ART OFFICE for Film + Video launched our online exhibition project, The MOVING INDEX, in 2008. Each program in this year-long series grouped three artists, whose films and videos were viewable on artoffice.org for two-months. Click here for more info
2008-2009 ARTISTS:
Rebecca Baron & Doug Goodwin, Jordan Biren, Jeff Cain,
Zackary Drucker & Mariah Garnett & A.L. Steiner & Van Barnes,
Patricia Esquivias, Andrea Fraser, Fallen Fruit, Ignacio Genzon,
Micol Hebron, Nina Katchadourian, Katja Mater, Jessica Mein,
Susan Mogul, Chris Peters, Kelly Sears, Cauleen Smith,
Jose Carlos Teixeira, Jason Underhill
2008-2009 ARTISTS:
Rebecca Baron & Doug Goodwin, Jordan Biren, Jeff Cain,
Zackary Drucker & Mariah Garnett & A.L. Steiner & Van Barnes,
Patricia Esquivias, Andrea Fraser, Fallen Fruit, Ignacio Genzon,
Micol Hebron, Nina Katchadourian, Katja Mater, Jessica Mein,
Susan Mogul, Chris Peters, Kelly Sears, Cauleen Smith,
Jose Carlos Teixeira, Jason Underhill
The MOVING INDEX 2008-09
The MOVING INDEX 2010
Program 1: MARCH/APRIL
Curator: PAUL YOUNG
"I’ve been working on an exhibition for the Arts Santa Monica in Barcelona for nearly a year now, and in the process I’ve come across a number of interesting film and video artists that I’m quite excited about. What I find interesting about each of these works in the ways in which each one conducts a formal inquiry into the nature of the medium, while at the same time touching on ideas about communication, art history and in some cases, cinema. What’s more, I’m particularly drawn to the fact that each tends to be relatively accessible.
What I didn’t consider until later was that the majority of them are either from, or schooled in, the United Kingdom. Nor did I consider gender issues when selecting each. Rather, I chose these works because I believe they’re all pushing the medium in interesting ways, and yet they all seem to share a common lyricism and poetic value." –Paul Young
Thorsten Brinkmann
Se king 7min. 30sec. 2009
I first saw Thorsten Brinkmann’s work at the annual LOOP video art fair a couple of years ago. He’s based in Berlin and he’s better known for his photographs and sculptures that are generally made from found objects.
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J Tobias Anderson
The Wind 3min. 44sec. 2009
J Tobias Anderson is a Swedish artist and filmmaker who graduated from the Royal Collage of Art in Stockholm. He often uses animation and found footage to explore ideas about film history and genre theory, often by quoting scenes from Alfred Hitchcock and his contemporaries, and often by focusing in on a specific cinematic convention.
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John Smith
ASSOCIATIONS 7min. 1975
John Smith is one of my favorite experimental film artists. He’s based in the UK and studied at the Royal College of Art. He’s perhaps best know for “Girl Chewing Gum” (1976), where he takes documentary footage of a common street, and then adds the voice-over of a movie director trying to direct the action.
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John Wood & Paul Harrison
One More Kilometer 2min. 45sec. 2009
Humor is undoubtedly the most conspicuous aspect of John Wood and Paul Harrison’s video work. In many respects it bears a similarity to a number of West Coast artists of the 1960s and 70s, namely William Wegman, John Baldessari and Allen Ruppersberg.
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PAUL YOUNG
Paul Young is a journalist and curator based in Los Angeles. His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Playboy, Elle, Variety, Angeleno, Dwell, Surface, Artnews, Art & Auction and many more. His weekly column, "Untitled," which covered contemporary art issues, ran in the Los Angeles Times for two years, and his "City Art" column ran in Angeleno for nearly five years. He is also the author of Art Cinema (Taschen), which explores ways in which art practices converge with moving imagery, and he curates video programs and exhibitions worldwide. His most recent is "CinemaLoop," an invitational video installation at Arco 2010 (Madrid) and "Remote Viewing," a large-scale survey of contemporary video, which travels to the Centre d'Art Santa Monica in Barcelona in May 2010.
