almost with a disjunctive voyeurism in Latin America.  My favorite Mexican saying goes something like this,” Mexico, so far from God but so close to the United State!”

Following the peculiarities of Latin American video art both high conceptual and populist is quite interesting. One of the Artists Meeting and [PAM] artists Maria Joao Salema has done a number of quirky and exciting curatorial works of found footage using you Tube videos. Some of these were projected for a band concert this summer in Brooklyn. Salema has also created several youTube triptychs that are part of Artists Meeting youTube parties (YTTP) see:  http://www.you3b.com/watch/765 and http://www.you3b.com/watch/936

And perhaps the most concise postcolonial media riff is her triptych Drum and Bass -- http://www.you3b.com/watch/737

My point is that the range and use of video as an object rather than a direct reporting of some live event has quite a lot of poetic punch.  This carries far beyond a lot of super high production quality work we see now in the museums and on large flat screens. There’s an intimacy and shallow space that video commands that is similar to a story circle around a campfire or in this case the crackling TV set of olden days. 

For Immediate Release:                                                                                      
Artists Meeting, the artists collaborative, will have a benefit party/art auction and concert at the Flux Factory, Sunday, November 1st.

Doors open at 6pm.  Suggested Admission is $10.
Flux Factory
39-31 29th St
Queens, NY 11101
Directions -- http://www.fluxfactory.org/about/directions/
 
Schedule of Events:
Art Viewing/Auction -- 6pm-8pm – (special auction performance by Bethany Fancher starting at 7:00). 

Artworks by: James Andrews, Daniel Blochwitz, Eliza Fernbach, Emmanuelle Gauthier, David Graeve, Karen Gunderson, Jon Handel, G.H. Hovagimyan, Thomas Hutchison, Jaime Jackson, Olga and Viktor Lysenko, Lara Star Martini, Christina McPhee, Artists Meeting, Mayuko Nakatsuka, Nsumi Collective, Sally Payen, Maria Joao Salema, Lee Wells and others.

Preview and Pre-Bid auction site – http://artistsmeeting.org/auction

Concert/Dance Party/DJ - 8pm-10pm Featuring --
Super Seaweed Sex Scandal and Live Footage                                                    

SSSS - http://www.myspace.com/superseaweedsexscandal                                          

Live Footage - http://www.livefootagebrooklyn.com/                                            

Special DJ sounds by: Y.M.I.                                                                                       

<embed width="500" src="http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/dist/images/header_title.gif">

I'm pleased to announce that several videos from   rantapod
http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod
will be included in the Pocket Films Festival at the Pompidou
Center in Paris, June 13, 14, 15.  Several  rantapod videos will be
made available for download via bluetooth  at the center during the
festival.Here's the website for the festival.
http://www.festivalpocketfilms.fr/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=91

Also--
I've put up a video project called Assembled Cinema. The piece is a
series of separate video clips on a video server set to random
select.  The "movie" is created by random selection. There is no
beginning or end to the narrative. The work is encoded with mp4 video
h264.  It can be viewed with a quicktime player by using the open URL
menu-->
rtsp://nujus.net:8000/anxiety.sdp

The quicktime player can be enlarged to full screen.

http://post.thing.net has several interesting new articles that reflect the current art scene and art fairs. Joseph Nechvatal has an article that engages a piece written by Jerry Salz.  I have a piece titled Oh That Market.  There’s also a piece by Alan Moore on the CAA  Feminist Art program talk. And a review by Keith Sanborn on the new cult DVD by Craig Baldwin titled Tribulation99.

The Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective is open at the Whitney.  The show is really well done and goes quite a way to presenting his work in a full context. His films, which show some of the process of cutting apart buildings, are part of the installation. Of course the Conical Intersect that I worked on is prominently featured. There’s some very funny parts to the movie such as, me and Gordon doing a can can and Gordon cutting into the walls creating a dust cloud that blankets out the scene.  A photo of Gordon and me was featured in the weekend times arts section.

<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/arts/design/23matt.html?ex=1329886800&en=ddd0bb46c7996653&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink>

The HD_RANTS I did with Brian Caiazza are getting a lot of play. They were included in the Cinema-Scope section of the SCOPE art fair, and are part of a traveling exhibition called 1800FRAMES.  Here’s the schedule:

The Pioneer Theater: East Village, NY on March 11th at 7:00pm with reception to follow.

