Up through Thursday, the
end-of-the-year exhibit features a number of engaging short video
Who expects to find an art video that is fun to
watch, provocative, stylish and actually leaves you wishing it were
longer? In an academic context?
There is such a thing. It is called "Some Notes on
Ruins," and it is in the end-of-the-year exhibit by the Media
Culture faculty of the College of Staten Island.
Probably, this 19-minute disc by Sherry Millner and
Ernie Larson owes something to the recent "Mummy" commercial film
extravaganzas. But its far more direct sources are the old Boris
Karloff classics. Still, the videomakers aren't doing a camp
tribute, or rather, it isn't their principal goal.
DIVERSE CONNECTIONS
Instead, they're using deftly reanimated snippets of
these grand old relics in order to make elegantly arch connections
between film, preservation, memory, history and archeology.
One tie-in observes that like mummification, "cinema
preserves the body's appearance . . . defending us against the
passage of time."
Similar ruminations are intercut with deathless vignettes from the
old reels, as in the Karloff mummy's resurrection ("He feels the
congealed life awakening in his petrified body!") or the discovery
of the tomb of Tutankhamun: "Your place in archeology is assured!"
Engaging digressions (the best is about the brisk
trade in pulverized mummies as medicine) in "Some Notes on Ruins"
suggest that not only can art videos can be fun, but even that
cinema theory and celluloid semiotics need not paralyze unwitting
bystanders.
'LIGHTPLAY'
"Lightplay," a glamorously platinum-toned video shot
in the jogging lanes of Central Park by Dave Gearey, has an
out-of-sync, toned-down soundtrack. The video is concerned with
pattern, shadow and light. Jogging may lack allure, but "Lightplay"
makes it look like heaven.
Gearey's also represented by five exceptionally
well-done Cibachrome photographs of ordinary objects, like a Cyclone
fence.
Elsewhere on the walls, visitors will find Jason
Simon's large framed C-print composites , all titled "Ebay," of
auction items presented without caption or comment as if their
significance and value were equally distributed throughout and
self-evident.
Simon's other contribution, a 10-minute video called
"August September" contrasts oddly threatening material shot at a
rural carnival in August, 2001, with World Trade Center footage a
month later.
For the digitally interactive, Valerie Tevere has
made "A Preliminary Guide to Public and Private Space in Amsterdam,"
a survey she characterizes as a "psycho-geographic work."
The exhibit is open by appointment through next
Thursday in the college gallery, located in the Center for the Arts
on the Willowbrook campus at 2800 Victory Blvd.
Call for hours 718-982-2366.
