Artists who shape, respond to, and re-make popular video culture

Pipillotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist (Swiss) talks about her first work of video art “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much” from 1986 – barely art – that they submitted to a festival just to get a free ticket to see the shows. Before MTV, before YouTube the artist – like Joan Jonas or Bruce Nauman or Nam June Paik and others – was performing simple gestures, improvised performances, and performing herself in footage that was rough, poor quality, chaotic and spontaneous.

Did artists invent music videos? You Tube?

Kelly Mark

Or cat videos? See Kelly Mark, Toronto based artist in 2002.

See the video here: http://kellymark.com/V_MusicVideoSeries1.html

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“Faced with the awe-inspiring popularity of web-monoliths like YouTube, contemporary art risks becoming nothing more than a quaint relic of the 20th century.

It’s probably not fair to compare contemporary art practice with YouTube; yet there is evidence to suggest that somewhere in the ulterior of its collective brain, the art world does just this, and finds itself lacking. How else to understand the ongoing assurances given in art exhibition press releases and catalogue essays about the important role the viewer plays in the construction of meaning – and the intention to facilitate it with this very exhibition?

If artists once played a leading – avant garde – role in providing a complex and forward-looking framework for reflection on the contemporary world, it now seems most comfortable bringing up the rear, providing explanations for developments already intuitively understood and widely enjoyed by the culture at large. “

Rosemary Heather, From Army of You Tube

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Ryan Trencartin

“Ryan Trecartin’s videos depict a vertiginous world I’m barely stable enough to describe. Watching them, I face the identity-flux of Internet existence: surfing-as-dwelling. Images evaporate, bleed, spill, metamorphose, and explode. Through frenetic pacing, rapid cuts, and destabilizing overlaps between representational planes (3-D turns into 2-D and then into 5-D), Trecartin violently repositions our chakras. Digitally virtuoso, his work excites me but also causes stomach cramps. I’m somatizing. But I’m also trying to concentrate.” From Situation Hacker: The Art of Ryan Trencartin, Wayne Kaustenbaum

Maya Ben David

Biography

Maya Ben David (MBD) is a Toronto-based Jewish-Iranian Anthropomorphic Airplane. Working in video, installation and performance, she creates worlds and characters that aid her ongoing exploration of anthropomorphism, cosplay and performative personas. Ben David presents the origin stories of her characters in the form of video and performance, and expands on them via her online presence. They often inhabit alternate universes accompanied by nostalgia, such as the worlds of Pokémon and Spiderman. In addition, Ben David also plays a character called MBD who is known for having multiple feuds with her many alter egos as well as the art world. Most infamously, MBD has ignited online feuds with artists such as Jon Rafman and Ajay Kurian.   Bio from her site Maya Ben David

Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, 2 Lizards: Episode 1, 2020

2 Lizards: Episode 1, 2020

Artforum is pleased to host this Instagram video by Orian Barki and Meriem Bennani, made while self-isolating because of COVID-19.

Beautiful moment of communion through sound waves in Brooklyn despite social distancing—the virus’s protective membrane is very sensitive to soap and heat but also bass. These two lizards are lucky they work from home and can afford to stay inside. This is the first collaboration between Yani and me; we made it over the weekend to take a break from editing and animating for work. —Meriem Bennani

This is what it feels like to live
presently in a historical moment.

“2 Lizards is an artistic time capsule that fuses genre—part documentary, part fiction—using cartoon animals to represent the artists’ community. The resulting absurdity and realness channel humor and sincere emotion to explore the societal fissures that formed around the pandemic, and its intersection with systemic racism. Each episode explores a specific quarantine mood: dreamlike detachment, anxiety, impassioned protest. Melodrama is notably absent. Instead we see cool emotions and “affect management.” Daydreaming, scrolling, and distraction abound. In addition to physical confinement, there is an emotional confinement that manifests as out-of-sync-ness: the lizards move with a particular cadence, slightly slower than everything else. This, the videos seem to say, is what it feels like to live presently in a historical moment.” From MOMA

2 Lizards joins a rich history of diaristic video art, including Gregg Bordowitz’s episodic Portraits of People Living with HIV or George Kuchar’s performative video diaries. Like Bordowitz’s and Kuchar’s footage of the mundane, 2 Lizards focuses not on the crisis as an event but on its daily effects. (It isn’t until episode four, when the lizards visit a friend, a healthcare worker, that we hear stories about the coronavirus tragedies.) As an event, contagion is invisible, but the ripple effects are evident. This is reminiscent of cultural theorist Lauren Berlant’s term “crisis ordinariness,” whereby “crisis is not exceptional…but a process embedded in the ordinary that unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming.”[1]

2 Lizards

This series speaks to the changing methods of image consumption that aim increasingly toward smaller, more portable screens and user-generated content that seeks to comfort through humor. Like memes, the lizards are an opiate for our precise moment of extreme social disruption. Much of the value in these videos is their format (the Instagram video), as they inextricably tie the work to the platform and its users. 2 Lizards is a feedback loop: it reflects the Internet by incorporating new modes of image technologies related to the constant stream of pictures, which are then distributed back into the world through those very feeds. During lockdown, in the context of isolation, social media became a place where many of us channeled our pent-up communal and emotional need to connect. It is where we received information about the world and began to watch a new one unfold.

