Past Events at the Grand Central Art Center Project Room
Thematic unity for the exhibit is achieved by the black box constructions in which the videos are screened. These constructions create darkened, intimate environments, which evoke the space of the confession, the home, and the voyeur. The single person booths privilege viewing as a private experience, emphasizing that spectators primarily watch video (television being the usual format), unlike film, individually or in intimate groups. Each video and spectator, thus, appears to be sealed off from the rest. However, outside of the booth/home, the videos act in conjunction to create a cacophony of sound and flickering images, emulating in their collage-like simultaneity the postmodern habit of channel surfing, the barrage of media information the average person negotiates daily, and the ever present humming of a collective--albeit, physically separated--audience for the endless stream of video produced by our culture.
As is fitting for Southern California, an advertising and consumerism mecca, one of the weeks is devoted to television ads. By explicitly crossing into the popular domain for this week, Six Booths in Seven Weeks blurs the boundary between video as art and video as disseminator of mass media message, thereby making the assertion that creative or innovative works can erupt through the cracks of the advertising industry. The inclusion of advertisements also gestures towards video art's continual association with its more popular sibling and art's struggle to critique the ways in which television mediates between the individual and society.
