Two Moments from the Post-Medium Condition

Abstract

Bruce Nauman 's video Lip Synch (1969) shows the artist's head upside down and close up, his inverted mouth at the bottom of the screen repeating the words lip synch, as the sound gradually moves out of synch with the image, this drift transforming the engorged neck and pulsating mouth into a part object, erotically charged. The video clearly pays homage to the technical breakthrough in film history when, in 1929, synch sound did away with silent film and brought a new dimension to cinema. Video, a later generation of motion-picture technology, had synchronous sound available to it right from the start. It is to this dimension that Nauman points in Lip Synch. Christian Marclay 's magisterial work Video Quartet (2002) spreads four separate screens of DVD projection across forty feet of wall, each screen showing the unreeling of a compilation of film clips from well-known works of sound cinema. The four different tracks compete for attention for the most part, but occasionally they display the same image, creating synchronicity along the horizontal expanse of the work. The effect, not unlike Hollis Frampton's Zorns Lemma (1970), is a visual grid: the vertical axis becomes the unreeling narrative of the constitutive shots including Janet Leigh's scream in the shower from Psycho (1960), or the meditative humming of Ingrid Bergman's As Time Goes By from Casablanca (1942) the horizontal one, the repetition of the visual fields, or the competition among them for dominance. Repetition is, for the most part, a matter of analogy, as when the full-screen image of a spinning roulette wheel rhymes visually with a record on a turntable, as well as with the circles of drumheads seen from above. These turning disks, needless to say, create the kind of self-reference here to the reels of film itself familiar to us from modernist art.