VIDEO>SCULPTURE

Video has had a long relationship with sculpture, from the stacked televison “gardens” of Nam June Paik and the closed-circuit corridors of Bruce Nauman to the more recent projections onto and into objects and architecture by the likes of Pipilloti Rist and Mona Hatoum.  With the now established practice of projecting hugely onto several walls at once, the white cube itself is made into a sculpture, subject to spatial manipulations.

This exhibition proposes to examine a different nexus of video and sculpture, one in which the making and/or history of the object is intimately connected to the video, as documentary or commentary.  Although the videos in “Video>Sculpture” are formally and conceptually engaged with the precedents and issues of video, and the sculptures are immersed in the phenomenal world, emphatically objects down to their metaphorical fingertips, in all these pairings there is a strong suggestion of cause and effect.  Yet, ultimately, that effect goes just off register, slightly askew.  Perhaps a documentary intention is derailed into the uncanny, or ironic reversals are instigated to create some kind of displacement, or cause and effect draw so close together,  have so little breathing space between them, that tautology emerges.  Whatever the procedure, in these video/sculpture couplings the if-then proposition is unseated, or at least made to wobble.