Viewing page 39 of 78

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

PINDELL

Information, Copenhagen, February 10, 1977

Video-drawings

These days many artists are engaged in experiments with television and video. This is something that we are not too familiar with in our country, but at the present time we have had the possibility to receive several offers in Copenhagen. Tranegarden has just closed a small, but instructive exhibition by Bruce Nauman, Dennis Oppenheim and Keith Sonnier. In "Huset" several artists are having a festival combining happenings and video. And in Kunstforeningrn there is an exhibition of "video-drawings" by the American artist Howardena Pindell, which were earlier shown at the Fyns Stifts Museum. 

Howardena Pindell combines drawing with video or television pictures. The drawings are based on baseball games, and are apparently consisting of a series of play analysis in terms of diaframs and schemes which graphically insist the strategy or the progress of development. Drawings on transparent paper are mounted on the TV-screen and photographed during a series of arbitrarily choosen programs. The result looks like a searching in Americana, where the baseball game has the metaphorical function which is well known from American film and literature (Malmud and Roth). 

These are in a way very American pictures, but the society-metaphore is not the most important part in the case of Pindell. The arbitrary TV pictures are not so arbitrary after all...they are nearly all taken from different sport programs, and are all, one way or the other full of action. They are pictures showing energy and strength in movement. Often the movement is accentuated by the unsharp or multiplied contures that a turbulent camera gives. 

It is, in other words, different, if though familiar, kinds of dynamics put up against each other, a stating and a bringing together of powers and movements which are working with and agains one another on different levels. There are different layers of meaning in the picture, but the one is filtered through the other. 

Instead of double exposing, which would be banal and without perspective, Pindell has rewritten one play... one set of energy- to a system of signs ( arrows, crosses, and numbers) while the other remains readable as " motive", through in the caracteristic twist caused by the media, via TV and camera.

Howardena Pindell's video drawings take their star from a situation of analysis, but from this crystalline poetic qualities which are often surprising and unexpected. They are a good proof that in New York very exciting things are happening just beneath the surface of the established art-scene, which still borrows is glorified aura from the almost mythological names of the sixties. 

Øystein Hjort