What we are watching here is a video work from 2002 entitled The Swirl by Chinese artist Ma Yongfeng. This 15 minute video is one of Ma’s very first works at a point where he was displaying an interest in using what might be seen as futile behaviours, as a means of pricking the fabric of reality, and questioning it’s assumptions. Ma has more recently become known for his minimal interventions in daily life and socially aware services, but at the point at which this video was produced, these interests were still nascent.

Well, I can’t ignore the video anymore, and that of course is its problematic – this traumatic activity which is presented to us – these fish which are due for quite a ride, as we will see.

As the commentator for this work, and ostensibly representative of it and of the artist, the unfolding of the piece makes it tempting to expound my own strong opinions about the treatment of animals, which could come into conflict with my respect for the artist. But neither Ma, nor—I guess—you, as the audience, will thank me for making such apologies. What’s done is done, and we (the audience as well as the artist) must deal with the consequences.

I have known Ma and his work for a few years now, and the work I have seen produced by him and which I have written about over that period initially has seemed formally very different from this early piece.

Ma now works less with video and more with events and situations. He aims to formalise a set of projects, which seek to work directly with social reality. He is, for instance, undertaking an ongoing project called forget art, an adaptable undertaking that takes many forms, including exhibitions, art fairs, interventions, online social networks, etc. but aims to play with these institutions and find new ways to turn them to social use.

How then does one get from these fish to an interest in working with the forms of society?

Taking a step back, what is happening in this video? Six live golden Koi fish have been placed in a top-loading washing machine and the washing cycle is set off. As an aside, the top-loading style of washing machine is a very common element in Chinese apartments – perhaps because this top-loading aspect saves space over their front-loading brethren.

So the wash cycle starts innocuously enough with the bright metal drum filling with water, the water falling from all sides to douse the fish. Once filled, the drum begins to turn clockwise, then anticlockwise agitating the water and the fish in the process. This continues, back and forth, for about 10 minutes. The water then drains out of the drum, leaving the fish high and dry on the metal base of the machine. Followed by a fade to black.

But such a cold description of the facts of this video leaves out the affective aspect of the action, both on the fish in their tormenting and violent situation, and on the audience with their feelings when placed in front of such an act by the artist.

It is probably best if I say at this point, that the fish were relatively unharmed after their washing, living out the rest of their natural lives with a friend of the artist’s.

So what causes an artist to undertake such an action on these helpless animals? What does it mean?

Ma’s other works of video and photography at that time were concerned with the place of “nature” in our understanding of the world, and nature’s place and use value in our attempts to understand the world through our depictions of it. This would appear as Ma’s own creations or by his filming of natural history museum dioramas and reconstructions, sometimes with subtle interventions and changes by the artist, sometimes simply re-presenting the facts in front of us. Equally these constructions—with their original didactic purposes and the artists own twisting of them—serve to point up the arbitrary and fake nature of the presentation, a nature which often blatantly ignores the real needs of the animals and plants contained therein, giving the presentation for the audience priority over any welfare issues.

The Swirl presents a demonstration of a completely man-made, machine-like setting in which nature is placed to face its fate. The piece’s apparent simplicity leads to some broad claims about its significance. Is it possible to see The Swirl as a piece of social criticism, or a commentary on the artist’s existence, as critic Dorothée Brill has suggested? Are these claims a step too far?

Symbolic meaning is a well-developed part of culture. Especially in the visual arts, objects and scenes are interpreted based on their symbolic status, various objects have deep and significant meanings developed over the course of centuries, which the enlightened viewer can piece together as a further layer of meaning for the image.

So what can be said about these fish? Koi have value in Chinese tradition as symbols of abundance and prosperity. Traditional Chinese paintings will include Koi to represent these values within the overall symbolic schema they present. In neighbouring Japan, the meaning of Koi fish is slightly different, where they present an ideal of strength of purpose, and perseverance in adversity. A meaning that seems particularly appropriate to this artwork and a meaning the artist may well have been aware of when putting the fish into this predicament.

Does the washing machine have a symbolic meaning and value in itself, which when combined with the fish creates some new, composite symbolic value, designed to enlighten us as to the piece’s “higher” meaning? By placing them in a washing machine and subjecting the Koi to the swirling of the drum, what does that mean for this set of values?

