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An Albanian video artist works between sound and image
Screen Gems
by Kim Levin
October 25th, 2004 4:45 PM

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A still from Dammi i Colori (2003)

Anri Sala
Marian Goodman Gallery
24 West 57th Street
Through November 13

Was it really only a couple of years ago that we were all overdosing on 
video art? One white-cube gallery after another was turning into a 
black box. Artists who had made their names with sculpture, 
installation, or painting were turning to video, and we began to balk 
at being asked to spend 10 minutes, or an hour, or 24, sitting on a 
floor in the dark watching something more likely to be insufferable or 
inscrutable than terrific?even though a generation nurtured on the boob 
tube was easily transfixed by anything that resembled television.

  Anri Sala, the internationally hot young Albanian artist making his 
solo debut in New York this month, knows how to hold our attention. But 
his relatively simple single-channel videos use no installational 
theatrics, no virtuosic manipulations, no clever ploys. "We go to 
cinemas to escape," he said in 2001. "We go to art spaces to confront 
something." Sala's straightforward approach comes as something of a 
shock. An early piece, Intervista?Finding the Words (1997), which 
involved a Soviet-era interview with his own mother, its missing 
soundtrack, and a disconnect between old meanings and new in the face 
of a new reality, was as political as it was personal. "When the system 
breaks down and the ideology disappears, the language becomes even 
grammatically incorrect," notes the artist. Uomoduomo, at the 2001 
Venice Biennale, which focused on an old man nodding off in church, 
negotiated an uneasy truce between consciousness and unconsciousness, 
transcendence and oblivion.

  Sala didn't paint the Tirana facades in Dammi i Colori (Give Me the 
Colors), in his current show. Others did, as part of an ongoing project 
initiated by Edi Rama, the city's mayor and a former artist, who takes 
us on a tour?with English subtitles?past the oddly intense crazy quilts 
of saturated color that festoon the drab city's decaying buildings. 
What at first seems an eerily schizoid imposition of formal modern 
decoration onto the wretched realities of a bleak post-apocalyptic 
place?crumbling walls, rummaging inhabitants, bare trees bleached by 
the glare of the artist's headlights?reveals itself as a post-utopian 
project. "The city was dead. It looked like a body," intones the mayor, 
who has pinned his hopes on this quixotic social experiment. "What are 
the colors doing to us?" Sound?deep, ambient, and urban?plays a 
unifying role in Sala's video, as if underscoring the mayor's words: 
"Color also has another role, it must bind together."

  Mixed Behavior, which reverberates with the roar of explosions, 
thunder, and throbbing music on a suspended monitor in a pitch-black 
room, offers a similar equation of festivity, destruction, and 
against-all-odds effort as a DJ alone on a rooftop works his decks 
under a tarp, illuminated by flashes of lightning and bursting 
fireworks. What looks and sounds like warfare?or a disco light show?is 
simply a battle against the elements on an anarchic New Year's Eve.

  Two other works, shot in Senegal, are even more directly about the 
migration of meaning and the futility of translation. Sala's art slips 
between sound and image, voice and vision, the legible and the visible, 
the abstract and the social, belief and mistrust?eluding symbolism and 
interpretation. It's about looking and listening. As the artist told me 
on the phone last week, "The formal things are pretty important, not 
because I'm attached to any formalism but because they're things that 
bring image, not things that bring explanation. They're things that you 
fail to translate or explain by words. I'm interested in when language 
fails to respond to the needs we have. That's when the visual becomes 
important. Language already has a lot of power in the world, even more 
than sex."


On Oct 27, 2004, at 12:17 AM, integer at www.god-emil.dk wrote:
>
> http://www.google.com/search?q=dopamine+levels+sex
> http://www.google.com/search?q=dopamine+levels+democracy
>
> http://cms.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20040921-000001.html
>
> "I can't stand his smell."
>
> xy: she = simply.cucu
>
> poor ivo
>
>> .yu = .us
>
> ivo = ivo
>