New Video, New Europe
Shannon Wright
Adrian Paci’s Albanian Stories would work equally well on film or witnessed in person: a charming three-year-old girl tells an improvised fairy tale. The story is a bit hard to follow, but when she starts referring to Italy–she and her father are refugees from Kosovo–and international forces, the threat to their safety emerges in a way that’s all the more affecting because she seems unaware of the extent to which her innocence has been compromised. An untitled video by Croatian Alen Floricic relies on its concept for impact. It shows the artist seated poker-faced next to a Christmas tree whose lights blink in sync with a dumb little melody, foregrounding the moronic aspects of mass culture even as the synchronization of lights and music is weirdly appealing.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
But no one is trying to fool anyone into thinking this is actually a film: the video projector is plainly visible in the gallery. Indeed, all the backgrounds are still photographs–any movement we see, such as a boat on the water, is the result of Hutchings’s computer animation of elements in the still. The only videotaped feature is the image of Hutchings. This piece evokes nostalgia on several levels–nostalgia for the age of the grand tour, for home movies, for the dying use of celluloid. (The projector sound is a sound track, and the filmic scratches and splotches were added digitally.) This “film” also appears to jump in the gate more than once, always in the same places on the video–it’s as if the ephemeral act of film projection had been made timeless, further heightening Hutchings’s conflation of nostalgia for celluloid and nostalgia for a time and place.
Wright was born in Baton Rouge in 1969 and lived in Chicago for a decade starting in 1992 (she has a 1994 MFA from the School of the Art Institute); she now lives in San Jose, California. Her mature work began with devices she made to be used in her performances; her first such piece was inspired by a 1920s Red Cross swimming manual: she hung herself in a harness and enacted different strokes. Soon she was making work influenced by Etienne-Jules Marey’s devices for measuring animal movement and Frank Gilbreth’s time-and-motion studies (he photographed the hand motions of production-line workers to improve their efficiency). Perfect Form and Lesson seem driven by the Gilbreth model, as humans are reduced to near automatons endlessly repeating tasks controlled by a machine. (Wright says she plans to build full-size mechanisms based on these videos.)