The round opening of the washing machine could be said to have some formal connection with a common way of framing scenes with wall openings in Chinese gardens. These openings take various shapes, but are all designed to provide a viewpoint out into the landscape which presents the scene as an aid for contemplation. The video work titled Beijing Zoological Garden, produced by Ma a couple of years after The Swirl, makes reference to this technique as the artist wanders the animal houses of the eponymous Zoo presenting the animals and spectators therein through this idealising, round vignette.

So, is it fair to make comparisons between the roles of Koi or these framing methods in the Chinese view of landscape, with Ma’s work? How about out modern interpretations of animals and landscapes, which we present in our museums and in our imagery?

In his works Ma seems to be picking up on these traditional tropes of the role of these animals and settings, while putting them in new contexts to play with their ultimate meanings when they come into contact with their audiences, a context which also alters with time and knowledge.

However once stepping beyond the highly codified set of symbols which make up the various cultural systems, symbolic value becomes something of a futile task, as the values become arbitrary and open to re-interpretation at any point. Any value can be read into anything – with a bit of effort. Indeed, artists have a tendency to reinterpret symbols, and twist meanings to reveal hidden factors within their assumed status. Ma Yongfeng in particular playfully questions many of these assumptions in his work, playing off the symbols against each other to open up the possibility of new meanings to appear.

In his latest works, where Ma has taken on the social aspect of art as his tool, although his intentions are sincere in his attempts to engage and create an effect on society, I cannot help but notice that in every case the subjects are not dealt with as hard and fast rules, but with a canny sense of humour which lightens the tone and prevents them from becoming too sterile.

So Ma’s fish may or may not mean abundance, and the washing machine may or may not refer to traditional scenery; the action may mean many things which we can read into the video from our position of safety away from the actual creation of the work, a point from which we can make judgements about the responsibility of the artist that perpetrated such an act.

The relatively simple set up in this video allows one to look beyond the reality of the situation and try to piece together some kind of symbolic meaning behind it. But the piece never makes it too easy to remain focused on one or the other, the reality or the symbol. The Koi’s predicament is never far from our minds – nor should it be if we have any sense of empathy in us. But then neither should the reality that this is just a video of an incident which took place almost ten years ago, and which can now be looked at with some perspective and from many other points of view besides the shock value that the activity immediately proposed.

Inevitably Ma’s work reflects aspects of the artist’s experiences and is an expression of his thoughts and ideas about the world. But how far one should go to create a symbol out of this very real action seen in the video? Keeping these two readings in process is important I think. Certainly the fish are being tormented. But equally they come to represent something beyond themselves in the process. Being able to keep those two readings in view perhaps can prevent lapsing into an essentialist reading of the piece as either a brutal mistreatment of animals or an aesthetic display divorced from real-world travails.

The Swirl forces me to never to forget the reality of the fishes’ dilemma, but at the same time to hold that reality as one amongst a number of readings of the work, which makes the work important as going beyond itself, to take on a wider significance within the artist’s work and in society at large.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published November, 2011 in ASPECT Magazine.

Shan Studio, 3-2-302# Sweetness Home, No.29 Huayuan Hutong Dongxiang, Andingmennei, Dongcheng District, Beijing, China

It’s midnight, Beijing-time, and in the darkened living room of a small apartment near the city’s second ring road, two figures quietly attend to their bank of equipment. The performers, Taurin Barrera and gogoj, appear not entirely there, in a world of their own, working away in an environment with few sounds filling the room aside from the rustles of their movements. Projected on the wall beside them are gogoj’s wave form lightening strikes, reacting to some unheard input, building from simple shaped waves through to complex smears and many-dimensional structures as the feeds become ever more complex. The silence in the room contrasts starkly with the sounds and visuals each performer is producing within the walls of the equipment and immediately dispersed away online to a small audience which has gathered from around the world to experience False SIP, Shan Studio’s first Gigonline.

Sheng Jie, also known as gogoj, is a Chinese video and audio artist, who established Shan Studio in 2010 in an apartment amongst the hutongs in central Beijing. Sheng began Shan Studio as away to extend her own practice, as “like every artist there are times when you close the door and do your work, but at the same time I wanted to open the door to receive people.”

For such a small space, Shan Studio is adaptable to many purposes: as a residency space, it has living, working and sleeping areas; as a teaching workshop it provides facilities for creating and demonstrating audio and video production techniques; the living room can be repurposed for small performances, as well as used as a lecture space.

The various types of events produced and hosted here reflect Sheng’s set of interests in working with sound and visuals. Her background was originally in music, her father being a famous concert violinist, but Sheng was also drawn to the visual arts with a focus on video. Her work and her aims for the Studio cross these two areas: “those two parts are a very important part of my background: that I could study music and then drawing – the sound and the visual.”

