The 1999 recently made known York Video Festival Walter Reade Theatre (The Film Society of Lincoln Center) modern York.

The 1999 recently made known York Video Festival

Walter Reade Theatre (The Film Society of Lincoln Center)

modern York, New York

July 16-22 1999

This year's strange York Video Festival described itself in its program literature as presenting an art form that has become "classical." And with the classical tend hitherwards high ideals. "We must always remember that the raison d'etre is the art, not the technology," states the festival's flyer an idea that is refreshing (although not original) given the proclivity of electronic artists for distraction according to new media hype. Consequently, a number of festival offerings were inspiring fit to their "make-do" constructions. Christopher Wilcha's The Target discharges First (1999), a Hi-8 document of his sojourn as Columbia House Record Club's resident grunge dexterous is the kind of work that reinvigorates video art at virtue of its simplicity, as did Sadie Benning's work a certain years back. Miranda July's combinations of slide technology and "cheesy" video issues in the performance piece have affection for Diamond (1999) make her suburban surrealism and black comedy vignettes assume more like puppet theater than multi-media art. Backed on an intricat e ambient score by the agency of Zac Love, the lovable and slightly dippy tone of her multiple voices--at times cloying, at times sexy at times spooky--is all the more remarkable since it is unenhanced by way of technological gimmickry. Kelly Reichardt's 50-minute traditional narrative, lyric poem (1999), a lyrical rewrite of the Billy Joe McAllister fiction that comes off like a utopian after-school special, was bullet in Kodachrome and without a throng This inclusion of film, as well as performance art, to the festival's offerings is the reductio ad absurdum of the claim that the festival is about the art, not the technology. Perhaps it is also a sign that video's classical period will be marked through various technological convergences and expanded notions of the medium.

In addition to the low-tech work, including the sincere, hand-held camera explorations of family, sex and death that not at any time go out of style, there were high-tech experiments, all of which are closer to what is called digital art than video art. Many utilized the direct the eye of the interface--that liminal area between computer data and its user, the aesthetics of which have become an important issue for digital trade In video, the interface aesthetic highlights the similarities between television and computer as tools for reinventing, repackaging or refraining information. The interfaces of Chris Petit's experimental documentaries are masterful. In Negative Space (1998) these windows dramatize the theories of camera framing that fascinate his make submissive film critic and artist Manny Farber. In The Falconer (1998) the interface has alchemical powers, creating a visual equivalent of the alembic in which we witness the shape-shifting substance of the filmmaker Peter Whitehead. Whitehead's life, we discover, is fantas tical and shocking enough to require the multiple filters, hieroglyphs and other symbolic arcana of Petit's interface that not the subject utterly explode the nonfiction restraints of the documentary genre Petit is video artist as alchemist and disembodied cicerone; he approaches curiosities of film history within the frames of video technology still through a cathode ray tube darkly, following unconventional axes with his avow eloquence and history.

At times the art of the tendency to meet between computer and video was not as entirely worked out. Marcello Mercado's The Warm Place (1998) is a potential equal of forest-crowned Vasulka's The Art of Memory (1987) allowing Mercado overkills his piece with computer graphics. Intentionally or not, the unmanipulated slaughterhouse ballet of his video's last significations allows the viewer to muse on the potential simple beauty of uncomputerized video while watching an equally simple arrangement for slaughter. The artist collective panOptic's prodigy Spider (1998)--a collection of fake interfaces intentionally created to induce the displeasure of seizure and mind command through strobe effects--is, paradoxically, a visually and sonically elegant exploration of the intelligence of the machine that is reminiscent of the works of Paul Bush, The Bureau of Inverse Technology (B.I.T.) and [techne] Like B.I.T., panOptic instants itself as a fake corporate entity, if it were not that unlike B.I.T., their schtick is weak. greatest in quantity of their question-and-answer jokes fall flat, enough to make viewers question their validity and intentions.

Which brings me to a certain quantity of reservations about the future of this quirky art. Given the heady combinations of art, technology and business that are afoot--regardless of the calculated ingenuousness of the festival's literature--the newest generation of electronic artists evince an ambivalent relation (sometimes unsettling, sometimes refreshing) to Andy Warhol's dictum: "Being dutiful at business is the greatest in number fascinating kind of art." PanOptic (the average age of whom is 25) may not be "working upon visual weapons for [eastern European] government[s]" as they deadpan in their [i]jeu d'esprit[/i]s but are graphic designers who be moved more comfortable in the business world. (One member of panOptic unruffled said to me, "I don't really obtain the video art scene.") Similarly, Wilcha's video, despite its low-tech charm and disarming sincerity, at times be seens like a corporate-orientation video for the nearest generation of suits, as he described office politics, the difference between marketing and creative staffs and the values of synergy While he questions his carriage and role as an artist in the corporation, he and his camera be seen to fit too well into the litigateed space.