(above) Desperate Attempts in Making Something Out of Nothing: Towards an Illegitimate Practice, video still of Werk/Play, 2004. (Installation detail at the University Art Gallery, University of California, Irvine). "Borrowed" video cart from the Dept. of Studio Art mounted on the wall, TV, DVD, color sound, 30 minutes. Photograph by Christine Nguyen. (right) Various stills from Desperate Attempts, 2004-5.
This series of videos is a work in process which initially evolved as a side project. Every day for a period of several months I attempted to record an impromptu action; there are currently more than 50 short videos in the series. It is a remaking and reworking of classic conceptual video acts, an opportunity for me, as a young artist, to grapple with issues such as questions of authorship, the limitations of a medium/end of art, and obsolescence in art history, theory, and contemporaneity (the quality of belonging to the present time). Employing a shuffling mechanism, the video randomly plays each individual act, revealing historical lapses and repetitions versus using a singular looped sequence.
I want to make a distinction between work and labor . Hannah Arendt argued that the word "work" (werk) connotes an action stemming from a mastery with objects. Work is like a trade, an expertise. Labor on the other hand implicates the notion of pain. To labor over something is to trouble yourself over a task, a "painful drudgery." It is within this context, the conflation of work into labor, do I feel provides an adequate background for my video piece. Referential to pop culture, political theory, and employing slapstick as a way to critique commodity fetishism, the video sculpture is an irreverent meditation on art practice– its specialization and professional turn. Through absurd and seemingly arbitrary and quotidian tasks, the video attempts to articulate a practice that doubles as an artistic service, thus questioning the division between what is considered arbitrary and legitimate.
"...the games of artists and aesthetes and their struggle for the monopoly of artistic legitimacy are less innocent than they seem. At stake in every struggle over art there is also the imposition of an art of living...the transmutation of an arbitrary way of living into the legitimate way of life which casts every other way of living into arbitrariness." - Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction.