[PAM] Member Blogs

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 It used outdated technology and tools to evoke another epoch in art.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.