Responses to videos

GARY HILL DOCUMENTARY-

I liked the way Hill spoke of video as not being about image but about the connectors in a circuit. It got me thinking more about the way that we see image with our eyes, not an apparatus. When we see it through technology, it becomes something else, further from image. I also liked his interest with symmetry and how he compared/contrasted it with his hands and feet in some of the pieces. His affinity for using the body is apparent, from the work where he strapped cameras to himself, to the one that observed bodies in panorama, to the one of himself lying naked on the floor. I also like his involvement of speech in most of his work as well, from speaking written language aloud to create a phonetic rhythm to having words spoken backwards. I found the Mediations piece to be especially interesting because it somewhat combined the body, language, and symmetry together. Body because he was using his hands to fill the speaker, language because of the words coming out of the speaker, and symmetry because the wordplay created a strange symmetry of words spoken and events happening in the piece.

THE KNIFE-

I found this to be excruciatingly boring. Which makes me wonder if that was the point of it? The whole time I was watching it, I couldn't help but think "is this all that's going to happen in this video?". It was kind of like watching a movie and waiting for a twist in the plot, and it never happening. When I saw the colors on the knife, instead of thinking of the connotations of each color (red-hot, blue-cold), I thought about the primary colors. And I began to think about contrast among them. I thought to myself, "well he is using the two most bold primary colors, but why? Because they are so different from one another? Is he using their oppositeness to bring different personas to the knife?" And then he made the knife turn yellow at the end, which furthered my thinking about primary colors, but didn't really answer my questions about why. I am sure this piece has a deep, meaningful thought process behind it, but I can't seem to delve deeper than the colors to find it.

THE CHAIR-

After watching this, I am now fairly certain that Goldstein has a thing for doing boring videos. Or maybe I should say simple videos that require patience. Either way, I wanted to fast forward through this one to see what happens too, without watching each feather fall slowly to the ground. I think the fact that he uses feathers further slows the piece, since feathers have such a slow falling rate compared to other, dense objects. I liked the imagery of the colorful feathers creating a confetti-like appeal, but part of me wanted it to be fast, or all of them at once. I am starting to interpret his videos as work that plays with color and tests the viewers patience.