Julia Oldham
Determining the Speed of Light 3min. 2010
Before watching this video, I had never heard of the Fizeau apparatus—a nineteenth-century device for measuring the speed of light using mirror and a spinning, toothed wheel. While there’s ample documentation on its simplicity and accuracy (it can determine light speed within 1,000 miles per second) Oldham and her physicist collaborator, Eric Corwin, tap the absorbing visual qualities of the functioning machine.
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Jeffrey Porterfield
filzhutUNTERLEGSCHEIBE 20min. 2009
For this piece, Porterfield briefly bends his own deeply camouflaged, character-driven performance persona toward that of German artist John Bock. In an intense, yet meandering journey through a typical white-box exhibition space, he reenacts Bock’s simulated mountain climbs and interactions with bizarre homemade props, culminating in a dreamlike confrontation with iconic conceptual and performance artist Josef Beuys.
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Bjargey Ólafsdóttir
ég missti næstum vitio/Lost my Head 8min. 30sec. 2005
Ólafsdóttir works across media, making drawings, photographs, and performance works, as well as short films. Her short films tend to push on the neuroses surrounding romance and domsesticity—combining elements of soap-opera drama (with soft-focus shots and improbable personality-shifting accidents) and dark novellas.
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Rainer Prohaska
My Endless Day of Summer 20min. excerpt 2009
In this video, Prohaska prepares a traditional Austrian “Tafelspitz”—boiled beef with broth, spices, and root vegetables—for guests of S1F Gallery in Los Angeles. The from-scratch process, recorded in real time with no cuts, is interminably long: over six hours. The work is part of Prohaska’s expansive project “Restaurant Transformable,” which incorporates video, photography, collaborative performance, and installation in a kind of hyperfocus on food preparation and consumption.
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STAMATINA GREGORY
Stamatina Gregory is an independent curator and critic based in New York. She holds a BA from New York University in European Studies and German, and is a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, writing on contemporary landscape photography, militarism, activism and the media. In 2005-06, she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and from 2007-09, she was the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where she organized projects including "Carlos Motta: The Good Life," "Odili Donald Odita: Third Space," "Kate Gilmore" and "Tavares Strachan: Orthostatic Tolerance." She has taught art history and writing at Hunter and Baruch Colleges, CUNY and at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been reviewed in Art Info, Art Nexus, Art Papers, Bidoun, The New York Times, The New York Sun, The Philadelphia Enquirer and Philadelphia City Paper. http://www.stamatina.net/projects/
Determining the Speed of Light 3min. 2010
Before watching this video, I had never heard of the Fizeau apparatus—a nineteenth-century device for measuring the speed of light using mirror and a spinning, toothed wheel. While there’s ample documentation on its simplicity and accuracy (it can determine light speed within 1,000 miles per second) Oldham and her physicist collaborator, Eric Corwin, tap the absorbing visual qualities of the functioning machine.
more
Jeffrey Porterfield
filzhutUNTERLEGSCHEIBE 20min. 2009
For this piece, Porterfield briefly bends his own deeply camouflaged, character-driven performance persona toward that of German artist John Bock. In an intense, yet meandering journey through a typical white-box exhibition space, he reenacts Bock’s simulated mountain climbs and interactions with bizarre homemade props, culminating in a dreamlike confrontation with iconic conceptual and performance artist Josef Beuys.
more
Bjargey Ólafsdóttir
ég missti næstum vitio/Lost my Head 8min. 30sec. 2005
Ólafsdóttir works across media, making drawings, photographs, and performance works, as well as short films. Her short films tend to push on the neuroses surrounding romance and domsesticity—combining elements of soap-opera drama (with soft-focus shots and improbable personality-shifting accidents) and dark novellas.
