Deep in the bowels of a formerly abandoned brutalist office block on the Strand, a pair of Arab men are dancing in a bank vault, a nude silver-skinned woman is prancing around some sculptures, some bloke is stroking a fish as it slowly dies and a glittery android is singing on a stage. Nah, it’s not London’s newest and most terrifyingly awful sex club, it’s a show of video art curated by New York’s New Museum.
Since the late ’70s, the New Museum has consistently been among the first to commission the bright young things that would go on to shape future art, so it’s no surprise that this show of contemporary video work is full of stuff that pushes at boundaries; art that – when it was made, at least – broke some kind of mould.
There’s nothing too fancy here, It’s almost all just single-screen installations – unlike ‘The Infinite Mix’, a brilliant video and installation show which took place in this same building a couple of years back – but there’s plenty of gold to sink your eyes into. Ed Atkins’s ‘Happy Birthday’ is a twisted, hyper-stylised digital elegy to memory loss and pain, leading to Pipilotti Rist’s sombre installation that leaves you lying on a bed listening to sad songs and watching images of water bubbling above you. Kendrick Lamar-collaborator Kahlil Joseph takes centre stage on the first floor with a gorgeous, long, emotional love letter to Harlem and black America, and down in the basement, John Akomfrah’s ‘Vertigo Sea’ steals the show with its lyrical, poignant and often shocking meditation on the Atlantic as a place of historical trauma.
A personal favourite, maybe because of its brute simplicity, is Hassan Khan’s ‘Jewel’, which pits two fellas against each other in a shaabi-soundtracked Arab dance-off. Other works I enjoyed, others left me cold or, even worse, bored. But some things will hit you harder than they hit me and vice versa.
In the end though, the show just feels like a bit of slog. Maybe it’s because this isn’t easily digestible art; each video is filled with ideas and concepts, every piece here gives you a hefty wedge to mentally chew on. And all those ideas, if you manage to eventually unfold them, end up clashing and messily overlapping. Whatever themes exist are jigglingly loose, and there’s no one conclusion or message you can take from any of it.
So what’s the point? Is it a retrospective of the New Museum’s video art programme? Is it a statement about the past, present and future of video art? In the end, it just ends up feeling like some video art in an old office block. Some of it’s good, some it isn’t so good, and that’s not enough to elevate it to celluloid brilliance.
@eddyfrankel
