THE CONTEMPORARY MUSEUM
Works by Forcefield Collection (top) and Paper Rad (bottom) are on view at the Contemporary Museum's video gallery through the end of the month.
Cutting-edge
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Contemporary
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This isn't your father's video art.
The Contemporary Museum's adjunct curator, Ann Brandman, has chosen cutting-edge work by two of the country's most anarchic video collectives for a program at the Makiki Heights museum's video gallery.
"New Counter-Media-Culture Collectives" features the work of Forcefield, an artist collective from Providence, R.I., and the trio Paper Rad. The program's materials were provided by Electronic Arts Intermix out of New York City, one of the largest distributors of video art.
"My interest in showing it," Brandman said, "was based on wanting to see what younger artists are doing. For me, as an older curator and in tracing the history of video art, I see it circling around again. Back then, the equipment was so expensive. Now access is so much easier.
"Virtual reality makes it possible now, whether it be a collective of people who live in the same house, or international collectives. The interdisciplinary skills some of these members bring nowadays, whether it be in music or textiles, makes for interesting combinations."
The Forcefield video collection comprises three pieces from 1996 and 2000. With a sensibility that veers between seriousness and silliness, the group is concerned with technology's uses and abuses.
Throughout their work, they employ vintage analog signal processors and now-defunct electronics. This emphasis on obsolete formats and equipment, and poor signal resolution, stands in contrast to a new generation bombarded with continually evolving electronic gear.
The artists who make up the Forcefield collective created their first installation for the Whitney Museum of American Art's 2002 Biennial.
Nominally organized around the theme of cable television, Paper Rad's "PjVidz #1: Color Vision" is a psychedelic half-hour variety show in which snippets of off-air footage alternate with original animation and music. Music videos, cartoons, even "Gumby and Pokey," all make appearances in a video that celebrates consumer media culture as much as it critiques it.
"This program represents the new crop of activist groups," Brandman said. "The mixture of art forms, technology and medium makes them the 'it' artists."
The program runs through the end of the month during museum hours.
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