By Guy Cimbalo

Alfred Guzzetti's History of the Sea

This summer’s New York Video Festival (now in its 11th year) took its chosen medium seriously. Perhaps a little too seriously. The program highlighted the academic issues and rhetoric of surveillance and history. Video descriptions explained how one video, Peggy Ahwesh’s The Star Eaters, “interrogated and unsettled the performance of social behavior,” while another, Marcello Mercado’s Das Kapital version .07, provides “a moral and economic sketch of digital dissolution,” and a third, Stephen Connolly’s The Whale, refracts “the micro-politics of contemporary life.”

At its playful best, however, the medium can tackle all those heady issues while still managing to be entertaining. Franziska Lamprecht and Hajoe Moderegger’s 1.1 Flat Acre Screen follows an arts collective as they attempt to turn a desolate plot of land in Utah (purchased on eBay for $456) into a desert oasis. Driven by the “romantic idea of a new frontier,” these pasty Germans pursue their land grab with an immigrant’s inventiveness and Rube Goldbergesque complications. It’s impossible not to cheer on their artistic insensibilities.

Peep “TV” Show from Japan’s Yutaka Tsuchiya (one of only three feature-length videos shown at the festival) proved less inspiring. A severally pierced epicene wanders Tokyo, setting up surveillance cameras. Girls dressed in Little Bo Peep outfits (one girl calls the look “gothic Lolita”) discuss plastic surgery and question the nature of identity. And the rest of twentysomething Tokyo walks through a world of Internet porn, distant war and 9/11 footage. This unique brand of Japanese nihilism has been done better in novels, such as Ryu Murakami’s Almost Transparent Blue. At this point, neither Japanese youth culture nor issues of surveillance possesses much novelty, and when Peep “TV” Show tries to spice things up with inane mumbling about the World Trade Center, the video’s failure to shock or enlighten becomes a liability. We are not even afforded the titillations of sex or violence — I suppose that’s the point — and in Peep “TV” Show it isn’t long before all that banality just gets plain boring.

Much of the experimental videos, like the program of Mike Kelley’s work — either alone or with fellow artist Paul McCarthy — provided little interest, except perhaps to the convocation of shaggy kids of questionable hygiene and funky eyewear that attended. Kelley’s Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip) — which was originally created for a show entitled “100 Artists See Satan” — features a bricolage of images copped from David Lynch and a lengthy sequence in which a fuse continues to burn and burn and burn, which, if we are looking for a convenient metaphor, will serve us quite well — specifically, when will this damn thing end?

Thankfully, the short videos offered significantly better options. Rome, NY, a short video by Ada Bligaard Søby, aspires to be nothing more than a home movie of sorts, but in its 26 minutes the video managed 10 times the emotional impact of Peep “TV” Show. Like a sweet-hearted Buffalo 66, the video follows the return home of two thirtyish men to the snowdrifts and strip malls of upstate New York. Much of the city is seen from behind a filthy windscreen, and little more happens than a visit home and a stop at Wal-Mart, but we are left with a sense of character and place that is truly effective.

The computer-animated short Fade Into White #4 (presumably a sequel to Fade Into White #3) also stood out. Directed by Goshima Kazuhiro, the video simply concerns a draftsman asleep at his desk. We soon enter an oneiric landscape of B&W objects beautifully rendered and subtly imagined.

For me, these narrative character-driven works provided more fulfilling video content than the art-world experimentations. Consider Eric Saks’s eight-minute dialogue from Hung Up that includes such insight as “A modest proposal. We hurl bricks at you. Brick you. Brick you the pleasure of instant dislocation without the fatigue of lifestyle enslavement. The ye olde brick... Way after the exceedingly long incubation time for a cultural insurrection to become germane.” There’s no need to subject an audience — especially an audience willing to get out of the house to attend a video festival — to this kind of drivel. It was only when the New York Video Festival gave up the mega-statement or the decidedly dull that the real immediacy and intimacy of video became apparent.