Exquisite mannerism ... Yang Fudong's Liu Lan. Courtesy Shanghart Gallery
A very brief history of
time
There are some very good
artists in Tate Modern's new film and video show. Shame we don't get to see more
of them, writes Adrian Searle
Thursday October 7, 2004
The Guardian
|
Exquisite mannerism ... Yang Fudong's Liu Lan. Courtesy Shanghart Gallery |
Tate Modern's exhibition Time Zones is long overdue, the first survey of time in recent film and video that the Tate has ever mounted. One could quibble and say that the subject applies to almost anything, and complain too that not all the work is terribly recent, or entirely unfamiliar, though only one work has, to my knowledge, been shown before in London. It is thoughtfully presented, however - a juxtaposition of very different styles and sensibilities.
With engagingly rough-textured directness, Turkish artist Fikret Atay encouraged a pair of bored teenagers in his hometown of Batman, Turkey, to improvise a Kurdish song and dance in the town's grubby ATM booth. There's a subtext: Kurdish music was banned for a long time in Turkey, and the presence of the cash machine is at odds with the down-at-heel, probably cardless kids, for whom the booth is as much as anything a place to get out of the wind.
How different in style this is to the exquisite mannerism of Shanghai-based Yang Fudong's Liu Lan. In this pale, watery black and white film, a young man in a white suit meets - or perhaps fantasises about meeting - a traditionally dressed country girl who lives beside a reed-fringed lake. The dreamy nostalgia of the film is heightened by the sadness and sentimentality of the music, the stylised acting, and the woodblock-cut credits at the end, as though the film comes from another time.
Time in Yang's work feels elastic, cyclical rather than linear - just as it is in Serbian artist Bojan Sarcevic's circular walk through Bangkok. It's a purposeful yet absurdly pointless stride that brooks no interference, and engages no interest from the slower-paced street-sellers and hawkers of the city. I expect him to come a cropper like Monsieur Hulot. He doesn't.
We could do with a few sofas, rather than the dodgy ergonomics of Tate Modern's benches. When Al˙s's Zocalo, May 20, 1999 was last seen in London in a Lisson Gallery show, you could stretch out as the shadow of the enormous flagpole in the centre of the Zocalo made its 12-hour, sun-dial sweep of the square. People line up to stand in the shadow, huddling together at the flagpole's base at midday.
Constant vigilance and rapt attention aren't what works like Al˙s's or Staehle's are really asking for. They are opportunities for a different kind of immersion, another register of perception. It is not so much a case of watching them closely as of their slowly unrolling or endlessly looped presentness.
I could also keep watching Fiona Tan's camera all day, as it inquires, insinuates, probes and glides over the make-up and kimonos, the faces and jewellery and hairdos of the Toyisha archery festival in Japan, where young girls perform a highly stylised archery contest as a rite of passage into adulthood. Saint Sebastian appears an almost entirely celebratory work, apart from the title, and filled with visual texture and pleasure and tiny human incident. Nowadays, this is a rare thing, and I have to say I loved it in a way I doubt Tan intended.
Jeroen de Rijke and Willem de Rooij's 10-minute view of a Jakarta cemetery, one of two films the pair have made in the city, also has an intent more subtle than it appears. Their work is characterised by space and atmosphere as much as it is preoccupied by the passing of time. Strollers and mourners drift between the graves. The towers of the city crowd the horizon, like different kinds of tombs. It is as though we were hovering slightly above it all, with a highly focused, elevated view. Like God, perhaps. The work of these two artists from the Netherlands is painterly and rich; I kept thinking of Courbet. There is always some indefinable pathos in their calculated witnessing of the passing world.
We are also witnesses to the tedious and inane machismo of Israeli car-hounds in their all-terrain gas-guzzlers, as they rev and shunt and stall their cars around the impossible gradients of the tyre-wrecked sand dunes outside Tel Aviv, in Yael Bartana's Kings of the Hill. I guess this is meant as metaphor for the Israeli male mindset, and of a state ranting and miring itself in sand. It works well enough, but I feel the work isn't altogether apposite here.
