Touch, Rise, and Fall, 2008
Plywood dwelling, 2009Aernout Mik’s latest show at The Project is a continuation of this Dutch artist’s exploration of the spatio-temporal relationship between video and architecture, this time examining notions of authority and control within it. The show includes two recent projects, Touch, Rise, and Fall (2008), a two channel projection, and Plywood Dwelling (2009), created in collaboration with Dutch filmmaker and steadfast directorial assistant to many of Mik’s videos, Marjoleine Boonstra.
In Mik’s videos, something indecipherably strange – and always somewhat apocalyptic – is going on. They involve scenarios that are uncanny, playing on the familiar imagery of televised catastrophe and crisis in order to challenge viewers to re-consider their perception of spectacle and reality. The scenarios in his videos are often based on public events or activities that involve scores of people, and often examine patterns of social behavior.
Plywood Dwelling (2009) is an eight-channel installation that portrays a scene of control and chaos. Filmed in the sleeping quarters of a small Chinese factory, multiple cameras positioned like security cameras monitor the activities in the narrow hallways and tiny bedrooms. Constructed from unfinished plywood, and projected as vertical screens, the sleeping quarters seem maze-like, the people dwelling in them like lab specimens. The activities that take place here are bizarre and confusing, as the confined quarters – the architecture – seem to compel its inhabitants to do things like form tight lines while pushing on each other, and stand uselessly in doorways. In the gallery, the projections are in a grid on one wall in a large room, and the bench for sitting is off to the side, making the viewer’s position to the screens askance, as if peering in from behind the implied security window.
Touch, Rise, and Fall (2008), focuses on the social space of airports: lounges, terminals, employee offices, duty-free shops, and airport security areas. The people that occupy the space of the video engage in the mundane activities associated with airports – distraught and fatigued passengers wait in line, endure searches of oddly stuffed plastic bags of goods at security checkpoints, and wander around terminal shops filled with stuffed animals and boxes. The social space is fraught with tension as individuals seem dazed, sometimes behaving without recognition of others around time. At other times they interact but as if the other were alien, such as when one older woman waiting in line begins awkwardly stroking the long dredded hair of a young white woman. There is quiet desperation as what is institutionally a tightly controlled space of the airport is rendered chaotic and inexplicable. Mik’s airport is a surreal point of contact: a place where goods (capital) and individuals (culture) are in awkward transit across time and space in a kind of excess of control as the image from one projection moves disjointedly into the other and back again.
Mik’s work is a kind of video version of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson’s still photographs, and seems to rely on the same tropes over and over again. But compelling use of no sound, which creates a kind of vacuum of space and time, and his careful construction of space, both inside the video and outside the video challenges the viewer to consider her own position – to control, power, and representation.
In Mik’s videos, something indecipherably strange – and always somewhat apocalyptic – is going on. They involve scenarios that are uncanny, playing on the familiar imagery of televised catastrophe and crisis in order to challenge viewers to re-consider their perception of spectacle and reality. The scenarios in his videos are often based on public events or activities that involve scores of people, and often examine patterns of social behavior.
Plywood Dwelling (2009) is an eight-channel installation that portrays a scene of control and chaos. Filmed in the sleeping quarters of a small Chinese factory, multiple cameras positioned like security cameras monitor the activities in the narrow hallways and tiny bedrooms. Constructed from unfinished plywood, and projected as vertical screens, the sleeping quarters seem maze-like, the people dwelling in them like lab specimens. The activities that take place here are bizarre and confusing, as the confined quarters – the architecture – seem to compel its inhabitants to do things like form tight lines while pushing on each other, and stand uselessly in doorways. In the gallery, the projections are in a grid on one wall in a large room, and the bench for sitting is off to the side, making the viewer’s position to the screens askance, as if peering in from behind the implied security window.
Touch, Rise, and Fall (2008), focuses on the social space of airports: lounges, terminals, employee offices, duty-free shops, and airport security areas. The people that occupy the space of the video engage in the mundane activities associated with airports – distraught and fatigued passengers wait in line, endure searches of oddly stuffed plastic bags of goods at security checkpoints, and wander around terminal shops filled with stuffed animals and boxes. The social space is fraught with tension as individuals seem dazed, sometimes behaving without recognition of others around time. At other times they interact but as if the other were alien, such as when one older woman waiting in line begins awkwardly stroking the long dredded hair of a young white woman. There is quiet desperation as what is institutionally a tightly controlled space of the airport is rendered chaotic and inexplicable. Mik’s airport is a surreal point of contact: a place where goods (capital) and individuals (culture) are in awkward transit across time and space in a kind of excess of control as the image from one projection moves disjointedly into the other and back again.
Mik’s work is a kind of video version of Jeff Wall or Gregory Crewdson’s still photographs, and seems to rely on the same tropes over and over again. But compelling use of no sound, which creates a kind of vacuum of space and time, and his careful construction of space, both inside the video and outside the video challenges the viewer to consider her own position – to control, power, and representation.
http://www.artslant.com/ny/articles/show/7605
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