Dur­ing the Venice Bien­ni­ale this sum­mer, the city has fallen in lust with video art. Whether you’re power-walking through the flick­er­ing endurance test that is the bien­nale or hunt­ing out the hid­den high­lights (Bill Viola), it is clear to all that video is the medium of the moment.
The pres­ence of V|07, the only art fair in the world ded­i­cated to video, is solid proof of the arts’ lat­est crush. Set in the idyl­lic loca­tion of San Ser­volo, a pic­turesque island in the heart of the Venet­ian lagoon, V|07 Venice Video Art Fair is a force to be reck­oned with, and its only in its sec­ond year. V|07 holds its own amid the pres­ence of many col­lat­eral events that serve to increase the fair’s cul­tural and expos­i­tive offer­ings.
Insert­ing itself in a wide range of projects that will ani­mate the island dur­ing the whole month of June, “Light On San Ser­volo” is a rich pro­gram of artis­tic events, pho­to­graphic exhi­bi­tions and instal­la­tions. They include “Shot and Go—International Pho­tog­ra­phy” and the Pavil­ion of Slove­nia.
Nes­tled inside the island’s cen­tral build­ing, V|07 aims to present the most dynamic inter­na­tional gal­leries involved in the dis­sem­i­na­tion of the lan­guage of video. Directed by Raf­faele Gavarro, V|07 selected gal­leries who rep­re­sent artists with an ardent focus on video and time-based media. Gal­leries ranged from Fabio Paris Art Gallery of Bres­cia (Italy), Douz & Mille Gallery of Bethesda (USA), Walsh Gallery of Chicago (USA), Gal­le­ria Enrico For­nello of Prato (Italy) and NT Art Gallery of Bologna (Italy).
The diverse Quang Art Gallery from Paris got the fair off to a good start with the work of Isabelle Grosse, Flavia Bigi and Stephanie Lem­pert. Isabelle Grosse stood out with her series “Streams,” a strip of short videos based around ideas of sur­veil­lance, rep­e­ti­tion and pub­lic ter­ri­to­ries. In the work, groups and gath­er­ings of peo­ple appear in a vari­ety of sit­u­a­tions, shot unaware, and from above. Human beings are ana­lyzed every­where from beaches and school­yards to demon­stra­tions and side­walks. Using dig­i­tal alter­ation in each scene, Grosse frames each per­son with thin lines, giv­ing each fig­ure back their indi­vid­u­al­ity.
The piece com­ments on the com­plex rela­tion­ship between inten­tional act­ing for the cam­era and our invol­un­tary relin­quish­ing of pri­vacy to the cam­eras of power sys­tems. From the ear­li­est days of video art in the mid-60s, artists engaged the ques­tion of when sur­veil­lance becomes per­for­mance and when per­for­mance becomes sur­veil­lance. Because of the cur­rent social and polit­i­cal cli­mate, the issue remains rel­e­vant. To observers of cul­tural phe­nom­ena, the dawn of the 21st cen­tury could be among the most cul­tur­ally con­fused and con­flicted eras to emerge in recent his­tory, con­sid­er­ing, on the one hand, society’s mass-fascination with real­ity TV pro­grams and web-cams, and on the other, its ever-present obses­sion with secu­rity, fuelled by global fears of ter­ror­ism.
As the doc­u­men­tary role (or capa­bil­ity) of video con­tin­ues at large to be debated, the rela­tion­ship between per­for­mance and the sub­lim­i­nal act con­tin­ues to evolve within art. Evi­dence of the new media’s abil­ity to broaden the hori­zon of these dis­cus­sions is appar­ent in the work of Isabelle Grosse, Luke Lam­born (at Galerie Mamia Bretesché) and Robyn Voshardt and Sven Humphrey, specif­i­cally with the work Para­meta­bolic.
