LANDSEASKY: revisiting spatiality in video art
Jan Dibbets’ ‘Perspective Corrections’ dating from 1968 transformed the way we think about photography as an art medium. His calculative and conceptual approach was also realized in film to articulate his particular aesthetic canon that is analytic, disciplined and reductive. He produced many short films in the ‘Horizon’ series from 1970 and 1971 and continued his investigations with further work in his 2007 photographic series ‘Land And Sea Horizons’. As a starting point, these works use a very common understanding of landscape – a straight line across a page to signify the change of land to sky or sea to sky – and go on to transform this representation into an extended investigation of spatial effects and perspectives. It is from this premise, an investigation into commonality and simplicity of the horizon motif, that is the launch point of the ‘LANDSEASKY’ exhibition. Artists have made some stunning video works that use the horizon line in sublime ways. The limitation of the image (the spatial representation) restricts the visual elements to reveal the artists’ approach. The foundational curatorial concern looks toward the artists’ analysis of screen space as an image with both sculptural and conceptual attributes. The curatorial project challenges the illusionist elements that we readily consume in screen culture and sharpens our focus on the medium of video by the selection, inevitably comparing and contrasting the strategies each artist articulates within the restriction of the curatorial boundaries. The works selected so far, have a very strong physical and visual impact. However, the exhibition extends the investigation of video space to include other subtle approaches that will add and amplify the discussion of spatiality in video. For instance, some of the proposed works update the connection between history and society with a fresh perspective. Peter Weibel succinctly summarises the approach to avant-garde Media Art of the 1960's and 1970's as antiillusion and goes on to describe the allusion and illusionary tendencies of art making in the eighties that influenced video art production of the 1990's and onwards (Synthetic Times, 2008 pp.112-116). Weibel’s finding resonates with American spatial philosopher Edward Soja who coined the term Thirdspace, he regards : “Everything, including spatial knowledge, is condensed in communicable representations and representations of the real world to the point that the representations substitute for the real world itself.” (Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, 1996 p.63) In order to move away from the illusionistic nature of the visual representation that both Weibel and Soja raise, the revisitation of spatiality in art making proposes a rational incision point that would re-establish the relevance between representation and the reality. The curatorial approach is to bring to the foreground evidence of artists working with an analysis of screen space that demonstrates a variety of understandings of spatiality through the form of video art. In the wake of Postmodernism, by focusing on the notion of spatiality, this exhibition project aims to re-evaluate the relationship between the dichotomies such as virtual and actual, subject and object, abstract and real, and to a broader context, the modernity and post modernity.
Media Art Asia Pacific
AUSTRALIA-KOREA F O U N D A T I O N 20th A N N I V E R S A R Y 2 0 1 2
This project is supported by the Australia Council for the Arts; the Australia Korea Foundation, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; and the Queensland Government through Arts Queensland, part of the Department of Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts.
MAAP partners with Artsonje Center; Gallery IHN; ONE AND J Gallery; OPSIS Art; Lee Hwaik Gallery; and Gallery Scape.