Stop-Start-Stop-Start-Stop-Start
By Crichton Atkinson
When does the beginning actually begin? Before the beginning began it had already begun as a series of causes, like video our comprehension is serial, we create narrative arrangements while defining things by their restriction. In spite of the infinite amount of occurrences that lead to the creation of the time based works in Apparition or Illumination: Video Art from the Underground, we all agree that each piece is delivered within a decisive start and conclusion. In the middle of the videos structure, amongst certain subtle beginnings, messages are revealed through the changing light dancing across a generic plain. Again and again these works start and stop their magic for different sets of perceiving eyes. Every time the art is exhibited to someone new the process of its logic starts again. Video is a phoenix, the light whirs or buzzes and darkness fades the room to reveal the apparition of an intuition, the ghost of a thought making its half-form physical in the shared realty. These visions of the past reignite a space, playing out in the mind of the viewer, an illumination gives meaning to some previously undisturbed thought.
The artists collected in Apparition or Illumination: Video Art from the Underground are at the beginning of their careers but are way past their start as artists. Their origin most likely arose in some confident moment of youth where they excelled childishly at a serious action perceived as adorable, dominating the attention of the anxious watchers relieved that anyone had demanded focus in the room. In some privately understood hour of childhood there was a beginning that for some strange reason didn’t stop. Against logic, physical struggle, and the humiliation of self-awareness inherent in creating work, the artist continued. In spite of the devaluation of making a product without a practical function that switches the economy of exchange from money to ideas, these zany profits have, for some incredibly odd reason, endured to show their art in a room to an audience.
The artist is no scientist, the data accumulated is unable to manipulate any practical materials. Artists are reduced to shamanism or academia, an aesthetic ordering of nauseas. The only material the artist can manipulate is cultural subjectivity, reviving the viewer, breaking them of their habits, the dull sag of repetitions luring cycle. These mavericks, speaking when not spoken to, provide a profound transformation through the illogical, which we need in this well ordered advent of mechanical communication, where media overload camouflages rationality with hype. In the downpour of communication the question on everyone’s electronic lips seem to be about time and how we don’t got it. The real artist arrests. The real artist stops you dead in your tracks and wakes you up from the schlepping egoism of our whirling New York City to remember that there are basic transitory aspects of being alive that cannot be ignored. Self preservation has switched from a pastoral patience to the production value of editing, negation, and selectivity. The ‘no’ takes over the ‘yes’, sorry Yoko, as the iPhone is raised to a bathroom mirror and an unconscious form assumes a sexually accepted pose- click. Video art allows a commentary, it provides a rapid stillness to prove that this age of decadence, this golden era of information, this new wave of globalization will be interpreted and digested, we don’t always have to take it as a hollow fast slap.
Please turn off your cell phones at this time.
It takes an extra step these days to push out the clamor, the interruptions, to accredit what is in the room with the energy of attention. We say so often these days without always saying important things. With façades provocation it is the duty of the underground to probe topics of depth or truth in search for the grandeur of reality. Each of these artists have accumulated knowledge and wisdom in the course of their lives, all this time creating and still- just beginning. Proudly we wallow in our humble virginity, screaming the naivety of process without the slick presentation of commercial success, I include myself as an artist in this, always attempting to speak and then speak better, always. Refinement is a certain form of death. There can never be enough forums where independent voices can speak for the sake of an ideas necessity rather than as a career step in the seemingly never ending crawl to getting paid, or being famous, or, sigh, even noticed. If this is all about a hierarchy of display than capitalism has vampired the sanctity of art into a certain silence. I am not sure where the line in the sand is drawn between outsider and insider artists, are these Bushwick wack-jobs where it is at? Sure, why not? It starts with a community that takes artwork seriously, that shouts, moves, watches, understanding that the underground’s raw voice can only exist if it is sanctified and supported underground. The sprawling, caustic edges of this scene that has trouble defining itself is not only a scrappy, feral reality, but a vivid force. The underground has the power to say what no one else can, when you belong to no one you don’t have to watch out for anyone- so, just a warning, watch out.
Pause. Begin again.
What does it mean to begin again? To be able to repeat, endlessly, to keep saying, in spite of context, the same actions, colors, possibly words, creating the dreams of yesterday again, and again, and again, and… endlessly. The button. The button chooses for us when we start or stop. The watcher has to revive the idea, breathe life into its silent absence via the machine before the regeneration of time based thoughts can begin again. The audience selects if the artist will or will not be immortal. Life everlasting in the access, property, and value of the ideas. Like Egypt’s Valley of the Kings- the Pharaohs, long dead with their forms crumpled in elaborate tombs- live on in culture, in the mind of the living. We revive the artist with curiosity, by the mystery of symbols, hieroglyphs are the same as the spatially-pictorial language of contemporary art. The artist is conjured back to life by anyone moved enough to become inspired and perceive something new.
Nietzche said ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’. We are all aware that the mind is accurate only to its own knowledge. To what degree are these relics of past thoughts worth the time it takes for us to watch them? If they are successful in changing what we think, we too get to begin again, prescribing our life-force to their eulogy. The process of the beginning doesn’t stop. So long as there are people willing to listen, to watch, to observe. To care about what the artists have to say, blind profits that they are clamoring in the dark, redistributing the hierarchy of logic, refracting light, the metaphor of knowledge, by redistributing power via the power of awareness. A clear independent voice reminds us all that the only reality we ever know is captured in real time, manufactured behind the lids.