The Amer­i­can gallery Bleu Acier pre­sented the work of artist duo Voshardt and Humphrey. They have cre­ated a body of deli­ciously sub­ver­sive work cen­tred on film, print and draw­ing explor­ing a broad range of issues from eco-psychology and power struc­tures to cul­tural bound­aries and iden­tity pol­i­tics.
Language—with its many intri­ca­cies and diversions—is an essen­tial part of their artis­tic prac­tices and inte­gral to a mea­sured inves­ti­ga­tion of their work. This can be seen pri­mar­ily in the work New and Improved. The film shows a fren­zied flash-card script of self-improvement and pos­i­tive think­ing like, “I can stop assum­ing the worst is bound to hap­pen.” The thoughts / actions / direc­tions flash by as if sub­lim­i­nal.
The video is a kind of visual play, car­ried out in sev­eral acts where there is nei­ther a cli­max nor a dra­matic denoue­ment, stop­ping the same way it starts: right in the mid­dle of a thought or feel­ing. The details and reflec­tions are touch­ing because they’re universal—as a viewer, one can iden­tify with many of them, giv­ing the work an instant and last­ing affect.
Voshardt and Humphrey’s com­mon ground is the for­ma­tion of visual arts and their devel­op­ment of open struc­tures, unique images and fresh ways of work­ing with the media. By recy­cling dif­fer­ent kinds of ide­olo­gies, imagery, soft­ware and mate­ri­als, Voshardt and Humphrey rethink con­tem­po­rary utopias with new tools for visual pro­duc­tion. The process results in every­thing from deep crit­i­cal reflec­tion to dark humour. This type of work comes at an inter­est­ing point in the his­tory of film. After fight­ing to be given cred­i­ble art-world sta­tus despite its mechan­i­cal nature, work of this kind is now being cel­e­brated for its evi­den­tiary role and the extent to which it ques­tions the sense of real­ity in con­structed rep­re­sen­ta­tions.
Else­where at the fair, the Fabio Paris Gallery of Italy show­cased the work of Gazira Babeli, Armida Gan­dini and Fed­erico Solmi. The gallery, open since 2000, has con­tin­ued its com­mit­ment to young and estab­lished artists within var­i­ous sit­u­a­tions. The Walsh Gallery from the United States played it fairly safe with some pass­able if not ardu­ous work from Hye­sung Park, Chang Jia and Miao Xiaochun. The gallery, which spe­cial­izes in Asian art, also appears to spe­cial­ize in the lat­est video art trend.
With a few excep­tions, V|07 high­lights an unfor­tu­nate incli­na­tion in video art that’s head­ing toward dig­i­tal white noise. When using tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate a piece of art, artists are now clas­si­fied in one of two camps: those mostly inter­ested in the newest tech­nol­ogy and those whose ref­er­ences stem from the visual arts. It is no secret that new media art is a loosely defined dis­ci­pline con­sist­ing of peo­ple com­ing from dif­fer­ent back­grounds with var­i­ous pref­er­en­tial degrees toward tech­nol­ogy fetishism. In the cur­rent video art world, more often than not you meet peo­ple whose favorite top­ics of dis­cus­sions are the lat­est hi-tech gad­gets rather than aes­thet­ics or phi­los­o­phy and who know more about the lat­est releases from play-station than the lat­est exhi­bi­tions at MoMA.
The visual fatigue that comes hand in hand with this pre­dis­po­si­tion was felt with Lydia Venieri from Galerie Quang, Paris. Her work was chaotic and obscure—not in the good way—making it easy for the viewer to lose their way as the piece became more of a pro­gram demon­stra­tion than a piece of art. I hoped for some point of ref­er­ence, but many of the other works sim­ply blended into one. Even now I strug­gle to remem­ber which video started and ended where.

Like it or hate it, this trend in video art is ubiq­ui­tous. In a strange way, that is what makes it impor­tant. As for its qual­ity, well con­tem­po­rary art is crit­i­cal in itself, so there­fore not afraid of crit­i­cism. Per­haps it even strives for it. After all, it seems the worst thing for art today is to go unnoticed.