Video as a medium

Last weekend, a full year after it had started, Video Wednesdays at Delhi’s Gallery Espace came to an end. It was a simple idea — to devote a single Wednesday, every month, to video art. By the time it ended, it had managed to show the works of several artists without necessarily having an entire video show for them.

The three-day long grand finale — with “best of” menus featuring five curators —offered one the opportunity to consider the idea in hindsight.

It is clear that video today offers a highly flexible, multi-avatared, almost miraculous medium for artists. But is the strength of the medium enough to create really powerful works? I can’t be sure. There are several works that hold a viewer’s attention because they are able to use video, and because they use a narrative, easy-to-understand style. Apart from this, the moving image and the anticipation of the next frame holds a viewer’s attention quite differently from any other media. A narrative work by Umesh Madanahalli, for example, draws out a playful encounter at a bar that turns into a nightmare. Regardless of whether or not one would call it good video art, it was engaging only because of the sense of dread accompanying it. Works like this compelled one to ask how video was being used by contemporary artists.

 

This throws out a problem — is video merely a medium or does it open out new possibilities of practice? Video Wednesdays suggests it’s mostly the former, although there is some aspect of the latter in works like those by Shilpa Gupta and Sonia Khurana. Shilpa’s strangely dislocating, securitised landscape is an idea that likely exists only because of the accessibility of video. And Sonia’s “Breathe” is likely to be shorn of its intensity in any other medium. Still, without the finesse of Shilpa and Sonia, Kiran Caur Singh, also an artist represented here, presented a work comprising crackling fireworks, shot under poor light conditions and dwelling on a deep ennui. I have often wondered if she intended the drowsy stares her work elicited. If she did indeed, it is, in fact, a wonderfully provocative work. These works were, because video was.

Many other works didn’t share this exploration of video.

I was personally most struck by works that were not adapted to the medium of video. Ebenezer Singh, for example, uses a popular device of translating and subtitling songs from south Indian films. YouTube is already laden with these, mostly watched by the youth — presumably north Indians — for a patronising laugh. Her intervention as a video artist in the world of music videos was hard to make sense of. Yet, it also served as a reminder of the problematic in Indian video art — there are already thousands of people working with video, intervening in it, creating popular, everyday products. Not acknowledging this is fraught with risks, including the dreaded question, “So?” I’d extend this to other works that relied on the gimmicks of the medium to keep a viewer engaged. Personally, I find watching artists with a proven track record of being innovative merely pushing buttons for special effects disappointing.

At some level, the works in Video Wednesdays seem to have been superceded by the importance of the initiative in creating a space to engage with the genre itself. By showcasing a range of video works, some brilliant and others surprisingly boring, an opportunity arose to survey what lies within the bracket of Indian video art.

(bharati@chintan-india.org)