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BLACK BOX RECORDER
2001
Pure Synthetics. British Video Art at TV Gallery
Martha Nevezhina
Nezavisimaya Gazeta, September 26, 2000
VIDEO ART is a synthetic genre. At the peak of its bloom, in the early 90s, it was mixed up with all its kinsfolk, with cinema as the most important of them.
It is high time to take it as a special kind of practice. With the British it has been in the order of things for a long time. "Black Box Recorder" is the most proper name for this video art action. It refers to its origin – video art is neither cinema nor fine arts or life in the performance format. It is a synthetic squeezing of all of them, what has remained from these genres after they had mixed up, imposed on each other and had been used in general. What is important is mix, not the components.
There are two halls in TV Gallery. There is a TV set in one of them, and there are three more in the other one. Video image is being shown simultaneously on all of them: in detail, from beginning to end, recorded gesture. Video art makers often use in their actions ready-made images (to emphasize that very peculiarity: they say, we aren't filmmakers). The British did not consider it beneath their dignity to shoot the image by themselves. Actually, these video pictures can be watched separately. In any case, they have nothing to do with cinema.
If you walk from one hall to another and from one monitor to another one, you feel face to face with a "black box recorder" of someone else's life, i.e. pure synthetics, human memory madå in UK.
Black Box Recorder
Konstantin Agunovich
Afisha, September 3-16, 2001
Somewhere over there, in the hi-tech West video art has practically replaced the drawing, so nowadays the artist has to record the idea with the help of a video camera as freely as he used to do this with the help of a pencil. In Russia video art remains a deep dark secret and they use video not much, reluctantly and in a simple way.
"Black Box Recorder", a peculiar name of the exhibition of twelve British video artists of the 90s arranged by the British Council, refers to that very device used in aviation for recording each and all including foul language.
This art has got only one dimension – time. The time which exists on the screen, juxtaposed with the viewer's time who involuntarily gets involved in this experience, and as a result of the resonance of these two silently ticking clocks you begin feeling a lump in your throat, as it happens in Roderick Buchanan's "Godstopper" where a boy holds his breath just for fun while his parents' car enters the tunnel, with his cheeks puffed up, waiting and waiting – but there is still no light in the end of the tunnel… You have understood everything but you are staying there, waiting when the time determined by the author is up and there begins another time, the time of the other author, other situation, other yourself.
Black Box Recorder. TV Gallery
Afisha, September 3-16, 2001
Video art by various English artists (Roderick Buchanan, Adam Chodzko, Mark Dean, Sarah Dobai, Graham Fagen, Douglas Gordon, Graham Gussin, Rachel Lowe, Christina Mackie and others) is displayed.
Ordinary box-like black televisions are transformed into the "black box" of the artist, recording surrounding details regardless of their apparent significance, highlighting that even the most minor events are not entirely inconsequential.
The artists have taken the concept of the "black box recorder" used in aviation and applied it to contemporary art, creating a recording device full of information. Black Box Recorder challenges both the principles of television and cinematography, as well as the concept of narration, presenting it from different perspectives and in some cases even destroying it. The work also alludes to the basic principles of meditation using a flow of images.
The Old New Formats of Arts
Mikhail Bode
Russky Zhurnal (Russian Magazine, Internet issue english.russ.ru), September 11, 2001
The best exhibition project of September is "Black Box Recorder" at TV Gallery, Bolshaya Yakimanka, presenting British video art. Actually, video art has become pretty boring. It eats up your time making you bury yourself in the monitor, watching and watching. There are a great many monitors at every contemporary art biennial and festival. At TV Gallery there was no regret for wasting time. British video art is correct (sparing the viewers' time), provocative in a gentleman way and aesthetically exquisite. The two hands, a hairy one and smooth, squeezing one another for 10 minutes, the children holding their breath before entering the tunnel, still frames telling about the life of ordinary holiday-makers, all this draws your attention. As for myself, I've realized long ago that I don't care about anyone's tricks and adventures. Anyhow, you can't help feeling enchanted. Video has become an old format of contemporary art. The question is how you can fit in it.
Black Box Recorder Cubed
Ptuch, September, 2001
The eyelet of a video camera is constantly recording every moment of one’s life, all those small things, which as a rule are cut out from TV programs like trash stuff. Contemporary artists use these accidental materials analyzing mass media culture and creating their own moving images. They spy on these "black boxes" (TV-sets), which we have in our flats, collecting information in their own "black box" – video camera. You can see what is inside these "black boxes" at the exhibition of British video art, which will be brought to "TV Gallery" by the British Council, on September 6 - 30.
Black Box Recorder
L'Officiel, #30, September, 2001
British video art is advancing! A troop of some 15 London artists is landing on September 5 at Art Media Center "TV Gallery".
The exhibition "Black Box Recorder" organized by the British Council confirms that with regard to collecting information a video camera is similar to a notorious black box traveling with every plane or train: these two things are equally observant and omnivorous.
It is planned, that "Black Box Recorder" will be shown in one space along with the works by local artists. It means that a dialogue, we reckon on so much, will become possible. Then Nizhny Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Ekaterinburg and Novosibirsk will join in this dialogue after Moscow.
The site has been created with the assistance of the "Open Society Institute" (Soros Foundation). Russia
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