Dutch Art Institute

A Hole in the Brain
Studentseminar + Symposium
9 February 2006

Videos showed:

Michel Chevalier - Hand to Mouth (1999, 07'00", USA)
In the conceptual video self-portrait Hand to Mouth of the American artist Michel Chevalier, the artist is looking without interruption straight into the eyes of the viewer.
While speaking with faltering voice, his hand simultaneously writes words on paper with a blue marker. Most of the spoken and written sentences, are quotes from diverse sources, varying from Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man to John Russ’s Image Processing Handbook'.
After each laboriously spoken sentence, he lifts the paper from the table to show the viewer his writing. The written words appear to be fundamentally different from the spoken sentence. In his pronouncements he observes analytically what the world has to offer. It describes for example a new fast-food market, which is more mature than the Pizza, because it offers a wider range.
As the video continues, it becomes clear that the artist-writer has no faith in the meaning of life and, as a malicious oracle, he curses the world.
‘May all these expectations fade as vanity into unfulfilment and not be.’ The discrepancy between spoken and written word seems symbolic for the gap between everyday life and the oversensitive spirit, which collapses under life's pressing banality.
In order not to disintegrate, the last written quotation is appealing to both dimensions, to sense their common ground of the present. ‘Look to me faith, and look to my faith, God; for my two centres feel this period’.

Sami Kallinen - The Juggler (2003, 07'40", Finland)
The Juggler is dressed in a walkman, shorts and two different beach slippers (on the one it says 'easy', on the other 'busy').
Every day, for many years now, he has been standing under a canopy at the Nederlandse Bank building in Amsterdam. The number of balls and skittles he can keep in the air at the same time commands great respect and admiration. For hours at a time, his sinewy body is an unapproachable fortress of complete concentration.
Kallinen lets him speak. The man gazes into the distance, avoiding the camera, and pontificates in a throaty voice. The way we live is incomprehensible and suffocating, and our systems of moneymaking and business contacts are totally illogical. The world of the others has degenerated because no one can or will ask questions about it. But he did, and the answers taught him that, in order to survive, he had to stay completely out of things.
This is why he is now standing, as a living statue, on top of the vaults containing our national gold reserve. Not to beg us to reconsider, but simply, to juggle.
(Vinken & van Kampen)

Valérie Pavia - La Vie Heureuse (1998, 03'00", France)
The story that we tell others about ourselves, when asked question of 'who are you', is usually far from objective. It is biased by dreams and desires, by disappointment about things we have never reached, or by the picture that we want to paint for the other person. We embellish our story or play it down, we omit or add things, and in fact, we are playing a role: the leading part in an autobiography.
In the self-portrait La Vie Heureuse (the happy life), Valérie Pavia is playing with this theme. On camera, in answer to the imaginary question of what she has been doing, she sums up things she has not done. We see her face in close-up, she is wearing a blond wig, and we hear her speaking a monotonous voice-over. She utters dry observations, some of a practical nature, like 'I have never fixed a tap', and some filled with irony: 'I have never sung in Japanese', or 'I have never had a beard'. But most of the time, these statements are designed to create the impression that Pavia is leading a protected and boring life, for example, when she says that she has never been to New York, has never slept with a negro, and has never spent the night in an igloo. The list is embarrassing, but at the same time mysterious, because inevitably you begin to wonder what she has been doing.
The images in La Vie Heureuse are covered in a bluish glow, which is caused by the way in which they were recorded. Pavia shot them with a 'handicam', after which she played them on television in order to film them again, from the TV screen. This double recording procedure is significant for the way in which Pavia keeps the viewer at arm's length. Because although her work appears to be autobiographical, the viewer never really finds out anything about her. At some point we see images of a notebook in which all the statements she has been making were jotted down, but later crossed out with firm strokes. Could this mean that, by this time, she has worked her way through the list, and therefore, has actually done all these things? Then we hear her yawn, but is she yawning because she is bored with her dull existence, or because she is satisfied with the thought that she is fooling us?
Ultimately, only one thing becomes clear. The artist is playing a role in a story about a happy life, but the fact of the matter remains well concealed.

Gary Hill - Site Recite (a Prologue) (1989, 04'15", USA)
With startling precision, Site/Recite moves across and around a table-top graveyard -- bones, butterfly wings, egg shells, seed pods, crumpled notes, skulls -- in a series of seamless edits that present a continuous flow of detailed close-ups. This taxonomy of dispossession, 'little deaths that pile up,' is juxtaposed to a narration on the linkage between semantic self-consciousness and visual experience. Through the window of this text, the objects on the table come to model how consciousness affixes itself to material manifestations and how memory is constituted by the collection of empty vessels. Site/Recite is a prologue for Which Tree, an interactive videodisc installation that presents viewers with a maze of interconnected branch points, allowing them to wander through its forest of images and words to discover the 'texts' of their own thinking patterns.

Texts are from http://catalogue.montevideo.nl/