Lynn Marie Kirby - Time-Dilation Series (2000-2003)
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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Time-Dilation Series, 2000-2003
Photons in Paris: image encodings
Off the Tracks
Out of Step
Study in Choreography for Camera Remote
Six Shooter
Twilight's Last Gleaming
Lynn Kirby, an avant-garde filmmaker, uses a wide array of film technology and philosophy when making her films. Kirby's films range in content from the feminine to the spiritual, political, and social. Kirby also uses a diverse toolset for creating her works. She originally began her work in film, but quickly switched to the video format when “editing for video” systems were developed. Later known for her work with digital video in the 90's, much of her work has been shown in a number of different forms, including the triptych. Kirby's body of work as a whole is diverse, with different messages and meanings conveyed in different settings and using different techniques of capture and editing.
When we were screening the “Time Dilations” series, the images she captures are not as pixel perfect as what can be achieved on newer consumer digital camcorder; rather, the images tend to become blurred and amalgamated together when there is a lot of motion, creating this “rare balance between austerity and playfulness” that Michael Sicinski of Cinema Scope mentions in his article “Incremental Framebusting: The Paragon Example of Lynn Marie Kirby”. When editing her work, Lynn relies on the manual controls of her digital editing deck to control the speed and direction of the film, as well as the sparadic crashes of her ancient editing computer to create some of her cuts. Lynn works within the limitations of her tools in order to create a “'way of looking at time and space both simultaneously and pulled apart'”.
A later work captured in a similar vein to “Time Dilations” is Kirby's “Twilight's Last Gleaming”. This latter work, which was originally presented on three separate screens in a triptych, uses Kirby's method of fast-forwarding and rewinding, computer “crash cuts”, as well as digital still frames created out of the colors of other images. What separates “Twilight's Last Gleaming” from her other digital video works is Kirby's use of music to shape the visual aesthetics of the film. The music Kirby chooses, not surprisingly, is the Jimmy Hendrix version of the film title. Kirby say that she “wants you to see the music of Jimmy Hendrix”. The images that collide across the triptych have a rhythm and a pulse that drive the work forward.
Unafraid of venturing off in new directions with new and unconventional technology, Lynn Kirby presents new experiences within the constraints she places on her work (i.e. “crash” editing). The exploration of the temporal, the spiritual, and the social can be found throughout her work through her use of editing and capturing, whether that be through exposing canisters of film, using older editing systems, or using different mediums. Kirby plays these different forms of expression to her liking in such a way as to capture objects and events that could be everyday, and present them in new ways that add meaning.
Lynn Marie Kirby has been working with ideas of intimate and cultural landscapes across the materials of film, video, sound and light for almost two decades.
Her work is constantly on the edges/boundaries of the medium with which she is working, yet the subject of her work reaches a broad audience, exploring very real and intimate personal stories that are both literary and experimental.
She challenges our concepts of framing, in terms of structures like narrative and documentary, as well as the literal way we look at framed images. Her work deals with love and death, exuberance and loss, themes present as much through editing - the use of pulses, freezes, glitches - as through characters and settings.
This is participatory cinema. As viewers we are asked to complete the cycle of looking, to bring our own experience to the work which is at once poetic and complex, and often quite humorous.
Her work has shown internationally at festivals in London, Athens, Istanbul and Oberhausen and she has had one person shows in numerous museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art and Artist Space in New York, George Pompidou Centre and Theatre de L'Entrepot in Paris, LACE in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Cinematheque and Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.
Several films won First Place awards at the San Francisco Art Institute and Big Muddy Film Festivals, Second Place awards at Onion City, Chicago, Ann Arbor and Women in the Director's Chair Festivals. She has received support for her work from a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowships and Film Arts Foundation grants, as well as support from the Jerome Foundation and the Kelsey Street Press.
In addition to her production and installation work, Lynn has taught film and video production and theory, emphasizing a cross disciplinary approach to the fields of film, video, performance, sound and critical media studies. She is currently a Professor at the California College of Arts and Crafts.
