Video art’s place in the post-Covid-19 art landscape
“Video artists are among the most prepared for the Coronavirus moment,” Barbara London, the former MoMA video art curator, tells The Guardian newspaper. Video artists’ knack for working with minuscule budgets, limited technology and self-publishing platforms and social media has meant that they are able to adapt to the new normal of the contemporary artistic landscape more easily, and much more quickly than artists working in other mediums. “Coronavirus,” London adds, “has made it the most essential and accessible art form.”
Lisbon-based video artists and sculptors, Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Pavia have worked together for close to 20 years to make what they call works of poetic, philosophical fiction: 16mm short films. Represented in The Nicole Brachetti Peretti Collection via their sculptural work, their short films are equally as mesmerising, featuring amateur actors, low-tech effects and dreamlike subject matter. Gusmao and Pavia’s work within this canon has been exhibited widely internationally and has participated in numerous biennales, including the 53rd an 55th Venice Biennale representing Portugal’s national pavilion in 2009.
The artistic duo’s films are characterised by short narratives that, at first sight, seem illogical. Nevertheless, far from being mere images of absurd events, these works, in fact, represent a bold engagement with major philosophical concepts such as subjectivity, free will and the very nature of existence. The nature of their work is particularly poignant to the viewer of 2020, as we are all called into a state of introspection as we interpret the world around us.
In a review of Gusmão and Paiva's Papagaio at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Vicente Todoli, the gallery’s Artistic Director, argues that the video footage in the exhibition is at once philosophical and paradoxical, calling on the metaphysical world of Alfred Jarry and the surrealism of Georges Méliès. The ethereality and humour of these films tap into a timeless and universal concept of absurdity: An everpresent, if underlying, phenomenon of the human condition, especially as the world succumbs to the uncertainty of recent events.
Of course, Papagaio was designed to be shown within a gallery space. The soundless films allowed the persistent rolling and ticking of the 16mm film projectors to fill the exhibition space, creating a multi-sensory experience, a concept perhaps alien to the art critic of 2020. However, the works have a shelf-life beyond the Pirelli HangarBicocca, and exist online for all to enjoy. Steven Cairns, the Institute of Contemporary Art’s curator of film and moving image, believes that the way we view and experience video art post-Covid-19 could shift, making online videos not only more attractive but more accessible for artists working in this medium. “The dream used to be that your work was shown inside a gallery,” he told The Guardian, adding, “I think people’s appetites for video art will dramatically change after this and they’re not going to shift back.”