CE MONDE TEL QUE NOUS LE VOYONS EST EN TRAIN DE PASSER

The above sentence by Paul from Tarsus as quoted by Paul Virilo in the motto in his book "Aesthetics of Disappearence (Esthetique de la disparation, 1979) seems to be an appropriate indroduction for the foreword to an exhibition of video art. For video (not necessarily video art) plays one of the central roles in the "disappearance" of our world: not only does it offer a visual image of what "our" world is. It is at the same time an essential symptomatic part of this same world, and foremost, it presents what this world would like to be as well as the fiction which it intentionally construes about itself. A similar position was that of television in the sixties and the newspaper and wireless before it.

At the same time video is something different from previous media, for today it differs from them in the technical aspect and in the opportunities it offers - and not simply by the medium it uses. For video nowadays is in principle a parasite of television. We should ask ourselves if video clips (even if they were technically feasible) would have any importance if television didn't exist. It is also symptomatic that the producers of the more important half of the videos by Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid are television companies. What video establishes is the essential part of the new "mode of information", to use a term by Mark Poster, i.e. the electronic mode of information in which the computer is integrated as the second element (essentially tried to video) of this new reality and new world. The world as we knew it is disappearing and this fact and how it is disappearing can be seen. Visually has emerged as the dominant mode of our communication with the world and of the world with us.

Video is more than just a constituent part of the present restructuring and of the "complexification" of the world in which we live. Not only because video offers these two processes to be seen, as every work of art or culture and as any medium. Video shows us the existing world - let us call it postmodern, on its terms and in its own way, one which is not necessarily our own. What is this way? Let us start with video. When we watch video, "we are in cinema-speed and not in a cinema-time". "For me", continues Virilio, "video is a void. It is something that is in ether, in electronic ether."

We could add that video also evokes the feeling of the sublime. Immanuel Kant to whom the majority of contemporary writings on the sublime refers, writes in the õ 25 of "The Critique of judgement" that the sublime feeling is evoked by something that we experience as absolutely great and beyond comparison. The sublime differs from the sublime feeling which we experience when gazing at preciptious mountains or trying to imagine the void of outer space. The sublime is not beautiful. Neither is video; it is interesting, cold, haughty, removed and aesthetic.

It is no coincidence that in the last decade the sublime became an important theoretical issue for the first time since romanticism. Obviously something in contemporary art and culture conforms with this feeling which we seemingly cannot define either as beautiful or as true in their literal meaning. "It is really quite misguided to hope to find truth by seeking it... Fortunately, art is not so misguided. It knows full well that ilusion is the only way to find anything, for if something is to be found - but 'found' without being sought - this can only really occur by the alternative route of something else.(*1)

Video evokes the feeling of the sublime. As far as it is art it causes an illusion by the way in which we attain truth. Nevertheless, if we view a video clip as presently the most widespread form of video, we can ask ourselves whether this form evokes in us an illusion similar to the one referred to by Baudrillard which will guide us to the truth? Obviously not. The same Buadrillard states: "Art entered the phase of its own idefinite reproduction; everything that redoublesin itself, even ordinary, everyday reality, falls in the same stroke under the sign of art, and becomes aesthetic.(*3)

Simulation, hyperreality, are consequences of this form of video as one which has so far developed and used the possibilities offered by video technology to the utmost limit. (Perhaps the same would apply to Prospero's Books, a video film by Peter Greenaway.) A video clip does not refer to reality, or represent the world outside of itself, but is instead a total aesthetization: Madonna on video is pure simulation, constituted by the rhythm of the clip. It uses and simultaneously construes the speed of which Virilio speaks. Video erases reality and replaces it with virtuality which, due to the perfected simulation of reality (which is really non-existent) achieves a greater reality effect than reality itself could accomplish.

On the contrary, in "Bilocation" (1990) or "Three Sisters" (1992) by Grzinic and Smid we encounter reality: scenes from the 1991 summer war in Slovenia as well as destroyed Osijek and Vukovar - all show the real which invades the illusion of the video film. The illusion of the narration is interrupted: "Three Sisters" become three sisters, three women who simultaneously refer to motifs from Chekhov, three strories about women, a walk on a razor's edge between fiction and documentary - and through all this, the political reality seeps in as if through seams.

Nevertheless, this political reality and the reality of war are but two extremes; most obvious and striking forms of the negation of the simultation which video usually realizes so succesfully. These video films in their other aspect, the aspect of feminine visual/audio (= video) writing are also present and show the real, only that this time it is personal, private, and thus the very opposite of the first. At this stage it is useful to remember the historic field of reference which the two directors share with some other Slovene artists from the eighties. This refers to their 4unearthing of Russian suprematism and constructivism and of the conflict between revolution, personal and private life and art. We encounter here an almost impossible, but artistically extremely productive position of russian artistic avant-garde; to carry out revolution in pure art and, simultaneously, as if on its back side, to carry out social revolution of October proportions. Could we conclude that video art, or at least a part of it, is a continuation of the traditional partisanship in art? If we limit ourselves to the work of our two artists the answer is decidedly negative. Firstly, because the art of October was not partisan, either in the manner of productivists, or in the manner of intellecutal bourgois. Secondly, the answer is negative because this art is situated within postmodernist, the ambivalence of which was well described by Terry Eagleton, when he wrote that "Much postmodernist culture is both radical and conservative, oconoclastic and incorporated, in the same breath". But then perhaps in both the historic cases mentioned we encounter the same binarity which could then enable us to explain the obsession of postmodernist art in postsocialist societies or in the same countries at the time of expiration of socialism with the same historic artistic avant-gardes.

Without elaborating on McLuhan's ideas we can claim that a lot of what he said about television applies to video too. Also because we experience video almost exclusively through the television screen. "When images chosen and constructed by "someone else" have everywhere become the individual's principal connection to the world he formerly observed for himself, it has certainly not been forgotten that these images can tolerate anything and everywhere become the individual's principal connection to the world he formerly observed for himself, it has certainly not been forgotten that these images can tolerate anything and everything; because within the same image all things can be juxtaposed without contradiction." Video has pushed this feature to its present utmost limit. This is witnessed by music video clips and video art alike.

At the same time, as Baudrillard mentions in 'The Revenge of the Crystal', "things always outlive their usefulness". Therefore a comparison between the cinema and television on the one hand and video on the other appear to be erroneous. That this is true suffices for us to see the video art of Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid. These works too, are proof that video today represents a crucial transformation in the history of representation. Video art creates sublime feelings. It does so when it recycles the film narrative of the fifties, as the directors do in the video "At Hhome" (1987) and prior do that in "Moments of Decision" (1952) when the two artists infiltrate the film by Frantisek Cap "Moments of Decision" (1952). This infiltration, which of course, provokes a complete semantic transformation of the primary film, achieves an aesthetized form in Moscow Portraits where a metamorphoses the persons portrayed, who, by the means of computer animation, change before our eyes. How could we use cinema or television theory, not to mention photographic theory, to describe these procedures and the meaning they create? Video art is neither the "continuation" of television or cinema art, nor its culmination. Video art is art - yes, art, still art! Art again? Through its specific mode it marks our time of change. Through feminine stories, video narration, technically produced effects, montage and, last but not least, the chronological survey of video films of the two artists from their beginnings up to the present time we can discern this transition responses to them, and fear. At the same time we can also have an inkling of broader changes in sensibility and of the disappearence of a certain world we knew. Stefan Zweig, Thomas Mann? Video is siumltaneously a component of the emerging world and the recorder of the disappearing one. It's art, of course! (Video art).