While working as a guest teacher at The Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, she came into contact with many students who wanted to learn about these links between video and audio. But the professors were unable to devote their time to just this subject, so the students were often left to their own devices, which is where the initiative for Shan Studio arose.

Eventually, dissatisfaction with the university environment convinced Sheng to stop working there and concentrate on the Studio as a platform for knowledge and exchange. The money to support such an endeavour comes from her commercial work, and the fees paid for the artists’ residency, teaching and workshops. Aside from that, the other events are free: “they are simply ways to help people who want to learn something.”

Since opening, the Studio has hosted 4 international residencies and laid on some 17 events. These include workshops that teach software and hardware skills, and what Sheng calls Freetalks which provide more relaxed presentations of artists’ work, emphasising a two-way flow of conversation between the artists and audience.

The events at Shan Studio are open to all, and often include students from CAFA but also many students from other university departments, including cinema, fashion and industrial design. This mixture of backgrounds creates a conversation that is important for Sheng: “they meet each other because they want to learn the same things. They can also exchange the information between them and also with the artists.”

The Studio presentation room is very small and usually fits about 15 or 20 people, a number that Sheng feels encourages connections between the people more easily. The biggest audience was a standing room only event with around 30 people for a performance and discussion with Yan Jun, a well-known Chinese noise artist.

Many events at the Studio have dealt with software technologies, such as Max/MSP a popular tool for the creation of sound, visual and interactive work. But Sheng is adamant that there is not only one way to work, saying that any software is just a tool: “Young Chinese people often focus too much on these tools. A question all the time is what software they should use. But I create these events to show people you have many ways to do things, maybe not with Max at all. You can do things without software, just with hardware.”

American electronic musician and sound artist Taurin Barrera was resident at the Studio just prior to the False SIP performance, conducting a three day workshop demonstrating his Max/MSP patches: “Taurin can only speak a little Chinese, so trying to explain his patches was very complicated. He finally gave up and spoke only in English with participants volunteering to translate for the others who didn’t understand. It was a very interesting ambience, because all the people are trying to guess what he was saying!”

Gigonline is the latest development at Shan Studio, developed in collaboration with Taurin: “I have a neighbour who is very sensitive to any sounds. Gigonline is a way to perform without disturbing them, and I can open the showplace to many people, and they don’t need to move from their own rooms.”

Technical limitations are accepted and deliberately incorporated into the broadcast. This first Gigonline: False SIP with Taurin incorporated “webcams, DIY synthesizers, medical equipment, projectors, busted radios, and many unconventional instruments.” For a broadcast event, the reality is that the internet can be very slow in China, but this becomes a feature and not a bug for the performance. Sheng revels in these restrictions, describing the internet as: “the best distortion box ever created.”

gogoj: http://sgogoj.com/

Shan Studio: http://shan-studio.com/?lang=en

gigonline: http://www.livestream.com/gigonline

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 22 August, 2011 on ArtSlant.

Siemens Home Appliance Art Space, Taoci 2nd Street, 798 Art District, 100015 Beijing, China

23 July – 7 August, 2011

In 2010, on a side street behind the main drag of 798, the German appliance company Siemens opened a small art space as part of their mission to “finance young artists’ projects and provide community service around China.” As part of this worthy cause, this month the gallery is hosting Overstep, a show of two young Chinese artists Shen Yi Elsie and Lei Benben, curated by Pi Li (Director of Boers-Li Gallery).

Over the past few years both Shen Yi Elsie and Lei Benben have moved from photographic works to a more expansive approach to media – in Lei’s case into video and for Shen a practice that has developed through video into public interventions. For Pi Li, their work “oversteps” discredited boundaries of objectivity, fragmenting narrative into disjointed personal histories, creating a situation he characterises as “the inversion of time and space, [where] reality starts to drift into illusion and no longer firmly detains us.”

