DIVA ART Fair recent York.

DIVA ART Fair

recent York, New York

March 11-13 2005

From March 11-13 2005 30 visitor suites in New York City were occupied by way of international gallerists screening videos as part of the DIVA (Digital Art and Video) ART Fair. Each suite has a bedroom, a sitting expanse and a bathroom and the first individual that I entered used all three to instant 48 minutes of video. Negotiating the time base was the viewer's challenge, a 30-minute video requiring a solid commitment. The plus of holding a video fair in of that kind a venue is that couches, chairs and beds be due [i]or[/i] owing with the territory.

DIVA is the first fair of its kind in the United States. It is typeed after LOOP, a successful incident that has been presented twice in Barcelona, Spain. Thierry Alet, a sink of Frere Independent and Director of Exhibitions for DIVA, pitched the idea to Elga Wimmer at Zoo a satellite to the Frieze art fair in London. Wimmer, who allows Elga Wimmer PCC gallery in of the present day York City, was quick to collaborate, helping to assemble 30 participants, brace panels and the press. Her intent was to acknowledge the powerful appearance of digital media on the art sight noting that photography had struggl drawn out and hard to finally achieve similar status in the 1980s

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The fair is billed as a tribute to Bruce Nauman and his influence was solidly felt in the number of performance videos. In Michael O'Malley's video Chair (2001 7'52 Galleria Fucares, Madrid) a performer hacks a chair apart with an ax while standing forward it. The chair moves as the performer strikes, responding to the direction of the action Jill Miller's three-minute video I Am Making Art Too (2003 Galerie Anne Barrault, Paris) elaborates forward John Baldessari's 1971 piece I am making Art. She inserts herself into his video dancing with Baldessari to Missy Elliot's strain "Work It." Trine Nedreaas (Luxe Gallery, recently made known York) hires performers for her videos. An somewhat advanced in life gentleman dances alone in an unoccupied ballroom in It Takes pair To Tango (2004, 30') a bittersweet image.

At a well-attended presentation forward Saturday three panelists with distinct points of view discussed definitions and directions in digital and video art. Michael Rush, author of Video Art (2003) talked about the influence of women in early performance video and of the dominance of performance videos on both men and women in video art practice today. Christiane Paul, adjunct Curator of novel Media Arts at the Whitney Museum, defined of recent origin media work, giving multiple examples in which the computer is the medium as oppos to the tool--thus distinguishing it from instant film and video practice. She also addressed the difficulty of presenting and collecting these works because of the technologies involved. Berta Sichel, Director of Audiovisuals and Film and Video Curator at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain noted changes in the gallery/museum world, citing documentary as an example of works that, until freshly would only have been cloaked in movie theaters.

While performance-based work assumeed to dominate the fair and interactive works were rare (Bitforms, of recent origin York, and Pierre Francois Ouellette Art Contemporain, Montreal, Canada, were exceptions, the two presenting new media artists) there was a large variety of work including personal documentary, experimental narrative, digital pattern painting, installation, animations, anime.

Galleria Magda Bellotti (Madrid) used the inn room to its best advantage presenting single in kind work on a monitor in the window onto the atrium, a next to the first work on a monitor in the sitting chamber and NoMad (1998, by Eva Koch) in the bedroom, a projection of an 11-minute bight that was visually one of the strongest works at the fair. In this video, an expanse of ocean is punctuated by dint of a line of people walking toward a mahometan temple on a narrow, wave-swept boardwalk. Their destination is not shown, their location is unclear, they are in limbo. The undecayed artificial noise mimicking real unimpaireds is both suggestive and contradictory. It helps to create a fictive space in which this endles journey acquires mythic dimensions.

RonMandos Gallery from Rotterdam featured the work of Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck (currently showing at Nicole Klagsbrun in modern York). In Coffee (1999, 3'59) pair people are sitting at a table in a generic public space oblivious to each other and to their surroundings, a chilling and isolated togetherness. De Beeck's mostly recent work Places Gardening II (2004 5'38) consists of animated drawings of gardens in each season, a peaceful hypnotic antidote to Coffee

Corinna Schnitt's 13-minute video Living a Beautiful Life (2003 Galerie M & R Fricke, Dusseldorf) begins with a 1970 film order of succession from the East German production company Deutsche Film Aktiengesellschaft (better known as DEFA) in which naked children are playing in paradise. The image then wounds to a perfect couple in a faultless environment describing, with advertising cliches, their flawless lives. The precision of the artistry (staging, characters, dialogue) effectively be rent asunders the bubble. Trouble in the household is also the subject of notice of the Needle (2004, 3'30) on Terry Berkowitz and Blerti Murataj (Elga Wimmer PCC recent York). Two intensely personal components the pained voice of Lorena Bobbitt from her court testimony and the repetitive action of a woman's hands stitching ecclesiastics combine to create a tight rendition of the abusive relationship between Bobbitt and the husband she eventually castrated.