155 East 3rd street

212-591-0434

http://twoboots.com/pioneer

Woods Hole Film Festival: Woods Hole, MA, from July 28th to August 4th with reception.

The Jersey City Museum: Jersey City, NJ from September 20 to December 31 with reception

Last night I went out to see the Doug Aitken projections at MoMA. They are brilliant.  The sculpture garden’s side entrances on 53rd street are open in the evening for the month of the exhibition.  My wife commented that the use of media stars such as Donald Sutherland didn’t add anything.  Go see this piece. It’s major and a breakthrough.

I also went downtown to another exhibition opening at Bryce Wolkowitz gallery,
601 west 26th. The show has projection pieces that are portraits. My faves are MTAA  and Julian Opie.  MTAA  have side by side portraits of them blinking.  Opie has his stick figure profile of a women walking with a leather dress. The bracket of the high production values of Aitken’s projection and the intimacy of the downtown gallery show is worth exploring.

Both Art Dirt Redux http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt and RANTAPOD http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod have been accepted for the 20th annual Stuttgard Filmwinter Festival for expanded Media.  Which is going on right now.

Frank Popper’s book, From Technological to Virtual Art  has been published, http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10448
This is due in part to Joseph Nechvatal’s working with Popper to organize the material and make it happen. Joseph also has a terrific interview with Popper that is well worth reading http://post.thing.net/node/264 I’m pleased to say that my work has been included in this book.
 

I’ve just returned from Split, Croatia where I was a part of the New
Media jury and a presenter for the Split New Film Festival. You can
read an extended report and hear an Art Dirt Redux sampling here at:
http://post.thing.net/node/1051

I highly recommend this festival as a place to submit your work if
you are a filmmaker or new media artist. I saw some top-notch stuff
and Split is a beautiful city on the Adriatic coast.

While in Split I had a chance to interview Branko Karabatic the head
of the festival for Art Dirt Redux. http://spaghetti.nujus.net/
artDirt/archives/2006_09.html

I’ve also put up a new website with all the HD_RANTS I produced in
collaboration with Brian Caiazza this summer. Brian pushed the
rants to a new level. You can get 1/2 resolution mp4 and avi files
here. http://nujus.net/gh_04/hd_rants/index.html

HD_RANTS will be part of the video - DUMBO festival http://
www.dumboartscenter.org/festival/2006/

I’m also presenting them one at a time on RANTAPOD to download onto
your iPod. http://spaghetti.nujus.net/rantapod

Part of the fun for me was having the [PAM ] http://
perpetualartmachine.com people at Split at the same time. They are
still in Europe for the SCOPE London Festival and have a surprise
launch of a new application coming up.

August you can stay in town or get out of town either way there’s great things happening.

Check out the Spielgel tent at pier 17 at the south street seaport.  It’s a beer hall/performance space that is the hippest ticket in town. I went to see Absinthe but they are also hosting a PS 122 performance series.  The best part is you can hag out on the piers with spectacular views. It’s way cool.  I even did an Art Dirt Redux about it.  http://spaghetti.nujus.net/artDirt/archives/000904.html

August 24th there will be a duplex sound art performance at 11 Harrison Street at the ground floor gallery & studio space.  This is the Locus Sonus performance for the DIGIT festival. It will be occurring on the Roebling Bridge across the Delaware River and simultaneously at 11 Harrison Street in Manhattan (6 pm to 10pm). It’s free and there are refreshments at the Manhattan location. 

DIGIT opens this Saturday August 19th at the DVAA  (37 main street, Narrowsburg, NY 12764) http://artsallaincesite.org with installations by Locus Sonus, http://locusonus.org , [PAM] Perpetual Art Machine, http://www.perpetualartmachine.com , Hans Christophe-Steiner http://at.or.at/hans/ . 

I am very pleased to announce that I will also be premiering a series of High Definition videos done in collaboration with Brian Caiazza called HD_RANTS.  These will be on view at the DVAA and will be shown on the large screen on August 24th at 2pm as part of the best of DIGIT program at the Calicoon Cinema.  Brian Caiazza is the very talented artist who is also hosting the August 24th event in Manhattan at his studio at 11 Harrison Street. 

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