By Crichton Atkinson
When does the beginning actually begin? Before the beginning began it had already begun as a series of causes, like video our comprehension is serial, we create narrative arrangements while defining things by their restriction. In spite of the infinite amount of occurrences that lead to the creation of the time based works in Apparition or Illumination: Video Art from the Underground, we all agree that each piece is delivered within a decisive start and conclusion. In the middle of the videos structure, amongst certain subtle beginnings, messages are revealed through the changing light dancing across a generic plain. Again and again these works start and stop their magic for different sets of perceiving eyes. Every time the art is exhibited to someone new the process of its logic starts again. Video is a phoenix, the light whirs or buzzes and darkness fades the room to reveal the apparition of an intuition, the ghost of a thought making its half-form physical in the shared realty. These visions of the past reignite a space, playing out in the mind of the viewer, an illumination gives meaning to some previously undisturbed thought.
The artists collected in Apparition or Illumination: Video Art from the Underground are at the beginning of their careers but are way past their start as artists. Their origin most likely arose in some confident moment of youth where they excelled childishly at a serious action perceived as adorable, dominating the attention of the anxious watchers relieved that anyone had demanded focus in the room. In some privately understood hour of childhood there was a beginning that for some strange reason didn’t stop. Against logic, physical struggle, and the humiliation of self-awareness inherent in creating work, the artist continued. In spite of the devaluation of making a product without a practical function that switches the economy of exchange from money to ideas, these zany profits have, for some incredibly odd reason, endured to show their art in a room to an audience.
The artist is no scientist, the data accumulated is unable to manipulate any practical materials. Artists are reduced to shamanism or academia, an aesthetic ordering of nauseas. The only material the artist can manipulate is cultural subjectivity, reviving the viewer, breaking them of their habits, the dull sag of repetitions luring cycle. These mavericks, speaking when not spoken to, provide a profound transformation through the illogical, which we need in this well ordered advent of mechanical communication, where media overload camouflages rationality with hype. In the downpour of communication the question on everyone’s electronic lips seem to be about time and how we don’t got it. The real artist arrests. The real artist stops you dead in your tracks and wakes you up from the schlepping egoism of our whirling New York City to remember that there are basic transitory aspects of being alive that cannot be ignored. Self preservation has switched from a pastoral patience to the production value of editing, negation, and selectivity. The ‘no’ takes over the ‘yes’, sorry Yoko, as the iPhone is raised to a bathroom mirror and an unconscious form assumes a sexually accepted pose- click. Video art allows a commentary, it provides a rapid stillness to prove that this age of decadence, this golden era of information, this new wave of globalization will be interpreted and digested, we don’t always have to take it as a hollow fast slap.
Please turn off your cell phones at this time.
It takes an extra step these days to push out the clamor, the interruptions, to accredit what is in the room with the energy of attention. We say so often these days without always saying important things. With façades provocation it is the duty of the underground to probe topics of depth or truth in search for the grandeur of reality. Each of these artists have accumulated knowledge and wisdom in the course of their lives, all this time creating and still- just beginning. Proudly we wallow in our humble virginity, screaming the naivety of process without the slick presentation of commercial success, I include myself as an artist in this, always attempting to speak and then speak better, always. Refinement is a certain form of death. There can never be enough forums where independent voices can speak for the sake of an ideas necessity rather than as a career step in the seemingly never ending crawl to getting paid, or being famous, or, sigh, even noticed. If this is all about a hierarchy of display than capitalism has vampired the sanctity of art into a certain silence. I am not sure where the line in the sand is drawn between outsider and insider artists, are these Bushwick wack-jobs where it is at? Sure, why not? It starts with a community that takes artwork seriously, that shouts, moves, watches, understanding that the underground’s raw voice can only exist if it is sanctified and supported underground. The sprawling, caustic edges of this scene that has trouble defining itself is not only a scrappy, feral reality, but a vivid force. The underground has the power to say what no one else can, when you belong to no one you don’t have to watch out for anyone- so, just a warning, watch out.
Pause. Begin again.
What does it mean to begin again? To be able to repeat, endlessly, to keep saying, in spite of context, the same actions, colors, possibly words, creating the dreams of yesterday again, and again, and again, and… endlessly. The button. The button chooses for us when we start or stop. The watcher has to revive the idea, breathe life into its silent absence via the machine before the regeneration of time based thoughts can begin again. The audience selects if the artist will or will not be immortal. Life everlasting in the access, property, and value of the ideas. Like Egypt’s Valley of the Kings- the Pharaohs, long dead with their forms crumpled in elaborate tombs- live on in culture, in the mind of the living. We revive the artist with curiosity, by the mystery of symbols, hieroglyphs are the same as the spatially-pictorial language of contemporary art. The artist is conjured back to life by anyone moved enough to become inspired and perceive something new.
Nietzche said ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’. We are all aware that the mind is accurate only to its own knowledge. To what degree are these relics of past thoughts worth the time it takes for us to watch them? If they are successful in changing what we think, we too get to begin again, prescribing our life-force to their eulogy. The process of the beginning doesn’t stop. So long as there are people willing to listen, to watch, to observe. To care about what the artists have to say, blind profits that they are clamoring in the dark, redistributing the hierarchy of logic, refracting light, the metaphor of knowledge, by redistributing power via the power of awareness. A clear independent voice reminds us all that the only reality we ever know is captured in real time, manufactured behind the lids.
