Pixels at an Exhibition (YouTube as Art)

New York Times Sunday Magazine
May 18, 2008
The Medium
Pixels at an Exhibition
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

What do video artists make of YouTube? Every minute, 10 hours of video are uploaded to the video-sharing site, which now shows hundreds of millions of videos each day. The place is a mess. Maybe artists should avoid it altogether.

The curator and Internet-art booster Rachel Greene has come up with another suggestion: artists could use YouTube, like a supply store, slag heap or rag-and-bone shop. To make the point, she recently asked a set of art-world figures — Sue de Beer, Matthew Higgs, Matthew Ronay and Wayne Koestenbaum — to present and project their favorite YouTube videos in Manhattan on May 13 at the Kitchen gallery. According to catalog copy for the show, “Artists Using YouTube,” some of the videos on exhibit provide “indirect fodder” for the artists’ own work.

Fodder — aha. Maybe that’s purpose of YouTube.

The shrewdest contributor to the show is the video artist Sue de Beer. De Beer’s first choice of clip is inspired: the final scene from “The American Soldier,” Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1970 film. Two slight men appear, backing nervously away from the camera, each with a gun pointed at the viewer. What an ingenious start. A woman in the frame cries out. The two men startle and turn, just as the camera does an about-face to show another armed man, on his knees, who fires two shots. Down fall both original men, as the film turns to slo-mo. The film is black and white, and the shapes are just simple enough — lockers, as at a bus station; short staircase; pay phone — to be readable at YouTube’s dirtiest resolution.

The person who originally uploaded the Fassbinder clip to YouTube was evidently drawn to the song on the soundtrack (“So Much Tenderness”) and framed the clip as a music video. But de Beer finds other significance in it. The threadbare print, the (mostly) immobile camera and the institutional quality of the set suggest a surveillance video. Indeed, one of de Beer’s other YouTube selections shows actual surveillance footage from the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School. She’s pressing the connection. Taken together, the Fassbinder and Columbine images are a good reminder that since 1970, when “The American Soldier” appeared, documentary audiences have had considerable practice reading surveillance and evidentiary images. With Columbine scenes and murders of all kinds playing on thousands of screens in the YouTube googolplex — the Saddam Hussein execution, the shooting of a police officer in New Hampshire — the Fassbinder scene comes to seem like one of them. Just as primitive artifacts placed in the context of high modernism seem to anticipate it, or interpret it, so a vintage film clip set online amid the YouTube flotsam can take on entirely new meaning.

De Beer also chose a video that shows the fashion designer Coco Chanel pricklishly fielding interview questions in unsubtitled French while smoking in the middle of her ornate drawing room. It’s moving and even unnerving to see a clip like this liberated from commentary. Even five years ago, you’d never have encountered it except in a documentary about fashion or feminism, where its significance would be assigned by pedantic talking heads. On YouTube, the strange tableau takes on a life of its own. Chanel can’t settle down; she fairly squirms and won’t take a seat in her own house. Similarly uncomfortable-looking is the dancer in de Beer’s final choice, “Footworkin,” an amateur video that shows a living-room dancer flapping and kicking to “My Funny Valentine.” Behind the dancer is a wilted bouquet of foil balloons, whose muted shine recalls the gilded mirror behind Chanel. De Beer draws bright lines with her curatorial choices, proposing connections between disparate images and showing how video clips are reincarnated by the format and community of YouTube. It’s an imaginative collection.

The other contributions to “Artists Using YouTube” aren’t as wisely chosen. The artist Matthew Higgs is also a curator, which might explain why his collection advertises its theme — the grooviness of the 1980s — so relentlessly. The archival clips he chose from YouTube serve as an audiovisual lecture, in which they do nothing but loyally make that case. One clip, of Talking Heads playing “Born Under Punches” in Rome in 1980, is shot largely at groin level, amid sound equipment that is being manipulated for feedback squeals and other effects; it’s like being close to the crooked spine and fritzed nervous system of a body that’s simultaneously pushing its sex appeal. The camerawork is pushy and invasive, and Tina Weymouth is stunning, but the film gains nothing, and loses much, by being on YouTube.

Higgs’s second entry, “New Order: Confusion,” is a music video, apparently originally sent to TV stations to promote the song (“For heavy rotation,” a card proposes at the end). It’s a kind of nocturnal race through New York City — subways covered in graffiti, old Times Square marquees and the twin towers in the distance — that seems coked-up on instant nostalgia. But does Higgs expect viewers only to share the ’80s love? It seems so: his final selection, a 1988 video by the Fall, is straight from the nostalgia-channel VH1 Classic, complete with the logo bug. Pop-culture connoisseurs should know about these videos. But get a collection on DVD. As YouTube entries, they don’t have much to say.

Matthew Ronay, a sculptor and another contributor to the exhibition, sent Rachel Greene, the curator, an enormous list of links, flinging at her a series of sobs from the heart — a daunting stream of words and images half-designed as a filibuster. He chose videos that purport to show the supernatural, things like levitation and magic, and though no single one is decisive, they suggest in the aggregate that something is going on here. After Sept. 11, Ronay explained in an e-mail message to Greene, he felt drawn to Islam. “Is my desire to investigate Islam similar to the way that people became interested in Eastern religions during Vietnam?” Looking for answers, he writes, “I read some Joseph Campbell and Unabomber.”

You can’t help watching closely the video clips Ronay provided. A man rises into the air over a circle of fire. Alligators are hypnotized. Gurus of every stripe dilate. Ronay is obsessive. He’s got more. He’s trying to nail something down. Something in the compulsive amassing of evidence for animism, voodoo, shamanism and other paranormal phenomena is heartbreaking and rousing. In his e-mail message to Greene, he relates his YouTube search terms — “spells,” “sacrifice,” “rewilding” — and you can picture him skimming hundreds of videos looking for the face of God.

But Ronay is nonetheless a victim of YouTube. Unlike de Beer, whose rarefied selections make heavy demands on the viewer, Ronay approaches video through search terms, which means he encounters only videos that have been rigged to be found by someone with his interests. What’s more, the videos are prepackaged as proof of a paranormal realm, and that’s no different from how he employs them; he offers no new purpose for the clips. (It seems not to have even occurred to the fourth contributor to the exhibition, the art critic Wayne Koestenbaum, that YouTube videos could be considered freestanding art. As of this writing, he hadn’t settled on specific entries — only subject matter — for his part of the exhibition.)

No artist should take lightly the opportunity to use YouTube. In my view, YouTube is neither a nascent art form nor a video library but a recently unearthed civilization. Everything’s muddy and looks kind of ruined. If you don’t have firm convictions about visual art, you won’t come on them just by poking around; everything will seem worthless. But while most of the stuff being dusted off and put into baggies at YouTube are indeed bent spoons and dime-a-dozen arrowheads, an archeologist with his eyes open can still be surprised by treasure.