VIDEOFREEX: THE ART OF GUERRILLA TELEVISION @ SUNY New Paltz, February 7 — July 12, 2015

Took a bus trip up to SUNY, NP,  from downtown NYC with many of the original members of this 60’s video collective. The trip up to New Paltz was animated and festive as Skip Blumberg a former freex-er, strolled the aisle welcoming old friends from the collective along with younger fans.  Bus monitors were ablaze with freex videos, and on-board noise cheerful with  introductions, stories and general hob-nobbing. EAI Executive Director Lori Zippay was aboard as was former MoMa curator Barbara London. Greeting us upon arrival the Samuel Dorsky Museum, was Andrew Ingall, Curator, who welcokmed  the group with  a wonderful spread; the Prosecco was flowing. A large community and distance traveling fan base turned out for the opening, and I bumped into videographer Kathy High (Associate Professor of Video Art & New Media at Rensselaer Polytechnic) and Paper Tiger’s Dee Dee Hallek.  Made the acquaintance of renowned theatrical  lighting designer Beverly Emmons (!) and another freexer, Davidson Gigliotti.  The  Museum did a great job of showing the video in the context of ephemera from that time, from photos of Maple Tree Farm, to events posters and news-media clippings. I was most impressed by footage of a performance taken on Prince street (late 60’s early 70’s) of naked artists being soaked in pigs blood dropped from above.

Advertisement

Bushwick Neighbors: NurtureArt Fresh Window 56 Bogart Street June-July 2014

Adam Douglas Thompson @ NurtureART
In the current Videorover show at NurtureArt, Adam Douglas Thompson’s projected scrim of a white-cube gallery space is relentlessly reconstituted; its space regularly being re-made with invented digital ‘shows’. Each one of Thompson’s doll-house-like concoctions is convincingly placed within this circumscribed digital context; and within minutes and (often seconds) the scene is washed over for the flavor-of-the-moment art idea or series that comes next. There are groups of paintings, sculptural objects, and installations; each group a thoughtful show in itself, lightly referencing the ‘canon’ yet neatly – and perversely (through the wonders AfterEffects) swept away, and replaced with another visual idea. It’s both compelling and unsettling as the constant stream of change (like the seasons in a gallerist’s space) and the more ubiquitous media landscape, perpetually engages, confuses, and entertains in offering up the latest possibility.

Susanne Hofer/ Light Bulb Magic @ Fresh Window
In entering the Fresh Window Gallery of Susanne Hofer’s show, I see lit on the floor, of a darkened room, a pile of empty oddly arranged boxes, cartons, cleaning materials, and the flotsam of office and carpentry ‘stuff’. “Oh no.” I think; a Sarah Sze wannbe? I linger a bit longer looking down at the stuff and then -in hanging with the crowd who face an opposing wall- I notice that the stuff casts a shadow on a projected (video) scene which – it turns out- is a setting sun. This shadow of stuff, is resurrected as an invented cityscape casting a dark skyline against the fading day. Another deceptively simple piece is a peephole several inches wide in the wall. Looking through it you see a vast scene on a reduced scale of New York Harbor at work. The pleasure of these pieces is in the trick of expectation; being disappointed, then fooled and delighted in finding the sublime plumed from the commonplace and disposable of the everyday.