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at 9:43 AM
Robert Smithson & Nancy Holt - East Coast, West Coast (1969)
Monday, January 28, 2008
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1969, 22 min, b&w, sound
East Coast, West Coast, Holt and Smithson's first collaborative experiment with video, takes the form of a humorous bi-coastal art dialogue. Joined by their friends Joan Jonas and Peter Campus, Holt and Smithson improvise a conversation based on opposing - and stereotypical - positions of East Coast and West Coast art of the late 1960s. Holt assumes the role of an intellectual conceptual artist from New York, while Smithson plays the laid back Californian driven by feelings and instinct. Their deadpan exchange ironically lays bare the limitations and contradictions of both sides in the debate.
Robert Smithson is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Smithson, who was born in 1938 and died in 1973, was a seminal figure in the art form that became known as earthworks or land art. He radically redefined notions of sculpture through his writings and projects. Among his most important and well-known works are Spiral Jetty (1970), a monumental earthwork located in the Great Salt Lake, Utah, and Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) at Kent State University in Ohio. Smithson's critical writings have had an equally profound impact on contemporary art and theory.
A pioneer of earthworks and public art, Nancy Holt has also worked in sculpture, installation, film, video, and photography for over three decades. She is best known for her large-scale environmental sculptural works, including Sun Tunnels in Utah and Dark Star Park in Virginia. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Holt made a series of pioneering film and video works, including several collaborations with Robert Smithson. Holt's early videos explore perception and memory through experiments with point of view and process.
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at 4:32 PM
William Kentridge - Selected Animations (1989 - 1997)
Sunday, January 27, 2008
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Johannesburg, 2nd Greatest City after Paris (1989)
Monument (1990)
Mine (1991)
Sobriety, Obesity and Growing Old (1991)
Felix in Exile (1994)
History of the Main Complaint (1996)
Weighing.and Wanting (1997)
Although influential in South Africa, the Johannesburg-based Kentridge was relatively unknown to the global arts community until 1997, when he achieved widespread recognition for his work included in Doucmenta X in Kassel, Germany as well as the Havana and Johannesburg Biennals. Since this time, his work has been exhibited extensively in many of the world's most prestigious arts institutions and festivals including the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Centres Georges Pompodou in Paris, the Edinburgh Film Festival, Annecy Animation Festival and the Venice Biennale, all of which have screened films from the Eckstein series.
Described as 'the most celebrated artist to emerge from South Africa in the post-apartheid era' (Village Voice), Kentridge's powerful films - born from the complex social and historical realities of his homeland - explore the passing of time, the traces that remain and the memory that events, beings and objects leave when we close our eyes on the past.
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Alex Gabassi - William Kentridge: Certain Doubts (2007)
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Films, drawings, installations, theatre, opera: William Kentridge, one of the most important names in South African contemporary art, easily glides between media, in a combination of references and techniques that render his work unique. In this documentary, which follows him through Johannesburg and Brazil, he speaks of the impact of the landscape and social contradictions on his work, and comments on the life of characters like Felix Teitlebaum, his alter ego.
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at 11:03 AM
Harun Farocki - Peter Lorre - Das doppelte Gesicht (1984)
Friday, January 25, 2008
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Peter Lorre achieved international fame for his performance in the myth-making role in M. This character has held a peculiar fascination for his generations of cinéphiles. However, at the time, whilst such success meant recognition, it also weighed on the Hungarian actor as a constrictive burden.
Using photographs and film extracs, Das doppelte Gesicht reconstrucs the ups and downs of Lorre's career, taking into consideration the economic imperatives and workings of the film industry at the time. (Arnold Hohmann, 1984)
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at 10:40 PM
Ken McMullen - Metzger (2004)
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
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The first ever documentary on the life and work of Gustav Metzger, founder of Auto Destructive Art one of the most pivotal cultural figures of the past forty years. The Scale of Gustav Metzger's achievements and his contribution to contemporary culture are clearly demonstrated in Ken McMullen's extraordinary and comprehensive film. From Freud to Vermeer, from Nazi design to the importance of drawing and the films of Leni Riefenstahl, Gustav Metzger speaks candidly and brilliantly of the influences which have shaped both his own work and the culture of our time. Gustav Metzger witnessed the rise of Nazism as a small child in Nurnberg in the early 1930s. He escaped to Great Britain in 1939 and trained as an artist before founding the auto-destructive art movement in 1959 which has influenced a generation of younger artists including The Who's Pete Townshend. Metzger pioneered the use of computers in art and with his 'Liquid Crystal Light Projections' which were incorporated into the stage shows of Cream and The Who at London's Roundhouse, he defined the visual culture of the psychedelic era.
