When people tell me they like going to art shows but draw the line at video art, I sympathize. Which is strange, when you think about it. But when you grasp certain peculiarities of the history of avant-garde art โ namely, that video art emerged as a medium in tandem with conceptual art, performance art and minimalism โ the penny drops: What hope, really, did it have?
The ordering conceit is that each clip in the hour montage contains a reference to the time of day that it is in real time, as you are watching.
Like cubism, it pushes what was once in the background into the foreground. But unlike cubism, that thing is not negative space or receding objects; it is another dimension โ time itself.
One effect of watching it there are many is to change your relationship to time. You sit back in comfortable chairs and watch the big screen in front of you. You walk into a darkened gallery with not one but nine large screens. Each one shows a musician in a different room of one large house. The musicians, linked by headphones, are all performing a song together. You can walk around from screen to screen the sound of the different performers gets louder as you approach the screen showing them or just sit on the floor in a position where you can take in multiple screens.
The song unfolds over just under an hour, after which, one by one, the musicians leave the rooms they are in and congregate around a piano downstairs. As they congregate, so does the audience around that screen. They then pour outside and walk together in the gloaming toward the Hudson River, singing all the while. One older woman started spontaneously dancing with her male partner. Others were in tears.
