Double Lunar Trouble

Double Lunar Trouble
Whitechapel Gallery 22nd November 2005

works shown:
An Idea For a Universal Trajectory in the Manner of a Proposal for 12 German Popsongs (21 mins, 2004)
Paraculture/Future Garden Structure (13 mins, 2005)
by Hilary Koob-Sassen

Rigadoon (5 mins, 2005)
Down There (4 mins, 2005)
Version (5 mins, 2005)
Sun D-e-a-t-h (2 mins, 2004)
Carousel (2 mins, 2005)
by Ben Callaway

One of the problems of being immersed in the history of experimental film and video is that when one sees new works apparently revisiting certain earlier practices and processes one can’t help but making comparisons. This was the case this evening at this Whitechapel screening of two young video artists’ work. It was not helped by the introduction by the curator (Stuart Comer from Tate Modern) in which he talked about us entering a ‘post-Documenta’ stage of artists’ film and video, where people are eschewing the more austere ‘documentary’ straight-to-camera approach in favour of something more ‘materialistic’, engaging more with the technology of video, in a digital age. What he actually does seem to have done is to fall into the curator’s trap of assuming that we live through linear phases of practices rather than in a multi-level culture that supports a number of quite different co-existing and overlapping modes. So it is convenient for him to overlook, or even be ignorant of, say the digital abstract work that has centred around, but not exclusively to, Vienna over the past ten or so years, in which sumptuous abstraction explores the properties, mutability and possibilities of digital information in glitchy, scratchy, colourful works such as that of ReMi, or Billy Roisz, n:ja, etc. Of course it is in the interest of the tastemakers and gatekeepers of these large art institutions to want to simplify and flatten recent history and contemporary epochs into a linear progression. It makes things easy to deal with and to make important sounding pronouncements about and to cash in on modishness. But of course these people don’t live in the real world where things are messy, complicated and difficult.

‘Post-Documenta’ or not, Comer did make some interesting observations about the work, its engagement with excess, its Baroque qualities. And back to my problem of the anxiety of influence I couldn’t help thinking of Scratch Video, Jürgen Reble and even David Larcher’s video works. Why was this? Because these works by Ben Callaway and Hilary Koob-Sassen have in common a reworking of televisual material that accentuates the particular aesthetic qualities peculiar to the medium. Like in Larcher I saw extremes of excess in the very electronic qualities, like Reble a hallucinogenic quality in the temporal and textural manipulation of found material, and like scratch, images clearly sourced from broadcast video. In the Q&A after the screening passing mention was made of these or equally similar connections and neither of these two sweet young men knew what anyone was talking about. In spite of what some conservatives may think this doesn’t display a general ignorance, they were not lacking insight, they were extremely articulate and capable of situating their works in a cultural philosophical historical context, it’s just that that context didn’t happen to include the history of video art. And why on Earth should it?

For this is remarkable work indeed. Individual and distinctive, yet engaged with the specificities of immediate context and references. Hilary Koob-Sassen’s work is the more complex, and in many ways the more Baroque. It consists of material taken from current affairs, news, natural history and TV documentaries which is mixed in such a flowing multi layered collage it’s often hard to identify precise sources. What we do see is a complex process of association often overlaid with a kind of faux evangelical, post-post-Marxist, post-post-structuralist ostensible critique often sung to a semi hip-hop-esque cello accompaniment. Think Laurie Anderson on fast drugs jamming with an operatic Eminem and a string quartet. Then slowed down. Koob-Sassens doesn’t so much free-associate as collect and reshuffle with eight arms simultaneously. He used the phrase ‘syntax octopus’ which describes the process quite well. The whole thing is allegorical. He writes that he is “...interested to examine a phenomenon which manifests the law of ‘multiple instances’, in experimenting to name the trajectory of an individual culture, and also the aggregate of cultures”. So we see some images that are familiar from the war on television: Condy is there, so are the Twin Towers being pierced by planes, but these are along several shifting axes of images and affects, they can’t be pinned down to easy associations, and we see documentary images of organisms and submarine activity, biotechnology, globalisation, environmental footage in this co-existence of conflicting propaganda which forms a kind of biomorphic criticism. Comer in his introduction mentioned that in Slavoj Zizek’s eschatology most people find it easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. This is the sort of imaginative state that the complex systems of Koob-Sassen’s work inhabits and recreates.

Ben Callaway’s work, while sharing the source material of televisual media, is all the more amorphous and abstract and atmospheric in a resonant ambient way. But also toxic and occasionally scary. He will take a short fragment of a sequence, zoom right in and slow it right down. It becomes like a tenebrous Ketamine video waltz, ripe with video noise, the fracture lines of slowed digital video, hazy, distorted. Figure skaters in a narcotic choreographed crawl, a walker drags their feet, stupefied drops to their knees, a car crawls, menace generated by the languorous grimy obscenity of the video noise and the digital artefacted granular music which sounds like Bach slowed down to 10%, processed by Oval and remixed by Goodiepal.

So here was some new video art. It fits into some history and yet is clearly unaware of the history of the form. What would it be like if it had been burdened by the anxiety of influence? Perhaps if either of these artists knew about Scratch, or Larcher, or the analogue excesses of Cerith Wyn-Evans and John Maybury, they would have been less inclined to make videos the way they do. So their ignorance of the history of the form is our gain, for these are remarkable works that speak to a contemporary condition using the particular qualities of the media in a cognitively sophisticated, yet fluid and dare I say poetically affecting way.