The video China Utopia (2009) by Lei Benben, is constructed in three short “chapters” each presenting scenes in which preoccupied figures are placed in sensuous environments. In the first chapter a riverbank scene bisected by a thin tree is interrupted by a man gazing out with us at the view. Stepping forward he removes his tie and drops it to the ground, but any thought that this might be a prelude to a full disrobing and leap into the water is denied as he sits to contemplate the scene. Following this, a two-part chapter begins with a view down another river into which a boat is paddled. On the boat four figures stand becoming dark shapes extending up from the boat, against the colourful, mountainous surroundings. The figures look around them, while the boat comes to rest in the middle of the river. The scene then changes to three figures in army fatigues in a cleared patch of field. They seem uncertain and walk in different directions, never coming into contact with each other. In the third and final chapter, a young urbanite wanders a bucolic wood, the ground covered with flowering plants. Sitting down against a tree he seems to doze, whereupon we are taken to a boldly coloured garden in blurred focus where on a traditional pavilion a duo of characters in Chinese opera dress languidly dance.

China Utopia, while giving over a clear feeling of contemplation, perhaps suffers from the lack of direction that may be representative of this “overstepping.” In many ways the purposelessness of the characters reminds me of Yang Fudong’s work, but (as with Yang Fudong) this can become tiresome without an obvious resolution or point to the activity. Taking a look at Lei’s other works (not on show), it is clear she has an eye for the purposeful/purposeless movements of figures within landscape – for example in the short video Tuanjiehu Park from 2009, where she surreptitiously films people performing their personal exercise routines in the titular Beijing park, a theme which recurs in Fresh Air (2010) but with far more emphasis on non-diegetic sounds creating an idealised backing to the gestures.

In the other rooms, Shen Yi Elsie presents works produced over the past few years that move beyond her earlier photographic tableaux, bringing in a social awareness, which greatly energises the pieces for me. The video work The Neon God (2008) takes her still shots of teenage migrant labourers performing menial work, and adds light trails which animate the figures as if revealing their hidden powers through photography. The video takes the photographs a step beyond static shots, animating the scenes through fades and tracking shots, however I am not sure that this additional manipulation adds much more than spectacle to the photos. It may be the case that the narrativity of the photographs themselves works well enough in its own right.

That said, this video reveals the artist’s urge to push her photography ever further, something that takes a leap in the public interactions of the Breath series. Her initial foray was in 2010 when she inserted little strips of pink paper, with the Chinese characters for “Breathe” on them, into closed walnuts shells. These were then mixed with unadulterated nuts on a market stall that the artist manned. These acted like messages in a bottle, sending the artist’s little reminders of life out into the world for the public to accidentally come across, beyond the control of the artist.

Shen has taken this method further with her works in other settings. Working in a dry cleaning establishment she inserted little folded paper objects—which she describes as “a common form of a folded letter or delivering a message in old times”—into the cleaned clothes. On the paper is written “please breath” ready for the client to discover. Other works in this series involve the artist creating a set of small ink stamps, whose impression she applies inside of newspapers to match the existing fonts, but highlighted in red ink. She then takes on the role of delivering these adjusted papers, the additions again reminding people to breathe. A fourth piece sees the artist handwriting signs offering to teach people to breathe if they phone the number provided. These signs are pasted on walls amongst other homemade adverts, inviting strangers to contact her for this unusual service.

Each piece is presented as a vertical series of photos accompanied by examples of the artefact involved – a very important and effective way of presenting the intervention without resorting to cliché. However, one point of concern for me in these pieces, is the relationship that the artist sets up with the labourers and the roles she takes on – which risks becoming patronising. The relationship between these two sections of society is an issue it is clear she is concerned with, but the focus of the pieces seems to be more on the artist performing the role interacting with the customers, which somehow precludes the body of the labourer themselves.

That criticism aside, I loved the way these actions step beyond themselves and reach out to an audience that to a large extent cannot be predetermined to bias the effect. Both Breath and The Neon God become a way for the artist to re-imagine the relationship of communication between the worker and their clients.

Pi Li, in his text for the show, describes “Overstep” as, for example, a move from “closed” to “open” narration: “from uniform to paradoxical.” This small show demonstrates the positive and negative consequences of such a move, and is a welcome demonstration of how a critical curatorial structure can productively work with it’s chosen set of works to leave room for questions and create something that takes them beyond themselves for the audience.

Author: Edward Sanderson

• First published 1 August, 2011 on ArtSlant.

Out in the University District of North-West of Beijing, near the South Gate of Tsinghua University, the WenJin Art Center has just opened inside the WenJin Hotel. Yesterday it was hosting a day of video and new media work curated by Wu Qiuyan, a teacher at the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

This was a great opportunity to have, if not the cream then at least a representative collection, of the last few years’ linear work on video presented. Splitting the works into the sections titled “scene,” “area,” and “emotion” presented the audience a broad range of artists, work and techniques, from the computer generated works of Miao Xiaochun and Feng Mengbo; through narrative (including a particularly subtle yet quietly sensationalist piece by Ma Qiusha, I still don’t now what I think about that…); semi/pseudo-documentary from Gao Yuan etc,; performance (for me the weakest set of works, but that’s my personal preferences). All of this was presented in a fairly tightly curated selection, which—although long—really felt like a comprehensive but concise account of the field in the time available.

