http://www.ivanargote.com/
a whole selection of videos of little actions. In this video he walks onto a bus and begins to talk about the driver and all the passengers as if he was making a home video at a family gathering.
(Source: alasalas)
Got to see one of my favourite pieces of video art last week, as it’s currently on display at the whitechapel gallery, until June 17th.
“presented as unified and specific time spans which can be re-enacted, and on which it is possible to inlay other elements and transmit a different rhythm (fast forward), just like the videos which they often end up becoming. For it would seem quite normal, today, that a piece, an action or a performance should end up becoming documentation on videotape.”
“Video…works like evidence. In art it signifies and demonstrates reality, …a practice at times too dispersed and all over the place to be directly grasped.”
(Bourriaud 1998 Relational Aesthetics p.76)
Making Peace with Camberwell - Stills from the Video Documentation
Statement of Intention: I will make peace with the area by leaving an offering in one of it’s shrines. I will do this by lighting a candle in a phone box. I will have cleaned the phone box of any rubbish and clutter that would be distracting from the action of making peace.
Created: 18:30-18:35 10/2/12
“The reigning economic system is founded on isolation; at the same time it is a circular process designed to produce isolation. Isolation underpins technology, and technology isolates in its turn; all goods proposed by the spectacular system as it strives to reinforce the isolation of “the lonely crows.” The spectacle is continually rediscovering its own basic assumption – and each time in a more concrete manner.”
Guy Debord, 1967, The Society of the Specacle, p.22
Time: 10 mins
Statement of Intention: I will leave an envelope containing 60p in a phone box in Camberwell, and on the envelope I will write “Call someone you like, who you don’t show how much you like them, and try and say: I like you. You have 30 mins to slip it in. As a gift from me to you.”
Created: 12:05-12:15 7/2/12
Time: 5 mins
Statement of Intention: I will leave an offering to Camberwell for 5 mins today. It will be a pot of pink pansies, left on the pavement at a busy spot in Camberwell.
Created: 13:40-13:45 3/2/12
Notes from Action: During the 5 minutes, the pot was moved to a more sensible position on the pavement among the street furniture and people, so that no one tripped on it.
“I was no longer working with metaphorical repetitions of situations; I was working with the real situation itself.”
(Meireles, C. 1999 in Insetions into Ideological Circuits, 1970-75)
Arun -tea with milk and 2 sugars
Time: 30 mins
Statement of Intention: I will offer to buy a hot drink for a stranger who is standing around in the cold, and aim to buy at least one hot drink for someone within half an hour of leaving the school.
Created: 14:40-15:10 31/01/12
Notes from Action: Some people rejected the offer, Arun accepted. a tea with milk and 2 sugars. He knows some other people who would also like a hot drink, round the back of Subways.
“Made from flints found on beach and detritus found around the squat where I was living in ‘83. It reminds me that I can make art with hardly any money and on the kitchen table”
Grayson Perry, talking about Le Tour de Claire, from Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman 2011
Big Brothers System’s Always there with His Beady Eyes on You
Detail from Collection of Half a Dozen Eggs - Pen on Blown Egg Shell
