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Videoart.net is proud to present a short documentary on prominent video artist and sculptor Buky Schwartz (1932 – September 2, 2009). Commentary by John Henhardt
Schwartz was invited to reconstruct his video installation piece “Spring, 1981” in New York City at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery as part of an interactive video installation exhibition in April of 2007. This exhibition showcased the work of emerging video artists as well as historically important artists who have influenced and inspired the following generation. Schwartz was born in Jerusalem and originally trained as a sculptor in Israel. Schwartz moved to London in 1959, where he played an important role in the hotbed of new sculptural directions at St. Martin’s School of Art during the 1960s. In 1971 Schwartz moved to New York, where he continues to reside part of each year. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, Schwartz’s inventive use of sculptural materials, such as mirrors and wooden timbers, involved an interplay between illusory appearances and the actual, physical presence, weight, and structure of his work. This playful interaction between sculptural appearance and physical reality quickly became a central aspect in much of his video installation work as he added that modern medium to his vocabulary in the late 1970s. In the documentary, Schwartz discusses the time in which his video constructions were conceived and eventually discovered by John Hanhardt, the curator and head of the Film and Video Department at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in 1977. At this time Schwartz was living and working in the Soho district of Manhattan. It was in his studio in Soho where he began to add new dimensions to his sculptures by integrating a stationary video camera and a monitor to his installations, thus changing the language of his art making while exploring a relatively new and unexplored medium of video installation. Videoart.net has also included special commentary on Buky Schwartz’s work by John Hanhardt, the former curator of film and video at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City from 1974-1996. He is renowned for the incorporation and further integration of video into the Whitney’s exhibition program, as well as its program in independent film. Acclaimed in three worlds – Europe, Israel, and the United States – Schwartz’s work has been included in the Venice Biennale (1966), the Whitney Biennial (1981) in New York, the Carengie International (1982) in Pittsburgh, and Documenta (1987) in Kassel. He was also represented in such leading historical surveys of video art as A History of Video Art (1984) at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Video Skulptur (1989), Cologne. His work has had numerous presentations in one-person and group exhibitions at galleries and museums throughout the world and is included in several private and public collections. Please enjoy this compelling short documentary which explores an artist’s creative process and his relationship with his curator in a very unique time in American art history. -Dianna Ekins, Associate Producer -Dan Fine, Executive Producer and Director	Videoconstructions #1 Videoconstructions #2 Videoconstructions #3 Videoconstructions #4 Videoconstructions #5 The Chair

Music video first emerged as a genre of experimental film in the hands of such
noted filmmakers as Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger. Since then MTV has appropriated
many of the techniques developed by these pioneers, and nowadays the music video
exists fully in its own right as an art form, aiming to enhance or complement
the songs, while often telling a story of its own.
 

Coercion by Lucas Tripodi
Visuals and sound exist in perfect symbiosis in Coercion. The punk rock soundtrack
is appropriately enhanced by the DIY aesthetic of the piece: rough stop-motion
graphics, flickering 8mm, spray painted brick walls, hand-painted and scratched
film. Excellent video for music that is always young and rough, born in garages,
and shouted on the streets.

Masquerade by Paulo Cancela de Abreu
A silhouette emerges under a tree and a dance of light and shadow begins in
the forest. The shadows mimic the dark sound of the guitar, the trees come alive,
they move as if of their own free will, inviting the viewer to partake in their
mystery. There is something hiding in those shadows–one is thinking; a face
appears for a few frames—its eyes obscured under sunglasses—and
is later dragged off-screen by somebody’s hand. Tree branches are left
moving in the place where the face used to be. Was it ever there or was it only
imagined? Through a simple time-lapse technique the artist creates a character
out of the scenery, infusing it with an energy that sends shivers down the spine.

Les 5 Siamoises by Hugo Arcier
In one of the first shots of Les 5 Siamoises the camera travels through a hallway
of doors, a Freudian image so often used to signify a trip into the subconscious.
Apart from this one shot, the director’s choices are anything but obvious. In
most dream sequences familiar to us the subject goes to strange places, observes
bizarre objects, and performs odd actions. One needs only to recall Salvador
Dali’s dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound, a film that also uses the metaphor
of doors. Les 5 Siamoises, however, takes the viewer into a subconscious state
that is populated exclusively by images of the subject.

The subject is a woman; she is nude, stroking her body in an act of self adoration
and exhibitionism–by virtue of being captured and manipulated on film. Auto-sexual
images lead to the cloning of her body. A voice on the soundtrack says "Now
tell me what you see!" What we see is an image of five clones of the woman,
bodies intertwined, two of them leaning in for a kiss. There appears to be no
outside objects influencing the subject’s subconscious. It is entirely
and completely internal, concentrated exclusively on sexual self-obsession.
The colors snap from sepia to full color when the woman is

PERNO. “Me Too”
An evocative piece of minimal video manipulation, maximum elegance and grandeur.
The artist extracts poetry and essence from mundane industrial footage—a formidable
task and a solid proof of poetic and abstract potential of motion picture medium.
A beautiful experience.

Bil Thompson. “The Tea Bag”
A clever play with audience identification, the film picks an unlikely object for sympathy—a teabag—and constructs a horrifying story of its death.
Mystical overtones stretch the simple act of making tea into epic proportions.
The teamaker, a woman, suddenly appears as a mass murder; her look into the
camera gives chills. Visually stunning, elegant, inventive, and deep without
being heavy. Where do teabags go when they die?

Andreas Flack. “Gardez!”
A visual piece gets all the more respect when its reliance on words is kept
to the minimum, while the emphasis is placed on frame, cut, and action. This
film duly deserves applause for its exclusively visual storytelling and extracting
the most laughs out of the least bit of action. Deceptively simple, the piece
brings a logical game of chess into juxtaposition with an absurd and comical
resolution. Connection to Marcel Duchamp is begging to be made. Special kudos
for the film’s smart self-referentiality: its last fade-out catches the actor
laughing at the camera, his tongue firmly against his cheek.