Being able to devote this kind of time and attention to all this lovely material was a real luxury which I can’t often don’t give to linear video work (much less to interactive, non-linear work, but it’s usually not such a requirement of that). When I visit a gallery there is never enough time to view the whole video as I duck in and out of the screening rooms. So I really appreciate what the curator was doing here, enforcing some kind of participation, it was a real joy to experience.

Artists by section:

Scene: Miao Xiaochun 缪晓春, Feng Mengbo 冯梦波, Bo Hua 卜桦, Zhang Xiaotao 张小涛, Wu Junyong 吴俊勇, Bai Chongmin 白崇民, Ye Dan 叶丹, Wu Weihe 吴玮禾, Gu Zhenzhen 谷真真, Dai Hua 代化, Liu Qianyi 刘茜懿, Xu Ruotao 徐若涛, Chen Hailu 陈海璐.

Area: Liu Xuguang 刘旭光, Chen Zhuo + Huan Keyi 陈卓+黄可一, Tan Ji 谭奇, Wu Qiuyan 吴秋龑, Ding Xin 丁昕, Cheng Jie 盛洁, Wang Gefeng 王歌风, Ma Qiusha 马秋莎, Chen Wei 陈伟.

Emotion: Feng Jiangzhou 丰江舟, Zhang Haitao 张海涛, Chao Fang 沈朝方, Tan Tan 炭叹, Tian Miaozi 田苗子, Song Song 宋松, Wang Tingting 王婷婷, Chen Zhou 陈轴, Pei Li 裴丽, Gao Yuan 高媛, Shi Jingxin 史晶歆, Deng Li 邓黎, Chen Xi 陈曦, Zhang Minjie 张敏捷, Ren Lun 任伦.

In March, the curator Wu Qiuyan will be hosting another event of film and new media, this time at UCCA. More details when I have them.

[ASIDE: I don't want to always seem like I'm complaining about things and especially not about Laoban, I had a great time and Jon did a great job and I fully support what he's doing. I think in every positive I see the potential for improvement, and I also want to understand what it is that I am finding so good, I guess so I can find more of the same. So, I can be quite critical of things, as I have high expectations.]

There were some very talented performers and artists working at the event, producing stunning visuals and sounds, and I can happily admit that I loved it – I was thoroughly engaged in it.

But at times my self-awareness came back and I was left wondering: what is the point of all this, what possible purpose does it serve apart from instant gratification? There was a hermeticism about it all, cut off inside that room from reality, and that began to worry me.

Looking back, the only artist who directly addressed some audience or source outside of the small group, some kind of larger society, with a hope perhaps of making some kind of comment, was Du Qin (a.k.a. D4Q1N), specifically generating a flying array of what I think was the current RMB to USD exchange rate as part of his projection – at any point in time a quite meaningful piece of information for society.

Du Qin at the Laoban Mixing Event, CPU:798. 12/2008.

Many of the other visuals that I saw were semi- or fully-abstract patterns, which—while distracting and by and large visually appealing—seemed to serve only to distract, not to engage. In most cases the visuals were feeding off the music and vice versa, producing what amounted to a closed loop, again not entering into an engagement with an audience either within the room or beyond.

[ASIDE: Of course, there may have been meanings which were lost on me. I may have missed them, but also the nature of symbolism is much more deeply ingrained in China than in Britain (from where I got most of my visual knowledge), so the significance of some imagery may have been meaningless to me.]

Nevertheless, the disjunction between my enjoyment of the sounds and visions, and my disquiet over the lack of engagement, can be rationalised by understanding the evening itself as the engagement. The possibility of the evening happening and what it represents is the socially important thing, both looking inward to the participants and outward to the rest of the world.

I should probably learn from the Adorno quotation which I posted a while ago, about ‘commitment’ in art. He says: “It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.” Looking further back in my posted quotes there is the Marxist Art Historian Meyer Shapiro presenting abstraction in art, for all it’s seeming lack of subject, and hence effectiveness, nevertheless is the “domain of culture in which contradiction between the professed ideals and the actuality [of our culture] is most obvious and often becomes tragic.” In a similar way, I think, the abstraction of Laoban’s participants, itself against the norms, presents an alternative which energises society purely by its presence in the system.

