REVIEW OF
LIVING PICTURES
FROM THE EXHIBITION 8 WOMEN—THE ART OF COLLABORATION
THE LOUISVILLE VISUAL ART ASSOCIATION, LOUSIVILLE, KENTUCKY
BY DIANE HEILENMAN, THE COURIER-JOURNAL, JULY 3, 2005
(Excerpted
from the orignial article)
Also engaging are the collaborative "Living Pictures" by Monica
Duncan of Louisville and Lara Odell of California. The series of six
videos are 8:29 to 11:30 minutes long each, which precluded this critic's
watching them all. However, the idea is gleaned from something like
"Blue Station," which presents two immobile women dressed
in blue against a blue building and a time sequence in which they do
not move but the wind blows the leaves of a tree, traffic passes and
we hear street sounds. The the kick occurs. A figure suddenly and slowly
does change position, becoming immobile again. It is a similar situation,
different sites, different colors, in "Sunday at the Center"
and "Saturday at the Park."
The point is more than an exercise in how long a viewer's attention
span can be challenged without action. These "Living Pictures"
recall the fad some years back for making live tableau of famous paintings,
but go it one better: The video paintings recover the oxymoron of art—that
it is, after all, realistic artifice. The distance between the realities
we perceive as real continues to decrease in the electronic world until
it is nearly impossible to distinguish "real" reality from
second–, third–, or 10th–level reality.
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