more
Rainer Prohaska
My Endless Day of Summer 20min. excerpt 2009
In this video, Prohaska prepares a traditional Austrian “Tafelspitz”—boiled beef with broth, spices, and root vegetables—for guests of S1F Gallery in Los Angeles. The from-scratch process, recorded in real time with no cuts, is interminably long: over six hours. The work is part of Prohaska’s expansive project “Restaurant Transformable,” which incorporates video, photography, collaborative performance, and installation in a kind of hyperfocus on food preparation and consumption.
more
STAMATINA GREGORY
Stamatina Gregory is an independent curator and critic based in New York. She holds a BA from New York University in European Studies and German, and is a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, writing on contemporary landscape photography, militarism, activism and the media. In 2005-06, she participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, and from 2007-09, she was the Whitney Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, where she organized projects including "Carlos Motta: The Good Life," "Odili Donald Odita: Third Space," "Kate Gilmore" and "Tavares Strachan: Orthostatic Tolerance." She has taught art history and writing at Hunter and Baruch Colleges, CUNY and at the University of Pennsylvania. Her work has been reviewed in Art Info, Art Nexus, Art Papers, Bidoun, The New York Times, The New York Sun, The Philadelphia Enquirer and Philadelphia City Paper. http://www.stamatina.net/projects/
Program 3: JULY/AUGUST
Curator: Hyunjoo Byeon
Curator: Hyunjoo Byeon
Jane Cheadle
Ground Shark 3min. 30sec. 2007 Sound by BJ. Nilsen
Jane Cheadle was born in Johannesburg in 1979. She lives and works in London.
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Junebum Park
1 Parking 5min. 25sec. 2001
Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. Junebum Park was born in Seoul in 1976 and he earned his BA in Fine Art at Sungkyunkwan University in 2003.
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Hiraki Sawa
Dwelling 9min. 20sec. 2002
Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, NY and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
Hiraki Sawa was born in Ishikawa, Japan. He currently lives and works in London.
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Ground Shark 3min. 30sec. 2007 Sound by BJ. Nilsen
Jane Cheadle was born in Johannesburg in 1979. She lives and works in London.
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Junebum Park
1 Parking 5min. 25sec. 2001
Courtesy of Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. Junebum Park was born in Seoul in 1976 and he earned his BA in Fine Art at Sungkyunkwan University in 2003.
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Hiraki Sawa
Dwelling 9min. 20sec. 2002
Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, NY and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo
Hiraki Sawa was born in Ishikawa, Japan. He currently lives and works in London.
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"Art and its representation are intimately contextualised by space and time. In the history of modern art, there have been various discourses about what an artwork gains or loses as it is presented in a space isolated from where the work originates. As technology develops, the moving image appears as a medium that transgresses space and time by containing an index, a sign which preserves an inscription of its physical presence, however, video is so construed that its articulation in space and time turns into installation in the gallery.
Being set in an online exhibition space, Program 3 aims to examine how a work of art can be manifested and transformed when new coordinates of space and time apply. The audience can access art on their monitors in every corner of the world, beyond spatial and temporal restrictions of a fixed venue during the exhibition. Through the language of its presentation as an online exhibition, it seeks to explore how this form of presentation is fundamentally different from art screenings, video-sharing websites and materialised installations. Through this format of presentation, can artwork be emancipated from being the medium in the white cube which endows its presence and laws? Can this format help to focus on the artwork, as the place of the work has to be the work itself, or does this format of presentation create a new gesture to contextualise art?
The issues raised by this exhibition will be explored by artworks that highlight the notion of space and time in the video frame, and construct the relationships between presence and absence, tangibility and intangibility, location and dislocation, and movement and stillness. Jane Cheadle’s Ground Shark (2007) composes a spatial and temporal dimension emerged from their accumulated movements and stillness, continuity and discontinuity of the sharks that are cut out from the vinyl floor, appropriating stop motion animation technique. Junebum Park’s 1 Parking (2001) manipulates and shifts a scale as he regulates cars in the parking lot with his gigantic, animated hands. Park’s playful gesture interrogates the idea of space and time by mimicking the real world, thus ironically exposing the construct that surrounds us. In Dwelling (2002), Hiraki Sawa poetically ruminates on time and space in the frame. With the absence of the artist, his London flat transforms into a stage in which surreal events unfold through the movements of the airplanes, which signify itinerant existences. Through their varied practices, the artists eventually question the relation between art, its representation and the system it belongs to.
