A Rough Mix (excerpt) (2007, 140MB, 8 min.)
Excerpt from a single channel and a looping installation DVD by Rick Silva.
Oh this is smart & rich & lovely work!
You think perhaps the remix idea has colonised all of our thoughts
& our work to the level of clich�.
(So maybe all that remains is to classicize it – to do it better & better,
which is certainly something Silva, in various guises, has recently done..)
One day, someone describes this work in words to you & you
might, if of a cynical turn of mind, think – ‘Ho-Hum!’
Then you actually look at it & there’s something alchemic going on.
From a fairly base metaphor, Rick Silva conjures a work of elegance,
substance & great beauty – a beauty not only visual but moral.
Look at it! – it’s a paean to the planet but many other things too:
the scratching becomes dance, it’s a dance film!
The music is so carefully cut (but in such an apparently offhand way,
the way one imagines the mythical 19th century gentleman
would cut): it’s a music video!
It’s a travelogue (but its editing would not have made sense
before the net).
Each basic level constantly & fruitfully gives rise to other emergent
meanings which in turn reseed new ways of thinking about the piece
– the mark of a serious & substantial work of art.
PS Interesting to compare this with Cary Peppermint’s recent
Series of Practical Performances in the Wilderness
– another work that is in a sense engaged around loosely ecological
themes, very much the zeitgeist, (but reasonably so!)
& whose artistic qualities are not confined, limited, by that engagement…
PPS Now I think about it – there’s all the wonderful stuff by Stallbaum & Poole too.
That fits in somewhere too…
PPPS Personally I like this much more than Silva’s recap – for me, in that, there was a sense in which the formal structure based on a kind of repetition over a long period eventually closes
us off ( although one can of course see how that work might have been
a very necessary staging post to this)
– here there’s a fantastic sense of opening-out
Exhilarating!
