Recently UK artist Michael Szpakowski posted a review of MTAA’s “Five Small Videos…” to the Rhizome RAW list. He has graciously allowed it to be republished here.

I meant to post awhile back to say how much I’d liked the MTAA “Five Small Videos About Interruption and Disappearing.”

Like them very much I do; but they also intrigue me. The blurb says they are inspired by early performance videos - a genre and a period which I enjoy a lot. There was a marvellous exhibition at the ICA here about a year ago of single channel video works - lots of Acconci, Baldessari and also early Nauman -wonderful stuff.

One thing that occurs to me about the MTAA response is firstly how *elegant* it is - & this is a quality of all their work - elegance and thoroughness, or perhaps elegance due to thoroughness - one could never accuse them of a lack of craft. This is in stark contrast to the sheer edginess and sense of ( often literal!) danger in much of that early video work. Doing my sums I can’t put this down to the newness of video as a medium - actually I suspect that the technologies used by MTAA are newer relative to them.

There’s a temptation to see this piece ( and others such as the one year performance piece) as a sort of conceptual post modernist whimsy, beautifully made but essentially a clever formal exercise.

I think this would be wrong - actually there seems to me to be a feel of “classicism” about this work - the elegance seems not a symptom or a bolt on but a very much integral part of the work.

I see this happening quite a lot -its as if in the shadow of high modernism it wasn’t quite respectable to use the methods and the language of the past without being *ironic* or having a high concept. Now all those barriers have long been broken we can simply move on to using a good move no matter when or where we saw it.

SO specifically here it’s as if the artists of the seventies having blazed a trail, created edgy stuff in a kind of white heat, MTAA are examining the language and the practice with the benefit of a couple of decades of hindsight and appropriating *what fits*, *what works* into their own practice.

And the resultant work for me isn’t simply clever or knowing but actually quite touching - I’m quite moved by these two characters in the videos ( and there are longer backward shadows cast here - Laurel and Hardy, Abbott and Costello, the *comic film duo* , spring to mind).

Certainly the piece feels to me to have many resonances that go beyond the intellectual, the clever, the knowing and enter the world of the affective.

Read the rest of the RAW thread here (1st page free, members-only after that). permanent link to this post