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Update to my previous post on the "A.B.C." video night at Deitch: It seemed strangely contradictory that Carly Ptak contributed the evening's most holistic performance (as a camcorder pans across images of the Great Outdoors, her voice hypnotically intones such Baba Ram Dassian commands as "look at the water, it's flowing neither forward nor backward, be a leaf in the water, just be here...") while at the same time, as a Duchampian found video finder, she offered the most out-of-synch-with-nature entry in the video program: a tape called Memorial Day 2000, which originally turned up in a West Michigan yard sale. The latter piece, shot by an anonymous camera holder, records a weekend of drinking, dancing, barbecuing, and bonfire-burning at a campground near the Michigan sandhills, attended solely by 20 and 30-something Midwesterners (no kids or anyone over 40) with the world's largest collection of RVs, ATVs, dirt bikes, and beer bongs. Kind of like an outdoor rave without a DJ, the event features vehicles chewing up the countryside, men wrestling in mud, a guy vomiting, and at the climax, a couch hurled onto the bonfire. To sensitive East Coast intellectual types, many of whom fled this kind of milieu, I'm guessing, the tape was a glimpse into the 9th circle of hell.
But maybe Ptak's two contributions aren't so far apart, on second thought. The TM piece isn't "nature" but electronically mediated nature, somewhat reminiscent of a soothing self help tape you could order online to get your fried head together. The electronic drones underlying the words were vaguely sinister and hardly "natural," in the sense of wind and babbling brooks (Ptak is one-half of the demonic noise act Nautical Almanac, after all). And as barbaric and eco-unfriendly as the Memorial Day revellers were, "at least they weren't at home clicking through the channels all weekend," as Ptak pointed out to me later. Their activities were a frenetic but ultimately non-violent coming together in search of...some kind of meaning? An attempt to reclaim lost communal rituals? And who's really in a position to judge them? When all was said and done, both performances reduced nature, or "natural experience," to phosphor dots on a screen, watched passively by a room full of people in their own search for collective meaning/entertainment/enlightenment.
Pictures from "A.B.C.", a.k.a. Another Bad Creation, a group night of video and performance curated by Cory Arcangel, at Deitch Projects, NY (last night, November 19, 2003). Featuring works created and/or found by Cory and Jamie Arcangel, BEIGE, Paper Rad, Seth Price, CELLmedia, Carly Ptak, LoVid and the shinths tour.
From the press release: "Taking its title from the early 90's teen pop band produced by Michael Bivins (of Biv10 entertainment), this night explores a style of video and performance best described as 'post cable access.' [V]ideo and live performance mash together in an almost imperceptible mix of quick cuts and poorly tracked VHS footage. Think accidental high-school videos, Salvation Army found tapes, awesome karaoke, anything originally recorded on a BETA tape, broken Nintendo games, blue screen ring tone hip-hop videos, and dance videos made with tin foil and spray paint. Th[e] night explores the side of homemade single channel video which is cheap, quick, and often embarrassing. Colliding to provide us with a clear picture of the ill fated 'home video revolution,' the foundations of A.B.C. are the celebration of the camcorder, the banality of everyday life, and a complete disregard for the medium."
Top to bottom: Carly Ptak, live video/sound/performance (a kind of transcendental meditation incantation with a spooky electro-bass pulse and the artist's face superimposed over leaves, rocks, river, and sky--rather disconcerting after a night of High Irony); LoVid, live video/sound/performance (playing their new video synth--sorry I didn't get more imagery in the shot); "Shinth," DIY performance with handmade electronic instrument built by Peter B. The Shinth tour was in the basement of Deitch's Wooster Street space; the video program ran upstairs for a continuous 90 minutes of big-screen projection. The flow of recorded videos and "pay no attention to those performers behind the curtain" live video was fairly seamless: I didn't realize till afterward that the Paper Rad performance (psychedelic nonZense literally phoned in through a stuffed talking bear telephone) was done live.
A couple more pics are here (click on thumbnails for enlarged view). More on Carly Ptak here.