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.”

Eva Koch

Eva Koch's installation 'Up' is a loop that shows people coming up out of a subterranean shaft. As a projection it has a diameter of 60cm.
Projected onto the street where many people will pass by during the course of the day, it provides moments of surprise; a little intervention that some will pass by not noticing and some will pause for a moment wondering what is going on.
The idea behind Koch's installation is that urban space is itself full of images and information that it may be difficult for art to find a place to demand to be seen and reflected on. Art in a public space requires special ethic to take into account the question of how art may address a public that has not in fact asked to be addressed. With her discreet intervention Koch opens up possibilities for us to reflect on all the we do not see and all that lies outside our field of vision.
Koch's work reminds me of an artist called Julian Beever who draws large scale illusions onto pavements to try and again, involve the public into his art. His pieces are anamorphic illusions drawn with a special distortion in order to create an impression of 3 dimensions when viewed from one specific viewpoint.

Hysteria

The face of the woman in “Hysteria” displays extreme emotion. There are no sounds, so the viewer cannot be sure whether the subject is moved by joy or despair or perhaps both. Taylor-Wood explained she wanted to amalgamate these two opposed emotional states and blur the difference between them to such a degree that they would become the same thing. The emotional turmoil of the actress is meant to infect the implied spectator who is unable to distance themsleves from the unnerving expression of an intense emotional outburst because it defies labelling, thus launching us into confusion.
I like Taylor-Woods intentions here, and in a world dominated by the spoken language, we can actually read more from a person by their body language and facial expressions. The fact that this piece has a great ambiguity to it also makes it more intruiging to watch and figure out our own conclusions from it.

Deadpan

1996 was the first year that a video artist, Douglas Gordon, won the Turner Prize. One of his best known works, Deadpan is a restaging of a Buster Keaton stunt in which a house collapses around McQueen who is left unscathed because he is where there is a window.

The use of extreme and unexpected camera angles is a trademark of McQueen's films. The idea of putting the camera in an unfamiliar position is simply to do with film language . Cinema is a narrative form and by putting the camera at a different angle, we are questioning that narrative as well as the way we are looking at things. It is also a very physical piece which makes you aware of your own presence in comparison to the legs on the video.

24 Hour Psycho

The exhibition is a video of a 24 Hour run of Psycho; a slowed-down version of Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film so it lasted a full day.
Gordon represents a different take on this classic horror and he has introduced many of the important themes in his work: recognition and repetition, time and memory, complicity and duplicity, authorship and authenticity, darkness and light.
In his own words Gordon states:
"24 Hour Psycho, as I see it, is not simply a work of appropriation. It is more like an act of affiliation... it wasn't a straightforward case of abduction. The original work is a masterpiece in its own right, and I've always loved to watch it. ... I wanted to maintain the authorship of Hitchcock so that when an audience would see my 24 Hour Psycho they would think much more about Hitchcock and much less, or not at all, about me..."

I haven't seen this video myself so i can't really pass judgement on it, but one reviewer who has seen 24 hour Psycho states:
"I have seen Psycho several times and I thought I'd instantaneously know where I was narratively but, as it turns out, film projected at 2 frames per second is quite a different experience. I was lost. I don't know how long it took me to realize that I had just missed the shower scene but I had. When I realized I'd missed the scene I felt a wave of disappointment. But what happened next was surprising to me.

Before I knew it I was in the headspace of Norman Bates himself, feeling my own wave of nausea and guilt (just as Norman does staring at what "Mother" has done), realizing that I had walked into this exhibit and even vaguely planned the time of my arrival to see the murder. Time is a funny thing. At two frames per second I was mesmerized staring at Norman Bates who was a) moving very very slowly b) feeling guilty very very slowly c) turning off the motel lights very very slowly and d) cleaning up the bathroom very very slowly while Janet Leigh's arm hung limply and tellingly in frame. While all of this was happening very very slowly it turns out the time was flying by. Before I knew it 45 minutes had passed.
I highly recommend this exhibit. I'll be back to spend more time with the rest of it, and I'll try not to let Norma's psychosis suck me back in for another hour so that I can give the other Gordon pieces their due"