Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House

Bill Viola's video installation...shows
A heavy wooden chair stands empty in front of a TV monitor. The monitor shows a man in close-up as he struggles to stay awake and alert. The room is silent. Headphones on the chair reveal his inner body sounds of breathing and swallowing, with multiple voices heard in the background engaged in stream-of-consciousness chatter. At random intervals, the man is struck violently from behind by an unseen figure, causing a loud explosion of sound to momentarily burst out from two loudspeakers in the room.


Bill Viola's video installation series "Buried Secrets" (1995) is so disturbing that its images and associations still float into its viewers consciousness the way the disturbing parts of dreams resurface unbidden, reminding one of anxieties, unresolved conflicts, deep fears. Viola's installations often deliberately blur the boundaries between self and other. This is most evident in "Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House" (1982), where the spectator seems to merge with Viola as he gazes from a monitor into the viewer's eyes, their separate identities disintegrating as the spectator experiences through amplified sounds the trauma of sudden blows to Viola's head. The installation creates the jarring disorientation of seemingly shared consciousness, and it also demonstrates the controlled rage that has been a root of Viola's art.

Clown Torture

Bruce Nauman's "Clown Torture" is a shattering spectacle of color, motion, and sound. Displayed at high volume, the audio level of the five simultaneously occurring videos is an assault on the senses. Heard long before it's viewed, one must bravely enter into an enclosed, darkened room in order to see where all the noise is coming from. Once inside, two pairs of stacked monitor and two wall projections come into view. Immediately one senses that something is awry, as only two of the four televisions are oriented right side up. With one monitor turned upside-down and the other placed on its side, the images become abstracted and disorienting. The videos playing on the monitors record clowns in unnerving or difficult situations. In one sequence, at an unseen antagonist. In another, a clown repeats the elliptical story "Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence. Pete fell off; who was left? Repeat. Pete and Repeat were sitting on a fence." Recited with a variety of expressions; happy, scared, mad, the clown can't help but hide a growing frustration at not being able to finish the story or have it make sense. Two videos show clowns trying balance objects - goldfish bowls and buckets of water - with little success. The final video resembles a scene from a closed-circuit security camera, only it's a disconcerting image of a clown using a public toilet.



Nauman's "Clown Torture" makes its artifice obvious, from the caked makeup of the clowns' faces to the many power cords that run across the ceiling, walls, and floor. With activity occurring from nearly every angle, the viewer - like the clown - is the subject of experimentation and interrogation. While it's easy to tell that these clowns are only acting-out traumas, it is nevertheless difficult to watch and purposefully so. "Clown Torture" makes the viewer question his or her own participation in the events on screen. Alluding to difficult subjects such as insanity, political torture, and surveillance, the work makes complex connections between theater, media, and apathy The makeup, hair, and costume of each clown act as a disguise for the actor or person underneath. Anonymous victims and inciters of brutality and pranks, these scared and scary clowns seem simultaneously real and unreal.

Angela Bulloch

Angela Bulloch’s work is concerned with issues of time and memory, making use of visual and technological elements including video games, film stills, musical theory…, in short all the shared codes of a generation, to analyze its systems of perception and its way of interrelating.

Since 2000 her work has focused on the use of Pixel Box - dmx modules, wooden ply boxes containing red, green and blue fluorescent tubes behind translucent glass fronts. The levels of brightness of each tube are controlled by a system Bulloch created in collaboration with Holger Friese, opening up the possibility of infinite combinations of colours which Angela Bulloch orders from figurative references. A film by Ang Lee, a work by André Cadere or a mathematical harmonic series are starting points for a whole series of variations of colors of these modules installed in the exhibition space. The actual structure of the modules brings to mind dance floors, public lighting and window displays: elements from popular culture encapsulating a reflection on the iconography of an era.

Speaking of her exhibition at Helga de Alvear, she explained “the show is titled The Missing 13th. The title refers to a harmonic beyond the twelve tone system. This harmonic tone exists but is not heard within the western musical tradition. On Tony Conrad's- Slapping Pythagoras record, Conrad attacks Pythagoras’ concepts of harmony as they exclude sounds discordant to our western ears’, like the 13th factor.

In the exhibition there are two different installation works, both works are formed with pixel elements. One work is a specific horizontal arrangement across the floor, which has a filmic basis to the program with an overlaid and conflicting animated layer. This piece was constructed as a whole and then split apart so that the elements combine together to form a different visual perspective to that in which they were made. A composite vertical image - spaced out horizontally.”