Yuula Benivolski

aspacegallery.org

“Scrap Pieces is a collaborative meditation on the physical components of the surface of images. This 4 channel video project borrows materials from the studios of four Canadian photographers: Laurie Kang, Jeff Bierk, Nadia Belerique, and Celia Perrin Sidarous. Filmed in the intimate style of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR), Benivolski soothes the viewer using debris and scrap materials such as small pieces of metal, silicone, plaster casts, test strips, seashells, glass, wires and transparencies.” Yuula Benivolski from her site

https://www.archivalaffections.com/yuula-benivolski.html

Traces
2021 / 4k video / colour / sound / single screen / 62’46

“Traces is an ASMR video tutorial that demonstrates the process of forensic fingerprint development on old currency that has been out of circulation for thirty years. With Bridget Moser.

I left Moscow at 10 years old when it was still part of the Communist USSR and made my first trip back home to the “Russian Federation” 28 years later. Curious about the disappeared ideology and citizens of the place I was born in, I purchased 300 Soviet banknotes which went out of circulation in 1993, with plans to lift fingerprints off them.

The fingerprints, once revealed through a chemical process taught to me by a forensic specialist, are photographed using an orange filter on a macro lens, and enlarged 80 times their size, in order to show the last natural traces of a place that has been made to vanish.” Yuula Benivolski

Christian Marclay:

Arthur Jaffa:

Warning about video art below: Contains explicit/violent material, actual footage

“Well my thing was like, first of all, there’s something to be said for just making explicit what is oftentimes implicit—which is black people being killed as if we’re not human beings. How do we introduce something in the space that can cut through the noise? There’s a real problematic around the appropriateness of having an image of a man getting murdered. But this footage is all over the place. It’s everywhere. It’s not like we’re talking about digging stuff out of some archive that’s never been seen before.

It’s literally everywhere so the question becomes: How do you situate it so that people actually see it, this phenomena, as opposed to just having it pass in front of them? How do you have people actually see it? And simultaneously, how do you induce people to apprehend both the beauty and the horror these circumstances? There’s something profound (and magical) to be said about the ability, the capacity to see beauty anywhere and everywhere. I think it’s a capacity black people have developed because not only are we are not authorized, we’re demonized—we are radically not affirmed, so we’ve actually learned not just how to imbue moments with joy but to see beauty in places where beauty, in any normative sense, doesn’t necessarily exist.”

From Love is the Message, The Plan is Death, Arthur Jafa and Tina M. Campt in coversation on e-flux

OPTIONAL READ: From Love is the Message, The Plan is Death, Arthur Jafa and Tina M. Campt in coversation on e-flux

SMILE FOR THE CAMERA: Alexia Castiglione, 2023

For my final, I overlapped all of the clips and displayed them side by side. By overlapping all of the clips, I am allowing my audience to move through each one at a steady pace, while also striping the videos of their humour. I wanted to focus on the cruelty of the parents. I wanted to show the unethical aspect of filming and posting your child on the internet during their most vulnerable moments. I made sure to include some of the parents dialogue to further emphasize this. In the video you can hear some parents laughing at their children or mocking their cries. One parent even says to their child “you are so dramatic!” I wanted to highlight the absurdity of the common parenting choices of this generation. My vision is to have this play on a loop, possibly in a stairwell. I want this video to be displayed in a space where the audience would have no choice but to walk past it and endure the discomfort of hearing the cries of these poor children.

JAZ MOREL, ALL GRWM 2023

For my internet video trend I found myself experimenting with a lot of different subject matter or internet video tropes, however, a consistent theme I was incorporating was ‘animal videos.’ Animal videos have a long history with the internet and appear on all platforms, from YouTube compilations of “funny cat videos” to TikTok’s of “pet meal-prep.” 

Being the animal lover I am, I opted to go the route of using animal videos as my subject matter. A lot of the videos I watch on the internet are light-hearted or ‘filler’ video throughout my day of just scrolling through my social media platform feeds. For this project I wanted to capture the light hearted or for lack of a better word, ‘meaningless,’ videos that I come across daily. Similar to what I originally had in mind of pit bull pampering videos, my work is a video compilation of all types of breeds being pampered or groomed in a human like nature. A lot of what is being performed on the dogs is what human’s themselves are doing in similar “get ready with me (GRWM)” videos, and so I wanted to have the two side by side to act as a visual commentary on the similarities of the two. 

Whether this video is meant to be humorous, a parody, thought-provoking, commentary of the times, etc.; none of that is definitive or a decision made intentionally, I more so wanted to have fun with the videos I commonly consume and play around with the similarity of the two video trends/genres.

After hours and hours of scowering YouTube for moments in video essays where the person mentions their microphone or makes some kind of reference to it. I noticed that an increasingly common trope in video essay style content was the presence of a microphone visible on the screen. This is in contrast to the typical kind of content on YouTube and in film/tv media in which the microphone and other aspects of production are taken with great care to be hidden from the audience. The only time we see production is typically in News media and journalism, where we see the figure who is stating facts holding a microphone. As a result, the microphone is a signifier of authority over what is being said. It creates the illusion that the person speaking knows what they are talking about or have some kind of qualifications to be spouting whatever they’re talking about.

I thought it would be cool to highlight aspects of these really long form, often serious videos where the creator takes a moment to recognize the fact that yes indeed they are using a microphone. When all these clips are placed alongside each other, it really highlights the ridiculousness and mock importance the microphone yields.

I thought it would be really easy to find clips of people referencing their microphone in some way, but it was actually much harder as most of the videos I found were anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour. I eventually discovered that most videos allow you to pull up the full transcript, which allowed me to control f and search for the word ‘microphone’ in the video without having to watch it. This sped up the project immensely. My strategy for finding clips was going to a video essayist’s channel and searching for the first time a microphone appears in their videos, which is usually when they will make some kind of announcement that yes they have a new microphone.