'Auto-destructive art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummelling to which individuals and masses are subjected.' Gustav Metzger, from MANIFESTO AUTO-DESTRUCTIVE ART, London 1960.
The scale of Gustav Metzger's achievements and his contribution to contemporary culture are clearly demonstrated in Ken McMullen's comprehensive film. Gustav Metzger speaks candidly and brilliantly of the influences which have shaped both his own work and the culture of our time. From Freud to Vermeer, from Nazi design to the importance of drawing and a far-reaching discussion of auto-destructive art, Gustav Metzger gives profound and lucid insights into the meaning and relevance of art, as well as highlighting the importance of understand the destructive impulses in human society.
Gustav Metzger witnessed the rise of Nazism as a small child in Nürnberg in the early 1930s. He escaped to Great Britain aged thirteen and trained as a cabinet-maker and an artist before found auto-destructive art in 1959 which has influenced a generation of younger artists from the The Who's guitarist Pete Townshend to the artist and writer Stewart Home.
Fusing art with politics and social activism, Metzger was a co-founder with Bertrand Russel of the Committee of 100, the anti-war protest group. He convened the now legendary Destruction in Art Symposium in 1969 and proposed the first Art Strike in 1974.
Ken McMullen's Metzger was commisioned by Arts Council England as part of the Pioneers in Art and Science documentary series, and is designed to fully utilise the potential of the DVD format.
Contains 111 minutes of additional features including sections on:
Auto Destructive Art
Freud
Leni Riefenstahl
Vermeer
Artist Emigres
Nazi Design and the rise of Nazism
Gustav Metzger's work and career from 1959 to the present day
Available via Pinnacle Entertainment.
Starring: Gustav Metzger
• Director: Ken McMullen
• Label: The Arts Council England
• Cat number: 2871039
• Format: DVD
• Price: 14.99
• Release Date: 02-08-2004
• Running Time: 139 mins
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at 10:40 AM
Robert Whitman - Performances from the 1960s (1963 - 1966)
Saturday, January 19, 2008
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Robert Whitman created some of the earliest and most important performance works of the 1960s. In his performances, the poetic and often surprising interaction of film, lights, sound, live performers, props, and objects that take on a life of their own create a dense visual, non-narrative dramatic structure.
This DVD captures for the viewer important and seminal examples of this ephemeral art form. It makes available for the first time original recordings of three of Whitman’s 1960s performances and documents the creative thinking of an innovative artist – and the artistic climate of the time.
Included is original footage of The American Moon (1960) and Flower (1963), both filmed by Whitman as notes to himself, and short documentaries about the works – featuring interviews with Trisha Brown, Jim Dine, Simone Forti, Claes Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, and the artist. A recent performance of Prune Flat (1965) is accompanied by an interview with Whitman on the piece. A bonus video presents Ghost, Whitman’s recent theater work, first performed in September 2002, with notes by Lynne Cooke and Arne Glimcher.
Robert Whitman was born in New York City in 1935. He studied literature at Rutgers University from 1953 to 1957 and art history at Columbia University in 1958. He began in the late fifties to present performances, including the pioneering works American Moon (1960) and Prune Flat (1965), as well as to exhibit his multimedia work in some of New York's more influential experimental venues, such as the Hansa, Reuben, and Martha Jackson galleries. With the scientists Fred Waldhauer and Billy Klüver and artist Robert Rauschenberg, Whitman cofounded, in 1966, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a loose-knit association that organized collaborations between artists and scientists. His one-person exhibitions include such venues as the Jewish Museum, New York (1968), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1968), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1973). Dia organized a retrospective of his theater works in 1976. Several theater projects have also toured to various European venues, including the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1987 and 1989) and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2001 and 2002).
