May 21, 2004
Aeronaut Mik at The Project
An Artforum.com review of the Aeronout Mik exhibition at The Project. The link dies in two months, so here's the full text:
Dutch artist Aernout Mik is a prodigious maker of video installations who, having been celebrated on the European museum circuit for several years, is presenting his New York solo debut at the Project. Parallel Corner, 2003, the only work in the show, is a silent four-channel video loop that debuted last autumn at the Istanbul Biennial. The cameras pan smoothly yet restlessly, as if on surveillance duty, across two scenes that bleed together. (Staged simultaneously in a warehouse, they were cleverly filmed to allow people near-seamless movement across screens.) In one, dozens of cameramen and reporters jostle for position before an older man and his younger attaché. In the other, children play among decrepit cars, oblivious to the other scene. The projections span two six-foot-high walls joined at a slightly oblique angle whose placement, close to the room's entrance, seems slightly aggressive, suggesting the street barricades of social protest. Are the events we're seeing wholly fictional? Are the two scenes related by more than physical proximity? Mik's calculated nonstance itself raises other, larger questions: Is such ambiguity necessarily productive? Whether you think so or not, Parallel Corner is surely seductive.