Art Feature: 18 Reasons Why We Still Like Video

One summer weekend soon, Tim Crowley wants us to take a trip. We won’t need to pack a bag. All that’s required is to step into a darkened room, where 18 videos playing on a loop will take us on a journey inside the heads of some very eccentric artists indeed.

We’ll see a man jumping and cavorting, trying desperately to break out of a gorilla suit; another traveling blindfolded for 13 hours just to have a few focused minutes in front of a painting in Madrid; rubber glove puppets, dripping with paint, enacting the lives of Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol; and a series of ordinary people standing in front of the camera held by Chinese artist Yang Zhenzhong, stating the obvious: “I will die.”

Crowley remembers clearly how he discovered the last of these videos. “I was at this huge art fair in Madrid in 2000,” he says “And in a corner I found this video playing called I Will Die. It was the best thing I saw in three days.”

For 20 years, Crowley – an arts journalist and photographer – prowled “every art fair and biennale in the world.” Much of what he saw is now a blur, but looking back, a handful of artists’ videos – often cheaply made, but totally individual – stood out.

He’s modest about the show he’s planned for us from this handful of works. He’s given it the tempting title “18 reasons we still need superman,” but freely admits the name makes no particular sense, though viewers could certainly have some fun assigning a raison d’etre for Superman for each of the works in the show – to get that artist out of his gorilla suit quick smart, for example, or to say “I won’t” at the end of I Will Die. Crowley also notes that the videos are largely the products of White Anglo-Saxon Males, which is perhaps not surprising, he says, given that’s what he is himself.

But he doesn’t plan to let it rest like that. Having produced his playlist of favorite videos to screen here, the show will go on the road, first to Shanghai and then to Hong Kong, Singapore, Bangalore, Mumbai, Dubai and Tokyo before returning to Beijing. At each stop, the local organizer will add two videos to the playlist, so by the time it arrives back it will no longer be a show chosen by one person (Crowley) but eight. If we choose to see it again upon its return two months on, it will have almost doubled in size and its perspective will have totally changed. “The show will grow,” he says. “It will take on a life of its own.” He’s clearly excited as much by this process of others “adding new things in” than by his own initial selection.

Crowley doesn’t much like shows that remain static. His first-ever “exhibition” back in 1994 involved creating a “village fair” in the heart of London and asking his artist friends to take part. Called “A Fete Worse Than Death,” it featured Damien Hirst as a clown and Tracey Emin as a fortuneteller. Hirst – these days still most (in)famous for pickling a whole shark in formaldehyde – got into the spirit of the thing, charging patrons ten dollars for the sight of him “painting a dot painting on his scrotum.”

Today, artists like Emin and Hirst, the so-called Young British Artists or YBAs, are still the ones to whom Crowley feels the greatest affinity. He loves their “punk” attitude, which said anyone could be an artist, the important thing being the quality of the ideas, not their execution. And this spirit connects all the videos he has chosen. “What I like about these videos is that they’re so ‘Lo-Fi.’ There’s something so appealing about that punk attitude – just go out and do it yourself!”

All those art fairs and biennales have clearly made Crowley pretty jaded about the big-scale projects favored by many celebrated contemporary artists, which anyone who’s been around the Chinese art scene recently can relate to. Until the financial crisis delivered the coup de grace to works more distinguished for their physical size than the quality of their ideas, Beijing was full of such bloated, seemingly mass-produced creations, and visiting a gallery could be a deeply depressing experience. These days, though, you’re more likely to be intrigued or delighted by works that embody some of the “punk” do-it-yourself attitude that distinguishes this show.

On the day we meet, Crowley has just added a final video to the list, by a young Chinese woman artist named Yu Yin. Called Photo Studio, it’s a send-up of five of China’s most iconic – and successful – contemporary artists. It is totally “punk,” giving us one more reason to sigh with relief that Chinese contemporary art is once again moving on.

“18 reasons we still need superman” will screen at the UCCA in July.
Check www.ucca.org.cn for details.