indeterminate states

Indeterminate States: Video in the
Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection

Curated by: Michael Rush

December 3, 2005 - February 3, 2006
 
As video art has matured from its earliest, performance-based roots, artists have embraced an idea-driven process that today is more abstract and poetic. As if melding the non-narrative energy of James Joyce with Marcel Duchamp’s utter openness to anything being the potential substance of art, contemporary media artists—those with an elegant idea supported by firm technique—are creating new filmic experiences, experiences that differ essentially from movies and television. Like many artists whose works are based on the same contemporary conceptual foundations, these artists are often somewhat abstruse in their work, more suggestive than concrete: in a sense, more abstract. Their work is perhaps best understood as “indeterminate”: that is, possessing a certain mystery that is not bound by particulars, whether of place or of personality.

The video art gathered in the Ella Fontanals Cisneros media collection (a collection still in its nascent stages) represents this sensibility: an artful, even dramatic, involvement in the human condition-but expressed obliquely, which, oddly enough, often makes the work more universal.

From the performance works of Ana Mendieta and Marina Abramovic to the multi-screen installations of Julian Rosefeldt and Kutlug Ataman, Indeterminate States offers an intimate exposure to major video artists and those newly emerging on the international scene. Several of these artists are fulfilling the promise offered by Andy Warhol in the 1960s of creating a new filmic art. I say "filmic" because, to these artists, traditional cinematic ingredients--such as richly textured images and multiple shots contributing to an overall consuming visual experience, attainable now through affordable digital technology--are central to this work. In their installations, tradition meets the conceptual, non-narrative poetics of contemporary media art.

Michael Rush
Guest Curator, cifo