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at 10:24 AM
Yvonne Rainer - Film About a Woman Who... (1974)
Friday, January 18, 2008
(From Erin Brannigan):
Dancer, choreographer, performer, filmmaker and writer Yvonne Rainer, who began choreographing in 1961 and made her first film in 1967, is a key figure in the story of the New York avant-garde in terms of both her writing and practice. (2) Rainer provided a commentary on the influences that preceded her own aesthetic objectives and articulated her own project through practice and explicatory discourse, establishing her position as a key player within the New York avant-garde from the early 1960s through to the mid-1990s. During this period she produced twelve films, including silent short works for multimedia performances (which she calls “filmed choreographic exercises”) (3) as well as features. According to Rainer, her fascination with dance and film emerged simultaneously when she moved on from acting at 25 (p. 51). She is certainly a choreographer who had as many film reference points as choreographic, evidenced in the use of projection in her stage work and her erudite use of cinematic quotation in her film work. (4) What links Rainer's dance and film work is an intense critique of disciplinary conventions and a profound interrogation of the role of performance. Performance is central to all aspects of Rainer's work; she herself refers to performance as the subject matter in her films (p. 8) and Peggy Phelan describes her writings as “rhetorical performances”. (5)
(and from Jonathan Wallay):
Rainer's work of this period also problematized the conception of the relationship between viewer and artwork that was at the core of the minimalist aesthetic. Once again, this arose from the fact that the material of dance was the person. A minimalist painting or sculpture was thought to frankly address the viewer and the space of the gallery, to rely upon the viewer for its completion. To seek such a relationship between a live performer and an audience, however, was to risk opening up the dance to all of those things that Rainer had rallied against in her “NO manifesto,” since in dance, the performer/spectator relationship is a human one, in which emotion, empathy, and relations of power are present. Again, one of the basic tenets of minimalism posed a unique problem for live performance. In a way, Rainer can be said to have inverted a key principle of minimalist art by attempting to cut off any kind of human connection between her performers and the audience. For instance, Rainer often instructed her dancers to refuse eye contact with the audience, either by keeping their heads cocked away from the spectators or by looking over and beyond their heads. Ironically, then, Rainer's performances seem to have initially aspired to the condition Michael Fried called “absorption,” a condition characterized by the work's refusal to address the viewer, an almost metaphysical detachment of the work from the viewer's time and space. Fried criticized the minimalist sculptors for their refusal to do this – for the ways their work acknowledged the viewer and depended on him or her for their completion. (Fried, 125-27) Rainer, concerned about the “seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer,” and troubled by the ramifications of the display of the dancers' bodies for crowds of onlookers, resisted this dimension of minimalist art. In her analysis of her dance Trio A, she wrote;
…the “problem” of performance was dealt with by never permitting the performers to confront the audience. Either the gaze was averted or the head was engaged in movement. The desired effect was a worklike rather than exhibitionlike presentation. (Rainer, 1995b, 271)
“Tasklike” (or, in the above quote, “worklike”) activity was Rainer's version of minimalism's “literalness” (the condition of objecthood). The difference, however, was that while literalness in minimalist painting or sculpture was what allowed for a new, more direct relationship between art work and viewer, for Rainer it was a means to keep the work from addressing the viewer—to prevent the heightened sense of co-presence that Fried and others found in minimalist art. This was a key decision, and it reveals that Rainer was concerned about the political consequences of the spectatorial gaze in art well before that gaze became one of the central concerns of psychoanalytic feminist film theory.
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at 11:12 AM
Tran T. Kim-Trang - Occularis (1997)
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To make Ocularis, Kim-Trang publicized a 1-800 number for callers to express their private fears and fantasies about being watched. This video collects the recorded responses along with stories about video surveillance, including a teenage babysitter watching pornography, a racist elementary school bully and a church leader attempting rape. The broader political implications of public surveillance are examined. code: asiandiaspora as-am
This video highlights several narratives concerning video surveillance—not to reiterate the conventional privacy argument but rather to engage the desire to watch surveillance materials and society's insatiable voyeurism. A variety of subjects recount their interactions with surveillance—getting caught in the act of stealing or watching pornography, being discouraged from making an illegal ATM withdrawal—and question technological determinism, asking whether we choose to develop technology or technology shapes our choices.
SOUND + VISION:
Director Tran T. Kim-Trang Interviewed
After fourteen years, noted video artist and educator Tran T. Kim-Trang’s eight-part video opus, THE BLINDNESS SERIES, is now complete. The Series, starting with the visually arresting ALETHEIA (first shown at Visual Communications in 1992), explores the multiple layers and meanings of sight, blindness and its many metaphors. In an online interview with Visual Communications staffmember Abraham Ferrer, director Tran talk about the Blindness Series, its genesis and how it has impacted her creative process.
ABRAHAM FERRER: What inspired the Blindness Series?
