The exhibition "Paradoks", looking at the first thirty years of video art in Norway, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art on February 14. I am represented in the show with I.O.D., from 1984, a work that keeps getting revived. Made at around the same time as Scratch Video was impacting on the video art scene in London, it is composed from fragments of media and advertising imagery, mixed in layers and manipulated to boost the colour and the synthetic qualities of the electronic image. The video was based on an earlier work entitled "That Elusive Quality of Romance" that took the form og collages, 35mm slides used in performances and installations in the early eighties, a series of colour xerox prints (the forerunner of digital photography) and finally a video installation that was exhibited in the storefront of a JVC video shop in Piccadilly, London. I.O.D. has also been broadcast in a series of tv programmes looking at the growth of video art in the mid-eighties.
Paradoks includes a bi-lingual catalogue in which I have written an essay on the relationship between television and video in the history of video art. The catalogue is available from the National Museum bookshop.
Installation shot below. Photo courtesy of Bull.Miletic.
I:O:D: (1984) exhibited as intended on a CRT monitor |
The Dark, The Light, together with pieces by Marielle Neudecker, Trondheim Kunstuseum. Photo Patrik Entian |