In addition to the very accessible format of the exhibition, Program 3 attempts to reconfigure the role of the viewer. Unlike the experience at a traditional gallery, this online exhibition draws the viewer into an opened format, thus it encourages them to have a positive approach towards experiencing the artworks. The audience experiences and interprets the work in diverse ways so that they can contextualise a new idea of space and time within art." -Hyunjoo Byeon
Hyunjoo Byeon
Hyunjoo Byeon is a curator based in London and Seoul. Her curatorial projects include Here Once Again, Alternative Space Loop/SNU MoA, Seoul, 2008, Visual Vocabulary, The Gallery at Willesden Green, London, 2008, Jason Underhill’s Sing Your Heart Out, part of GSK Contemporary, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2008-09 as well as Flexible Aura, Brain Factory, Seoul, 2009. Byeon earned her MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2008 and was selected as participating curator of the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course in 2009. She has also lectured in Art Theory and Introduction to Contemporary Art at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, South Korea.
Being set in an online exhibition space, Program 3 aims to examine how a work of art can be manifested and transformed when new coordinates of space and time apply. The audience can access art on their monitors in every corner of the world, beyond spatial and temporal restrictions of a fixed venue during the exhibition. Through the language of its presentation as an online exhibition, it seeks to explore how this form of presentation is fundamentally different from art screenings, video-sharing websites and materialised installations. Through this format of presentation, can artwork be emancipated from being the medium in the white cube which endows its presence and laws? Can this format help to focus on the artwork, as the place of the work has to be the work itself, or does this format of presentation create a new gesture to contextualise art?
The issues raised by this exhibition will be explored by artworks that highlight the notion of space and time in the video frame, and construct the relationships between presence and absence, tangibility and intangibility, location and dislocation, and movement and stillness. Jane Cheadle’s Ground Shark (2007) composes a spatial and temporal dimension emerged from their accumulated movements and stillness, continuity and discontinuity of the sharks that are cut out from the vinyl floor, appropriating stop motion animation technique. Junebum Park’s 1 Parking (2001) manipulates and shifts a scale as he regulates cars in the parking lot with his gigantic, animated hands. Park’s playful gesture interrogates the idea of space and time by mimicking the real world, thus ironically exposing the construct that surrounds us. In Dwelling (2002), Hiraki Sawa poetically ruminates on time and space in the frame. With the absence of the artist, his London flat transforms into a stage in which surreal events unfold through the movements of the airplanes, which signify itinerant existences. Through their varied practices, the artists eventually question the relation between art, its representation and the system it belongs to.
In addition to the very accessible format of the exhibition, Program 3 attempts to reconfigure the role of the viewer. Unlike the experience at a traditional gallery, this online exhibition draws the viewer into an opened format, thus it encourages them to have a positive approach towards experiencing the artworks. The audience experiences and interprets the work in diverse ways so that they can contextualise a new idea of space and time within art." -Hyunjoo Byeon
Hyunjoo Byeon
Hyunjoo Byeon is a curator based in London and Seoul. Her curatorial projects include Here Once Again, Alternative Space Loop/SNU MoA, Seoul, 2008, Visual Vocabulary, The Gallery at Willesden Green, London, 2008, Jason Underhill’s Sing Your Heart Out, part of GSK Contemporary, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2008-09 as well as Flexible Aura, Brain Factory, Seoul, 2009. Byeon earned her MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2008 and was selected as participating curator of the Gwangju Biennale International Curator Course in 2009. She has also lectured in Art Theory and Introduction to Contemporary Art at the Kaywon School of Art and Design, South Korea.