Strange Bedfellows: LOOP video art fair and revolutionary instants in Barcelona

Approaching its 9th year Barcelona’s LOOP video art fair once again returned to its annual presentation format; renting a hotel for 3 days, inviting 40 odd galleries to show in 40 rooms and waiting for the buyers to roll up.

Whilst the notion of a fair is baldly a marketplace proposition, the event was also ostensibly an open spectator event in the 10 day LOOP video art festival, suggesting not only commerce, but hopefully a look at contemporary practice across European and North American dealer galleries.

This year the venue was once again the 4 star Hotel Catalonia Ramblas. Walking past reception towards the ground floor suite of guest rooms the first obvious question was context; stepping outside of the white cube how would the works look relative to a double mattress, towels and room service?

At the opening, gallery attendants played chaperone, welcoming guests who lounged on the bed or perched on makeshift chairs somewhere between bedside table and wardrobe. Most of the work showed as large projections on a screen bracketed between floor and ceiling. First impressions were of strange conflicts between image quality and scale; while the HD videos survived being projected to fill a wall, others shot on much lower-res digital were ugly fields of over-stretched pixels.

Not all of the work showed just in the bedroom, some galleries setting up screens in the bathroom and quite literally offering the opportunity to watch their artists works whilst sitting on the toilet; an interesting alternative for those who usually undertake their daily ablutions armed with a battered copy of VIZ, Rod and Reel or Majesty magazine. Later this sometime-extension of the fair into the bathroom led me to bravely open another door, only to discover an elderly gent relieving himself.

And what of the work? Ah yes, the work.

Some dealers had obviously attuned their presentation towards the domestic and offered works of decorative abstraction or icy mountain melancholia. More meaty was Eve Sussman and Simon Lee’s 3 screen video of tarnished architectural facades entitled Wintergarden, which spoke to the failure of political economies in the eastern bloc. However, its time-lapse photography of passing seasons across decaying architecture seemed all too obvious. Granted, this was a work trading on painterly formality, but perhaps the worst feeling one can have when watching a time-based work is the realisation that you know exactly what’s going to happen.

Other pieces were more bombastic, but not necessarily any more enervating; Kent Monkman’s Dance to Miss Chief juxtaposed the artist as high camp performer next to images of fictitious Native American feature film character Winnetou. Perhaps in the heady atmosphere of 1990s new media art this 2 screen work might have seemed a provocative reclamation of a pop culture icon as high camp hero, but here it failed to raise any sense of sexual frisson.

Much better was Joao Onofre’s Untitled (SUN 2500), in which a sailing boat was hoisted through the blue skies above a Portugese suburb and lowered into a backyard pool. Surreal, majestic and dryly comic, the work was a beautifully clear-sighted intervention in urban architectural space.

Perhaps the more pertinent question was not what’s showing but who’s buying. As I walked from room to room, I repeatedly ran into to one American buyer who earnestly asked questions to the vendors about the meaning of the work, whilst taking notes, as if to penetrate the mystery. In another hotel suite one gallerist had attempted to lend fetish object status to the work for potential buyers by placing what appeared to be a DVD on a white pillow inside a perspex display cabinet, illuminated by the bedside lamp.

This year’s fair drew significantly less numbers than previous, a situation put down by some to more pressing concerns and distractions. Outside the Hotel in the Plaza de Catalunya thousands of protestors held a 24 hr vigil angrily protesting rising unemployment and political corruption. Around the corner at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge the exhibition 1979 A Monument to Radical Instants offered a sprawling catalogue of uprising, protest and pop culture. If an obvious comparison, the events outside Hotel Catalonia Ramblas made LOOP fair’s marketplace manoevures seem painfully lacking in critical drive and agency.

Perhaps the last word remained with one of Hotel Ramblas lobby paintings. Looming over a TV monitor advertising the fair and covered in heavy layers of grey circular gloop, it could well have been a prop for George Barber’s sly and witty 2003 video about participating a in an art show sponsored by a concrete manufacturer. Addressing the intersection of art and commerce, Barber’s work bore the merry title I Was Once Involved In A Shit Show.

 

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