Rewind: David Rokeby
Art Gallery of Hamilton
David Rokebys new work Taken confronts its viewer with an immense split-screen projection: one half depicts a bustling crowd composed of varying degrees of opacity; the other consists of a grid of grey head shots. Although other works flicker in adjacent rooms (Shock Absorber and Cheap Imitation), Taken commands the full attention of anyone wandering into the Art Gallery of Hamiltons New Media Series offering.
It takes only moments to realize that the work depicts the room that you have just entered, and a moment more to pick yourself out of the crowd. Your image is being recorded and played in real time, and as you move, you move through a dense field of previously recorded people. Composed on the grand scale of 19th-century academic painting, this projected throng evokes the energy and noise of a crowded market. Kids run by. People wave and point. Your image stands in the midst of the commotion, and yet you are alone in the silence of an empty room.
Twenty seconds into viewing, you notice that a copy of yourself has re-entered the space, following the path you just wandered. After another 20 seconds, another you enters, and so on. You begin to play with the piece, using your body to lay visual tracks that indefinitely loop. Stand and your image darkens, like a photograph burned from overexposure. March in a circle long enough, and eventually an entire troop will marshal behind you.
As you move, however, you become a target for a robotic camera. An unrecognizably blurry image of your head, blown up to presidential proportions, briefly replaces the grid on the other half of the screen. Above your nearly anonymous visage, seemingly random titles like oblivious, implicated and unwilling are digitally appended. Here Rokeby panders to his audience with technical bravura, while trading on the cinematic conventions of grainy surveillance images to build dramatic tension. Whether hes attempting to sound an alarm or just trying to be funny with his implicating vocabulary, Rokeby offers little we dont already know about the problems that attend this technology in our lives.
In contrast, the first half of the project beautifully illustrates the audiences complicity through its seduction by the technology. Instead of being stark and crisp, the image is aggressively filtered; coloured sienna at first, over time the recordings fade, first to a burnt orange, and then to translucent raw ochre. The figures are recognizable but softened; details blur, and motion seems tempered into a more flowing and graceful version of reality.
Thirty years ago, Dan Graham ensnared his viewers in perceptual and temporal loops using nothing more than mirrors and video equipment. Rokeby similarly makes the viewer aware of his or her body in actual space through immediate comparisons of image with self. Surveying the immediate past while trapped in the present, viewers of Taken exist both inside and outside of the representation.
Although seduced by technology himself, Rokeby delivers a telling form of history painting for a century that promises a continued assault on attention span and public memory. Haunted by doppelgängers that dissolve into a background radiation of absence, one can observe the half-life of the present. Most unsettling is the heroic stature accorded his subject: a crowd milling about, enraptured by an image of itself.
Spring 2003
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