I would go further, though, and give more credit to the event itself as a process which creates some change, some difference. At the end of the day the event can only (re)present what the individuals are doing at any given moment. If no one is engaging through their work, then engagement will not appear. But the evening itself can serve as an engagement. By moving the means of engagement onto the level of the container, this perhaps avoids a situation where participants feel pressured to conform to a particular mode of display, one which has a rather bad reputation for histrionics.

It’s true that there are many ways to make a statement, and being part of something which makes a statement—even if you yourself don’t make one—is perhaps enough, and important. You are guilty by association, as it were.

Laoban Soundsystem 1.0 Holiday Mixing Event at CPU:798

Friday, December 12, 8 PM – 12 Midnight, Free and Open to the Public

We invite all to come out to the launch of version 1.0 of the Laoban Soundsystem for a special Holiday Mixing Event at CPU:798. This is a new type of media event where all are welcome to join, bring media, laptops, video players, cameras, and other recording devices. The goal is to mix media, explore what artists, DJs, musicians, designers, and architects are working on RIGHT NOW — successes, failures, and rough edges are welcome at Laoban events! The ultimate plan is for consumers to be producers by both mixing media, and by tagging any recordings they have with “laoban” when posting onto twitter.com, flickr.com, or other places.

His works stem from an investigation of his home town of Jixi, a mining town in NE China. Jixi Research Project, ongoing since 2004, is a documentary-like archive of visual and spoken records of the lives of the people living in this town dominated by mining and the consequences of this industry on their lives and landscape. This piece is presented as a 4-channel projection with interactivity, emphasising the audiences participation in the story telling process.

For Sunflower Project, Zheng commissioned his family and friends to plant a large field of sunflowers in the hills surrounding the town of Jixi. The resulting artwork is an ultra-high resolution composite photograph of this field. On the one side in the distance is Jixi and on the other a memorial marking a mass grave of locals killed by the Japanese Army during the occupation of China during the Second World War. The sunflowers act as physical link between the living and the dead, a route of remembrance, reflecting during their short lives the remains of life and death all around them.

On a side note, and this may be old news, but tate are using a new video player (produced by BT, using Flash apparently) which seems to be of better quality and easier to use than the old one.

My friend Yumiko and I at the end of the symposium.

Wait, perhaps that’s a bit disingenuous. I know what my immediate reaction was. What’s taken time has been trying to put that reaction into words and work out it’s relevance.

On the one hand, I’m not good with blood, so inevitably I found the video of I Miss You! quite difficult to watch. On the other, I get a vicarious thrill from the whole practice of cutting and blood-letting, in the same way that I find many types of body modification attractive.

While watching this video I couldn’t help thinking about the beauty of the way the video was distorted by the compression – when it’s viewed full-screen especially it created abstract washes of golden colour, with regions of smooth colour gradients merging into more detailed, pixelated areas.

I was considering capturing some of the footage and isolating those parts as a work of art in itself. I thought that this would serve as a new piece of work to show my reaction to Franko-b’s work. But then I thought, hold on, why would I want to do this? Is this just me avoiding my real issues with the piece?

The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Gertrude, III.ii)

My reaction to the footage, and my subsequent ways of dealing with it, gives me away. Blood-letting causes a visceral reaction on my part, I would go so far as to say a revulsion, and my coping strategy is to transfer my attention away from that aspect of what is being shown to an aspect of the video that I am comfortable with, in this case the aesthetic of the semi-random pixel effects. This sounds like trauma to me, but I am not well versed in its extensive history, so wouldn’t like to trivialise the subject. The following comes from a text that I happen to have just read, but I should go back to the primary sources, whatever they may be:

…trauma can be experienced in at least two ways: as a memory that one cannot integrate into one’s own experience, and as a catastrophic knowledge that one cannot communicate to others.

Avital Ronell, “Haunted TV” Artforum, 31, 1 (September 1992), pp. 70–3.

And here I am being completely distracted from the work itself by my own reactions to it. Have I nothing to say about the piece or the artist in themselves? I should consider whether this an intended effect of the work*. Can I judge the work separately from it’s effect on me? Can I/Should I be objective about it?

The work asserted the body as a site for the representation of pain and fear, intrinsic to the human condition.

* This point reminds me of another of Franko-b’s works Why Are You Here (Aktion 893)