Slouching on a sofa watching television may not seem like such a high cultural pursuit, but it all depends on what's on the tube. White sofas and televisions at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum invite visitors to be couch potatoes and tune in to classic video art from the prestigious collection of the Pompidou Center in Paris (titled New Media Collection, 1965-2005－Centre Pompidou).
Thirty-three of the Pompidou Center's historically important video artworks are on view until July 23.
Thematically grouped, the videos create a provocative and fascinating dialogue.
In the mid-20th century as television began infiltrating homes and replacing traditional media, artists experimented with the new medium to create alternative ways of perceiving the boob tube and criticize the consumerist allure and power it held.
Many of the pioneering works seem fresh and contemporary even though television technology has advanced considerably.
Nam Jun Paik, a pioneer of video art, is well represented in this exhibition with several key works. Paik's argument that TV could be used for profound pursuits and not only to sell commercial goods or ideology to unwitting spectators, still rings true.
PHOTO COURTESY OF TFAM
Paik's poetic Moon is the Oldest TV utilizes television monitors like light-boxes. Each TV set, placed on a pedestal, displays one phase of the moon that is actually produced by a magnet on the cathode ray tube, which alters and disrupts the signal. Pushing the limits of the medium, the work is simple, yet complex and seemingly eternal.
Early on, artists saw video's potential for interactivity and incorporated the audience into the work via close circuit cameras. Dan Graham's Present Continuous Past is an installation where your image is projected after a few seconds delay; thus your past self is occupying the same space as your present self.
Artists also explored video's spatial dimensions to create installations. In his Going Around the Corner Piece (1970), Bruce Nauman forces viewers to move their bodies, rather than being merely seated spectators, in order to change their visible perceptions.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF TFAM
Nauman's Stamping in the Studio (1968), in which he banally walks around repetitively stomping on the floor is shown next to Samuel Beckett's non-verbal play Quad I, in which four colorful, shrouded figures continuously shuffle across the staged area. In this humorous juxtaposition, the meaningless pacing symbolizes the futility of human existence.
Cinema has a profound effect on contem-porary art with artists deconstructing scenes, film scores, characters and the medium's implied symbolic meanings. Jean-Luc Godard's film Passion is shown in this context.
Film and video are also great media for capturing memories as they lend themselves to simultaneously showing past and present images. In Pierre Huyghe's The Third Memory, fact and fiction merge as the protagonist reenacts his famous bank robbery, but his memory of actual events is clouded by Sidney Lumet's film Dog Day Afternoon.
New technology creates new modes of artist expression. So the VHS tapes of the 1970s, watched on a television set, are now replaced by theatrical, multi-screen projections that create a stereo experience of light, sound and image. Stan Douglas' Hors-Champs and Isaac Julien's Baltimore provide a glimpse into the future possibilities of new media art with their innovative forms of editing and storytelling.
The works on view also show that most of what is considered canonical art still continues to give viewers epiphanies and provides an uplifting glimpse into the miracle and the wonder of the human condition.
What: New Media Collection 1965-2005 － Centre Pompidou
Where: Taipei Fine Arts Museum, 181 Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei (台北市中山北路3段181號)
Telephone: (02) 2595-7656
When: Through July 23
The problem with Marx’s famous remark that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, the second time as farce, is that the first time is usually farce as well. This week Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chair Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) made a pilgrimage to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) “to confer, converse and otherwise hob-nob” with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. The visit was an instant international media hit, with major media reporting almost entirely shorn of context. “Taiwan’s main opposition leader landed in China Tuesday for a rare visit aimed at cross-strait ‘peace’”, crowed Agence-France Presse (AFP) from Shanghai. Rare!
What is the importance within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of the meeting between Xi Jinping (習近平), the leader Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), the leader of the KMT? Local media is an excellent guide to determine how important — or unimportant — a news event is to the public. Taiwan has a vast online media ecosystem, and if a news item is gaining traction among readers, editors shift resources in near real time to boost coverage to meet the demand and drive up traffic. Cheng’s China trip is among the top headlines, but by no means
A recent report from the Environmental Management Administration of the Ministry of Environment highlights a perennial problem: illegal dumping of construction waste. In Taoyuan’s Yangmei District (楊梅) and Hsinchu’s Longtan District (龍潭) criminals leased 10,000 square meters of farmland, saying they were going to engage in horticulture. They then accepted between 40,000 and 50,000 cubic meters of construction waste from sites in northern Taiwan, charging less than the going rate for disposal, and dumped the waste concrete, tile, metal and glass onto the leased land. Taoyuan District prosecutors charged 33 individuals from seven companies with numerous violations of the law. This
Sunflower movement superstar Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆) once quipped that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) could nominate a watermelon to run for Tainan mayor and win. Conversely, the DPP could run a living saint for mayor in Taipei and still lose. In 2022, the DPP ran with the closest thing to a living saint they could find: former Minister of Health and Welfare Chen Shih-chung (陳時中). During the pandemic, his polling was astronomically high, with the approval of his performance reaching as high as 91 percent in one TVBS poll. He was such a phenomenon that people printed out pop-up cartoon
RSS