TRAN T. KIM-TRANG: In 1990 Jacques Derrida helped to curate a show for the Louvre Museum titled Memoirs of the Blind. All the works in the show were pulled from their permanent collection and had something to do with tears, ruins and self-portraiture. I was taken with his ability to draw connections among disparate ideas and wanted to attempt something of the kind myself. Two other motivations were 1) a personal fear of vision loss and 2) the history of American Avant-garde cinema's fascination with vision.
You produced ALETHEIA, the first episode of the Blindness Series, back in 1992 while still a student at the California Institute of the Arts. At the time, did you envision ALETHEIA as part of a series from the outset, or did the idea of a multi-episode series spring from the thematic possibilities presented through the video?
Even before making ALETHEIA I had an eight-part series investigating blindness and its metaphors mapped out roughly by topics: the introduction, cosmetic surgery, sexuality, surveillance, hysterical blindness, language, actual blindness, and the epilogue. ALETHEIA then became a table of contents, I was keen on the idea of structuring the series like chapters in a book.
While ALETHEIA could be described as employing a "kitchen sink" approach to addressing pertinent topics through video art, subsequent episodes have become increasingly focused and, dare I say, less "experimental." Why is that? And do you agree with that observation?
I don't agree that subsequent episodes have been less experimental than ALETHEIA. I've always been fond of quotes--textual, verbal, visual--and quoting, and depended on them a great deal in ALETHEIA as well as KORE. I would say that with later episodes I've come increasingly into my own voice: words and images. I don't think it's easy to categorize any of the pieces in the series, with the exception of AMAUROSIS, as anything other than experimental. They're hybrids and include elements of narrative, documentary, porn, performance, essays, etc. They play and push the bounds of conventions. They challenge me as a maker and the audience. I never took more artistic risk than when I made EKLEIPSIS (a physical assault on some viewers) and have never reaped better rewards for it.
Yes, let's talk a bit about EKLEIPSIS. Your use of a diminishing strobe technique to mimic the effect of hysterical blindness was challenging, but by the end, I found that your manipulation of the imagery, especially as it serves the narrative, was quite ingenious, and thoroughly appropriate. Looking back, I feel your work on EKLEIPSIS may in fact have been an aesthetic breakthrough for you...
Yes, I agree. But I really believed EKLEIPSIS would never see the light of day because no one would be able to watch it. So I was a nervous wreck after finishing it; speaking of, the day I finished the piece was also the day Pol Pot died. Imagine that. Coincidences like that kept popping up throughout the 14 years working on the series.
I found the penultimate episode of the series, AMAUROSIS (2002), somewhat of a departure in the series, first of all because it is a documentary, and as such it comes across as the most straightforward of all the episodes. Is this a break with the experimental form you established with the preceding episodes, or did the subject matter necessitate a different filmmaking approach?
The subject matter dictated a documentary approach where I could just let Dat [Nguyen, the subject of the video – Ed.] talk about himself and his experiences. Other than selecting the topics for the series in advance, I approach each tape completely wide open. After extended research and recording, the material I collected then dictated the form.
The final episode of the series, EPILOGUE, in some ways evokes your first video SEQUITUR ALLIANCES (1991) in that you reference the cyclical nature of family and life, from your recollections of your grandmother, to the death of your mother and birth of your son. If I view SEQUITUR as a sort of prelude to the Blindness Series, then I see EPILOGUE as bringing things full-circle, as it were. Do you agree at all with that assessment?
I do, and that's an interesting connection that I hadn't seen before. It's not part of the series and it's not even the first video I ever made, but it came right before the series and it's funny how life has a way of completing some circles. A thought back to your question about experimentation, I consider both EPILOGUE and SEQUITUR equally experimental, the difference is that one is very abstract with hints of a narrative but resists it while the other is very clear, also with hints of narrative while resisting it.
Have you been able to step back and view all eight episodes? Have you come to any grand epiphanies around your growth as a filmmaker as a result of taking on and realizing this concept of sight/lessness?
I've not watched the entire series but even scanning them all while preparing the exhibition reels I can already see that some tapes show signs of aging, marked by the times in which they were created, while others are still very fresh. Why that happens is too much to go into, but I put the same amount of passion in all of them.
