Critical Writing Index

Once More With Feeling

by Catherine Fowler

Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), 2013, v. 2, no. 1, pp. 10-24

This article argues for the recognition of a new trajectory of performance-on-video, using work by Gillian Wearing, Kutluğ Ataman and Phil Collins. In this trajectory the artist has disappeared behind the camera to be replaced by real, ordinary, amateur people. Given the contemporary proliferation of recordings of ordinary people performing on reality television and on the Internet, this article asks what the act of artists recording ordinary people might now ‘mean’ to us, and, equally, how real people performing in video art might themselves ‘matter’. Through close analyses of Wearing’s Confess all … Ataman’s Women Who Wear Wigs and Collins’s the world won’t listen we find that a different kind of participatory space is gained on-screen in which artist, performer and eventual gallery visitor are drawn together through affective connections. Accordingly, the article concludes that in giving attention to this new trajectory of performance-on-video, what we ultimately discover are other ways of thinking about the act of recording that make faith in the subject possible once again.

ITEM 2013.157 – available for viewing in the Research Centre

Videos, Artworks and Artists Cited

Turn OnVito Acconci

Stamping the StudioBruce Nauman

'Videoinstallation' Split RealityValie Export

Vertical RollJoan Jonas

Confess All on Video. Don't Worry, You Will be in Disguise. Intrigued? Call Gillian.Mona Hatoum

Kutlug Ataman's Semiha b. unpluggedPierrick Sorin

Women Who Wear WigsSophie Calle

Never My SoulPipilotti Rist

baghdad screen testsMatthew Barney

They Shoot HorsesJohanna Billing

The World Won't ListenJeremy Deller

Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to SayHarrell Fletcher

TraumaJavier Tellez

Secrets and LiesMark Wallinger

2 into 1Dryden Goodwin

Michal Rovner

Eva Koch

Gillian Wearing

Kutlug Ataman

Kutlug Ataman

Kutlug Ataman

Phil Collins

Phil Collins

Phil Collins

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing

Gillian Wearing

Andy Warhol

Catherine Opie

Nikki S. Lee

Anna Gaskell

Cindy Sherman

Nan Golding

Rineke Dijkstra

Eija Liisa Ahtila

Sarah Jones

Katy Grannan

Daniela Rossell

Shirana Shahbazi

Dorit Cypis

Kelly Nipper

Elina Brotherus

Salla Tykka