My manifesto for video art

If there is something that I do, it is video art. Art that works at the breakdown of the aesthetic and the visual and audible. It is not predictable, planned, or perfect. It’s not constructed for perfection, even if the editing is tightly woven. It relishes the oddities and the exceptional in found material, and of seeing these things.

Working with gathered material inevitably means compromise, accommodation, ambiguities and error. I want ambiguity and error – that is where art lies. It is not film – of perfectly told stories and things of seamless beauty. I could write narratives – but why would I want to build in the predictable? It’s not what I want to do.

Yet I work with translation, of turning one meaning into another. It is not about being literal, as that skirts understanding and interpretation. Being literal is to be servile, thoughtless. I translate, reinterpret, reform, give a different life to things, which may or may not be better. But betterness is irrelevant; having and communicating ideas, however imperfectly, matters more.

Berlin, 26 September 2019.

Echoed by Wulf Herzogenrath in the Magic Media Media Magic exhibition at the Akademie der Kunste

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.