Anri Sala’s fourth floor exhibition features two screens each displaying a different point of view. Both points of view only show his hand/ hands playing the piano in sync with the music we hear. I initially thought that he was trying to convey how the “truth” and reality is difficult to capture, as it is hard to figure out which video was supposed to be the one actually visually recording him playing the music we hear. In other words, I questioned which video was more “authentic”. I realized that it was futile to determine which one was authentic since the music seemed to be a final edit of an orchestra performance, and that it was more likely that the artist simply visually recorded himself playing the same piece, without ever recording the music he was actually playing. This made sense after I read the curator’s writing about his work: how he was influenced by his native country’s tyrannical government and their rewriting of history. Perhaps Anri Sala wanted to portray how reality is hardly ever recorded accurately.
Cheryl Donegan’s works were more centered around consumerism. She displays seemingly unrelated commodities on an old television, perhaps to criticize how our media has always been dominated by capitalism and consumerism. She also projects fashion runway shows onto an old rain coat, perhaps to portray how high fashion “trickles down” to clothing bought by middle-class and lower-class consumers. The most confusing video art present in the exhibition was showing the artist with a bag over her head, wearing bottles taped together, and a #1 glove. By covering her face, she may have been depicting how people lose their individuality in consumerism. The video strangely reminded me of Miley Cyrus’s music video, Wrecking Ball.
Of the two readings, I found a passage from Demos’s A Matter of Time to be interesting. He writes, “Conducting experiments into abstraction’s musical equivalent, silence, John Cage discovered its ultimate impossibility. Despite eliminating all exterior sound when he entered the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, Cage discovered he could not purge the high-pitched noise of his nervous system….” It is interesting how the artist believed that an “abstraction” of music meant a purging of any sensations from one of the 5 senses, especially hearing, and how this led to “lived duration”, since truly excluding one’s senses from any sensations is impossible.