Since Walter Benjamin promoted its ‘emancipatory potential’ in 1935, film and video have increasingly become the thinking man’s medium when it comes to contemporary art. Of course it has its technical difficulties, like how to deal with the audience missing the beginning or walking out half way through a painstakingly structured piece. Artist Steve McQueen notably caused a stir at last summer’s Venice Biennale by restricting viewing of his film Gardini to timed slots, but what unfurled was an arrestingly atmospheric, lyrical film, well worth the wait.
Conversely, Andy Warhol’s long still films include Empire, an epic eight-hour study of the Empire State Building, designed so that you could chat, cough or even look away and the slowing moving images would still be there.
It wasn’t really until the late 1960s that artists began manipulating film as an artistic medium in its own right. Since then it has evolved harnessing new technologies and producing its own very unique visual language. Arguably there is an element of mysticism surrounding this genre of art, in that little is known of the workings behind the camera. The viewer is forced to almost work ‘backwards’ from the moving images presented in order to interpret the intent behind video art films. The use of video is a way of both turning the focus onto the behavioural patterns and the cognitive psychology of the viewer. Video art pioneer Peter Campus once said: ‘The screen is like a sedative, it quietens the eye and brainwaves down’.
There is a plethora of places to seek out video art. One is the current show at Raven Row gallery, Against What? Against Whom?, which presents the works by Harun Farocki ranging from as far back as 1995 to 2009’s Immersion, a video piece that uses a dual screen projection to address the treatment of soldiers traumatized by their experiences in Iraq. He has produced films about everything from the prison system in America to the production of bricks, and his work maintains a high level of critical engagement as well as a clear sensitivity to the medium he so adeptly manipulates.
