Mental Radio

Tate Modern, London, August 2008.

Comparative studies provide an interesting way to understand cultural objects (in a pinch, social ones as well). These studies allow one to perceive the networks that cultural objects are bound within. Obviously, an idea of networks of cultural objects evokes Marx’s social relations and other ideas about the relationship between productive entities, but what also seems to be evoked is a notion of the book of nature as a text to be read (a notion that Foucault identifies with the middle ages and the early Renaissance). In this reading of the world, each cultural object fills a position in relation to other objects in a tangle of meaning that creates a intellectual network as revelation. You know that you’re on target with your reading because the world revealed this particular meaning to you at that particular moment.

At the Tate Modern last summer, there was a video installation that featured Polish video artist Pawel Kwiek’s Video A (1974). In the tape he explores the formal properties of television production at the time.  The video features Kwiek calling camera shots and transitions from the studio floor as an unseen collaborator in the control room executes each of the commands on cue. The wipes, dissolves, zooms and such transform the image in ways that are at once illusionistic (at first the eye is confused, what is happening to the image?), but also each transformation calls into question reality of the camera image (predicated as 1970′s video was on a blurry, skewed image). Kwiek’s video links to the Western European and American structural film (Snow, Frampton, and others) in that the material character of the video medium organizes the content of the mediamaking in question. I found Video A fascinating to watch (and ponder).

I stood in the semi-darkened screening area for several runs of the tape while other Tate visitors flitted past, stopping a second to watch the video, then moving on to the large scale abstractions in the next gallery. This is not to highlight some superiority in my attention span or artistic sophistication, but simply to call attention to the demands that Kwiek’s work imposes on the viewer. My own interest in his work most likely stems from a restless curiosity of mind on my part – attention deficit, perhaps – or at least a nostalgic longing for video work that exhibits an aesthetic of extreme procedural constraints similar to the work that I consumed in great quantities while attending the Center for Experiemental and Interdisciplinary Arts (CEIA – R.I.P.) at San Francisco State University back in the mid-1980s.

Regardless of my own taste for this type of work, the video does seem more like an essay, or thought experiment in Michel Montaigne’s terms, than it does any other form of media (definitely not entertainment oriented forms of media). The intent of the work seems to be the main obstacle to a conventional viewing approach associate with what narrowly defines intentionality in media production. As we know as a rule of thumb, a movie must have characters, plot, identification, etc. Kwiek’s work reminds us that this scene of reception needs to re-addressed now that the notion of the “shock of the new” has become rather old. I never really understood experimental work, the kind of interest to my colleagues and I at CEIA, as shocking (though we were introduced to modern art through a reading of Robert Hughes’ text),  it simply suggested alternative ways to viewing and variant scenes for engagement with media. As a viewer of experimental media you did have to meet the work at least halfway, but such rewards that followed even from mediocre work! Seems that we’ve all gotten lazy of late (or smug).