Face Value.
Contemporary video works from Colombia.
Curated by José Roca.
Face Value brings together video works from nine Colombian artists in which the depiction of a frontal face is singled out as a unifying formal trope. As in Andy Warhol's Blow Job, these works present both an embedded visual discourse and one that exists outside the frame. I would contend that a reflection on identity is deployed through the interaction of these works, despite their distinct goals and agendas.
Read the full curatorial essay.
Untitled, by Juan Fernando Herrán
1993.
Duration: 5 min.
Juan Fernando Herrán rethinks the Landscape genre in this short video, in which visuality is replaced with actual experience of the place through the involvement of the body. The camera frames the face then focuses on the mouth, the locus for many biological processes -from the sexual to the scatological- and also the site for language. Sculptural processes transform raw matter into art through the involvement of mind and body. In Herrán’s personal ritual, nature goes through the body, as it were, in order to become sculptural form and thus a sign of culture.
View the video
Narcisos, by Oscar Muñoz
2001.
Duration: 3.20 min.
After preparing a silk-screen frame with his self-portrait, Muñoz delicately sifts graphite powder onto shallow containers filled with water so as to produce an image that floats on the surface in unstable equilibrium. As the water evaporates, the powder gradually settles and, responding to the changes in the environment becomes distorted. "Gone down the drain" is a common expression for what is irredeemably lost. This video takes the temporal component of his previous works a step further, as we are able to experience the disappearance of the image in real time.
View the video
Two Essays On Contempt, by Francois Bucher
2001.
Duration:
a.Trailer: 8.12 min.
b.Traveling: 6.39 min.
The first of the two short videos begins by positing up front its referent, Jean-Luc Godard’s 1964 masterpiece, Le Mepris (Contempt). Godard’s opening scene stages the dis-positive by filming himself filming the story: a film within a film, a movie about the making of a movie that is itself based on a book (The Odyssey). Bucher re-stages it once again, as the camera zooms out from the film clipping to reveal the monitor in which it is playing. One of the roles for images is establishing a site for memory to anchor itself. In his complex set of references, Bucher shows how our framing of events depends on the cultural conditions for their intelligibility.
Lover man (where can you be?), by Santiago Echeverry
2000.
Duration: 4 min.
Summertime, 1996.
View the Video
Duration: 1 min.
In Lover man (where can you be?), Echeverry appears simultaneously in everyday attire and as a drag queen singing Billie Holiday’s beautiful ballad -that has become a gay anthem in Bogotá. Echeverry’s work is highly autobiographical, and is the result of his involvement with gay culture in Bogotá, its relative invisibility and its (often auto-inflicted) ghettoized status. We meet in the same places; we eat in the same restaurants. And for the ones who have practically no family left in the country, this Ghetto becomes an extended family.
Dios no existe (God Does Not Exist), by Fernando Arias
2002.
Duration: 10 min.
God does not exist is a visual readymade picked up by Fernando Arias in the streets of Bogotá. It shows a close-up of a talking head dexterously conflating quasi-scientific interpretations of the Bible with sci-fi literature and a wide array of received ideas while carelessly incurring in evident contradictions as the discourse is deployed. What is compelling is the fervor with which this new account of the origins of life is narrated. The backdrop of Bogotá’s Planetarium and the sound of the urban chaos add to the effectiveness of the video in portraying a glimpse of contemporary urban life in Bogotá.
Untitled, by Lucas Ospina
2002.
Duration: 20 sec (loop).
Lucas Ospina’s delicate drawings and watercolors explore the ideological implications in common expressions and everyday forms of spoken language. In his latest series Hair, the artist makes cartoonish drawings in which bodily hair links the characters to each other, thus establishing relations of subordination -with obvious sexual undertones: a goatee becomes someone else’s pubic hair, a long mane ends up being someone else’s armpit. When the characters are identified as critic, artist, gallerist, curator and so on, the implications are obvious (and often hilarious).
Pleasure Politics: Dido, by Carlos Salazar
2002.
Duration: 4.38 min.
Carlos Salazar is a painter that for more than two decades has developed a very peculiar iconography in which eternally pubescent girl-women (which vaguely recall Balthusean models) are portrayed in decadent settings with a dense, hermetic set of references to popular music, history of art, and the artist’s personal tastes. The shift to video was a logical move for a gaze that so openly declared its desire. In Dido, the situation is inversed: all we can see is the face. Structured like a romantic Lied and set to Stockhausen, Salazar’s short video explores the layers of mediation that separate pornography from what is not considered as such. The issue of exploitation is also a blurry one: Salazar is projecting his desiring gaze on his subjects, but it is always her who commands her pleasure.
View the video
Eruptions, by Sandra Bermudez
2002.
Duration: 10 min (excerpt).
Sandra Bermudez Eruptions, an hour-long video that shows the face of the artist watching porn movies, highlights that pornography is ontologically anti-climactic, since unlike eroticism, where satisfaction of desire is always deferred- it continuously fulfils any desire that might arise. Functioning in a similar way as Warhol’s Blow Job, the viewer in Bermudez’s video understands from early on what to expect from the video and consequently concentrates in what can be seen: the artist’s face. But, unlike Warhol’s film, there is no final outcome, no expected end, and no climax.
Video-Veronica (from the Iconomía series),
by José Alejandro Restrepo
2000.
Loop. Iconomía shows the ambiguity of that status, always oscillating between iconophilia and iconoclasm, fascination with the image and the constant threat of its suppression. In the biblical iconography of Verónica, a woman holds the piece of cloth where the indexical trace of the face of Christ was impregnated. As a result on Colombia’s internal war, a conflict that has spanned for more than forty years, thousands of people have been kidnapped or disappeared. It is common to see in the news the relatives of the missing persons, usually mothers or wives, holding the images of their dear ones in front of them or wearing t-shirts with their photograph. As in many other works, Restrepo uses myth not as a theme but as a device for effectively addressing the current state of things.
@ MOCA at California Plaza
Nov. 10, 11am -5pm,
|
