And, of course, it often ends up in even poorer resolution on YouTube. Ster Kinekor's old adline is true: it is always bigger on the big screen. Even that wouldn't redeem a lot of the poorer work on show here, but it would add an intensity, a feeling of immersion, to the best works that would lift them to a higher realm.
The topic, despite its clunky wording, is a lovely one, and several artists produce stand-out works which rise to the sky itself. Georgie Papageorge's documentation of three remarkable land-based events she facilitated/curated treads the line between video art and doccie, although it feels a little churlish to say so, so consummate is the production and so astounding the works being documented. In fact, they really deserve a full-scale documentary. At the same time, I wouldn't have minded watching a different, even less linear and more experiential edit of it that concentrated purely on the conceptual, visual and human beauty of the event. But I'm splitting hairs and Papageorge's twin vision of planetary movement and deep humanism is remarkable.
Diek Grobler's Melancholy at Departure made lovely use of somewhat over-mined motifs and while its spirit was a little too close to Kentridge for comfort, the work felt, like Kentridge's works often do, like a film for an art gallery. In other word, it felt like video art, rather than simply a short film. And yes, I know that's an arbitrary distinction, but Kentridge, however unfashionable it may be to like him, is a solid benchmark; his moving images feel utterly at home in a gallery but would be just as resonant projected onto a city block.
Rat Western's contribution, Territory, was beautifully rendered and echoed my concerns with framing the medium by literally making use of gilded frames in the virtual gallery she constructs in her work. But the popular conundrum she poses that 'a perfectly accurate map would be perfectly useless' is no longer true, since technology and a scrolling, zooming video screen now allow us to map the world with such accuracy that the digital maps of the earth at maximum zoom are in fact much larger than the planet itself. Which may or may not be part of the work.
The piece that most impressed was Brent Meistre's remarkable very short stop-motion film The stranger who licked salt back into our eyes, featuring Meistre himself as a stranger in an even stranger land, accompanied by a slowed-down but still haunting recording of the Makeba-Belafonte version of Malaika. Beautifully produced and edited, the work shows Meistre to be a master of his medium. And not just because he's so good with a camera but because he understands how easy it is to play with illusions, in our heads, on the screen. And also that we can always we do with some fresh strands of mythology.
One of my favourite works was very similar to one of my least favourite, and oddly enough, they both come from the same artist, Sesule Loyiso Lwazi Mkungela. Mkungela's Ebholorweni ya ka Mandela (At the Mandela Bridge) and Ixesha (Time) both present time-lapse studies of Johannesburg. But the latter work lacked both the deftness and the conceptual precision of the first; the use of clock images to hammer home the message of its title, suggests that the delicate beauty of Ebholorweni ya ka Mandela might just be a fluke. But I hope not. It's a beautiful work, presenting Johannesburg in all its specificity and also as a universal city in which we are all, like the taxis and buses that appear on the screen for a fraction of a second, ghosts of transcience.
Of the poorer works, and many of them require a reading of the well-produced mini-catalogue to work out what they're on about, many might well have been redeemed in the context of the exhibitions from which I presume they were culled. But they simply don't work as stand-alone pieces or in the context of the other works presented here. And some of them feel as if you're standing at someone's computer screen while they're showing you what they've just learnt with their animation programme.
In my limited travels around the world, I have, on occasion, spent some time with various video archives. And I am struck by the fact that older work, which was produced within far more technically demanding and limiting parameters, is often of a higher quality and interrogates the medium with greater rigour than much of the more recently produced work. Of course, the ease of access to audio-visual technology in the 21st century means that anyone can do it (and many, many people do at some point). Which is not unrelated to one of the things that struck me about much of the less satisfying work here. Many of the pieces are exploring what the technology – the software – is capable of, rather than what the moving image itself is capable of.
These are NOT same thing. It's telling that the greatest artistic success of James Cameron' Avatar was the fact that so few people focused on its three dimensions. And Cameron is right – when the technology works properly, it should be invisible. With too many of the works on show here, all you see is the technology or the medium – and not even in some clever-clever postmodern way.
Finally, as I mentioned before, it's likely that many of these works will find an inevitable home on YouTube – and not on a city block or in a large scale projection booth. But only a handful of them will rise above the sea of moving images that is, for me at least, one of humankind's greatest, most profound and most inconsistent legacies.
