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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Busan Bienniale



I finally made it to the Busan Bienniale a couple weekends ago. It leaned fairly heavily towards video and installation art. I have this minor grudge against video art, as so much of it totally disregards the way people receive art in a gallery. Let's face it, even if you're a top-notch artist, it will be difficult to make someone stay in the same place in a gallery for very long. I think video artists should keep this in mind, and compose accordingly so people can get the "gist" of your video from any 2 or so minute fragment. Mind you, this only applies to video art displayed at large exhibitions like bienniales.

Regardless, there was a couple good video installations. This was one of them. On the one side, an outside corner that made the projection surface look like a glowing cube, various deserted architecturally inflected images dissolved in and out. As you walked around the cube, however, the inside corner on the other side revealed that it was not a cube at all, but merely two fairly flat surfaces intersecting on a perpindicular plane.

The inside plane depicted an avalanche in slow motion, engulfing everything in its path, including a road, miniturized by the scale of the mountains and the avalanche, and eventually engulfing the whole screen. The way this piece conveyed the awesome natural power (that can be both beautiful and destructive) as the architecturality of the box was absolutely brilliant. The domestic sublime, you might call it.

My other favourite work was a sound installation which I will explain more in a subsequent blog.

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