Saturday, November 18, 2006

Internet Video at Mission 17 (SF)

Alert: This exhibition is scheduled to close on 11/18/06.

The current exhibit at Mission 17 (closing today) is a selection of amateur internet videos, curated by Clark Buckner. It’s a doubtful premise, since thousands and thousands of such videos are available to anyone with a computer, 24 by 7.

But context changes things. My viewing of this show re-framed what I already knew about internet video. It made me realize how much of it falls into the category of body art. Pioneers of this type of art—such as Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and Marina Abramovic—have been succeeded on the internet by non-artists, first as a trickle and now a flood.

One clip from the show (photo above) reveals possibly the world's fattest dominatrix in a horsie scene with a man. One of her gambits is to lift her huge floppy belly with both hands and drop it onto the man's back. I have seen a lot, but I had not seen this before.

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