As for the epiphanies, you know, I put the very same question to myself in making the EPILOGUE, and I'm glad I abandoned it in the end. Halfway in the series, I thought everything I was trying to say was about distance and proximity, and it may very well be. I know that I've gained confidence and been humbled at the same time every time I made an experimental work. And it's been much more exhilarating to be curious, inquisitive, searching, and ever on the quest than having answers. That's what making experimental art has revealed to me.
I understand that you are now developing a new work, a longer-form piece this time. Can you talk about that a bit? Has the Blindness Series served as good preparation for realizing a feature-length film?
Absolutely. I can't tell you how profoundly the Blindness Series has taught me to craft the kind of feature-length narrative film I'm developing. Everyone can learn the conventions of narrative filmmaking. It's finding a voice and a vision that's challenging, and I think for the past 14 years I've been trying on voices and visions, taking risks, and having loads of fun doing it.
The feature narrative is titled CALL ME SUGAR. LOGLINE: A spirited Vietnamese war refugee with five kids in tow immigrates to an Iowa farm where she struggles to find her place in the world among farmers, trailer trash, and churchgoers. Even as this single mother ambitiously pursues the American Dream, she yearns to return to her country. When an insurgency group forms to reclaim Vietnam from the Communists, she gets deeply involved until it threatens her family and she must choose between the future of her children or the past of her dreams.
In addition to continuing a dual career as filmmaker and mother, you also teach art at the Clarement Colleges. From your vantage point, how are the next generation of visual and media artists?
I've been teaching at Scripps College since 1999. Before that I was adjunct at CalArts, UC Irvine, Otis College, and UC San Diego. These are all very different schools with different students and general outlook on media and artistic production. In my estimation, the next generation of visual and media artists have the means and tools to make what they want and they should take care not to be overwhelmed by technology, letting the tools dominate their ideas rather than serving them. I believe the best thing schools can offer artists is an incubator to develop concepts and ideas, and I hope more and more students take advantage of this over gaining skills. I'm continually amazed by the sophistication of students' visual vocabulary, and would encourage them to take more risks. Students have a tremendous urge and feel the pressure from our media culture at large to make conventional narrative and documentary works while the faculty for the most part encourages experimentation and hybrid forms in addition to the established ones. Animation is a burgeoning genre in both video and web works. I think the finest works to have come out of the programs at the Claremont Colleges in recent years have been performance video and political documentaries. And I think that we're in good shape.
And finally...where is the Blindness Series going after L.A.?
Holly Willis and I are currently co-editing a collection of essays, titled MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE: WRITINGS ON TRAN, T. KIM-TRANG'S BLINDNESS SERIES, with contributions from Laura Marks, Alex Juhasz, Jesse Lerner, Ming Ma, Tracy Maclean, Allan DeSouza, Lynne Sachs, Peter Feng, Michelle Dizon, David Lloyd, and M.A. Greenstein to mark the completion of this body of work. Plans to tour the series nationally and internationally are in the works, so stay tuned.
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at 10:48 AM
Joan Jonas - Vertical Roll (1972)
Vertical Roll is a seminal work. In a startling collusion of form and content, Jonas constructs a theater of female identity by deconstructing representations of the female body and the technology of video. Using an interrupted electronic signal -- or "vertical roll" -- as a dynamic formal device, she dislocates space, re-framing and fracturing the image. The relentless vertical roll, which repeats throughout the tape, disrupts the image by exposing the medium's materiality. Using her body as performance object and video as a theatrical construct, Jonas unveils a disjunctive self-portrait. As she performs in front of the camera -- masked, wearing a feathered headdress, or costumed as a belly-dancer -- her feet, torso, arms and legs appear as disembodied fragments. Subjected to the violence of the vertical roll and the scrutiny of the video mirror, these disjointed images of the body -- including a photographic representation of a female nude -- are even further abstracted and mediated. The incessantly jumping picture frame, with its repeating horizontal black bar, both confronts and distances the viewer, creating a tension between subjectivity and objectivity. The tape's staccato, insistent visual rhythm is heightened by the regular, sharp crack of a spoon hitting a surface, which resounds as if Jonas were smacking the video equipment itself. In the tape's final moments, Jonas confronts the viewer face-to-face in front of the aggressively rolling video screen, adding yet another spatial and metaphorical layer of fragmentation and self-reflection to this theatrical hall of mirrors.
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