With rather more ingenuity, Anri Sala's 2002 double projection, Blindfold, shows a pair of new, naked billboards in Albania. Their blank, canted metal surfaces catch and reflect the low sunlight, which blasts the static camera like a blinding death ray, bleaching out the sky and surrounding buildings in blisters of light. As the sun moves, the buildings and passersby emerge from a strangely day-for-night, light-shocked gloom. This film almost takes us back to the strategies of 1970s structuralist film-making, yet its matter-of-fact materialism is another metaphor for the fitful emergence of global capitalism in Albania. This isn't Sala's best work, by any means, and though I like the work in Time Zones a lot, I keep thinking this isn't quite the video and film show we need right now. What is needed is more depth, with more than one or two works by each artist. More time, in other words, more space, more sofas.
· Time Zones: Recent Film and Video is at Tate Modern, London SE1, until January 2. Details: 020-7887 8008
Oct. 18 issue - Forget images of scantily clad MTV babes or zealous art students producing grainy films with handheld cameras. A new exhibit at London's Tate Modern—its first to be devoted to video—lays to rest the debate over whether video is truly art. "Time Zones" (through Jan. 5, 2005) features works by 10 international artists, ranging from Fikret Atay's witty "Rebels of the Dance" (2002), set in the far east of Turkey, to Yang Fudong's more cinematic "Liu Lan" (2003) which shows a young man arriving at a lake to meet a woman on a boat. The highlight of the exhibit, it blends exquisite artistry with video's realistic edge.
Indeed, the Tate exhibit shows that video artists are increasingly focused on what's most essential to their art: its ability to capture events in real time. And this has helped them secure a niche in the art world. "Video has moved back to a form of art-making that reveals itself gradually," says curator Gregor Muir. Film has long been regarded as more artistic for its ability to portray light, color and shadow with greater nuance and intensity. But by exploiting its association with newsgathering, video art helps us to digest what we see. "Moving- image work has been gaining increasing prominence," says Irit Rogoff, professor of visual culture at London's Goldsmiths College. "While we are bombarded with images [in everyday life] we are given little insight into how to think about them." New, more widely-available technology means more video is being created than ever. And prices for such works have increased dramatically, in tandem with demand from private collectors and museums.
At first glance, many of the works included in "Time Zones" appear to draw on traditional art forms. Wolfgang Staehle's "Comburg," for instance, a live Webcam picture of an 11th-century monastery in rural Germany, is reminiscent of landscape photography. Fiona Tan's vibrant, colorful "Saint Sebastian" looks like a traditional ethnographic documentary. Portraying Kyoto's annual Toshiya festival—a coming-of-age ritual in which young girls shoot arrows at a target—Tan lingers over their elaborate hair decorations and costumes. The delicate landscape of Fudong's gorgeous "Liu Lan" echoes ancient Chinese scroll paintings and his haunting, cinematic work harks back to early Chinese film.
But gradually, these works come to life, subverting their immediate impressions. Depending on the time of day, and over the course of the exhibit, the landscape in Staehle's work will change, as autumn turns into winter. In Fudong's work, the young woman in traditional Chinese dress, sewing by the lake, could come from any era. But the suitor who arrives to meet her in a Western-style white suit highlights the cultural confusion of a country in the throes of social and economic upheaval. Atay created his disarmingly simple "Rebels of the Dance 2002" when he chanced upon two Kurdish boys messing around in a grubby CashPoint lobby. Under his intelligent gaze, their lively banter and curious glances at the cash machine—representing an economy they are unable to participate in—underscore how the discovery of oil in eastern Turkey, and the influx of big business that followed, has disrupted life there.
Other video artists play cleverly with the natural passage of time. It's hard to tell at first what Anri Sala's harsh, bright work depicts. As the angle of the sun shifts, a giant but barren billboard is slowly revealed, and the surroundings—a vacant plot of land, a rundown building—come into focus. Sala has captured an impoverished, Third World city—perhaps Tirana, in his native Albania—on the brink of change, the empty billboard anticipating the imminent transition to capitalism. The natural ending of a day lays bare a way of life that is about to vanish. These works—some beautiful, all provocative—are a reminder of just how eloquent images can be.
