Physical Video

 GoMA Media Gallery 14/5 – 4/9/2011

A man, a broom, a wall. A man, some oranges, the floor. Pitted against gravity, Erwin Wurm’s sculptural persistence shines out from a small embedded screen in the corridor leading to GoMA’s Media Gallery. This 40 minute loop of Wurm performing his One Minute Sculptures (1997) is captivating, the absurd balancing acts amplified by the low-fi buzz. I’m not event inside yet and already I think Physical Video is one of GoMA’s better shows this year.

Focussing on the performative body and its engagement with video, this collection based exhibition presents a series of videos in which the body is the primary subject. Featuring both contemporary works and works by key artists from the early days of performance documentation, Physical Video does a tidy job of outlining the current climate of filmed performance and reflecting on the lineage of the genre, albeit through the very limited scope of their collecting policy.

James Oram’s Feeling the Burn (2006) stands out amongst the more recent works. Oram performs a brief endurance challenge, holding his breath for as long as it takes a struck match to extinguish, repetitively for nearly 20 minutes. The viewer finds themselves participating in Oram’s action, taking on the matches in the discomforting task. This work has a direct relationship to Mike Parr’s Performances (1972-75), which documents Parr’s execution of a variety of endurance tasks. The appeal of these two works lies in the direct body responses they garner from their audiences, producing an immediate empathetic reaction.

I can’t help but wonder about the impetus for this exhibition, which although enjoyable lacks pertinence to contemporary artistic debates. It doesn’t seem to bring anything new to the table, except for the gallery’s recent acquisition Art Make-Up (1967-68) by hugely influential American artist Bruce Nauman. This works sees Nauman cover himself in coloured layers of make up, projected on all four walls completely enclosing the viewer. A powerful work to experience, this acquisition is an important addition to the QAG/GoMA collection which lacks American work from this period, and indeed it serves to contextualise many of their more contemporary performative video works well. If in fact Art Make-Up is the work Physical Video is anchored upon I would have appreciated a little more honesty and a bigger spot-light, instead of this casual group-show inclusion. 

Lisa Bryan-Brown