Could someone please pass me a socket wrench? Film still from Raw Footage, 2006 by Aernout Mik. (Images courtesy of MoMA.)
Scapegoats, 2006.
Highly addicted news junkies looking for a different kind of high should take a gander at the Aernout Mik videos currently scattered around the Museum of Modern Art. Just be prepared to be confused. Mik’s fictional scenarios, such as Scapegoats, at left, have no narrative, no sound, no beginning and no end. In them, various combinations of civilians, soldiers, students and politicians (or at least that’s who I think they are) amble about chaotically. At times they are aimless; at others, destructive. It’s like watching a reel produced by a highly cinematic security camera: it’s rather incomprehensible, yet you get the feeling that you’re seeing something very important.
Training Ground, 2006
None of it made much sense to me until I trudged down to MoMA’s dimly-lit basement to see Mik’s 2006 piece Raw Footage, which consists of two monitors showing snippets of raw news footage filmed by Reuters and ITN during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. People dash along streets as gunfire crackles in the distance. A tank tries to force its way through a grove of trees. A stray dog pesters a group of soldiers. Unlike Mik’s other pieces, this video contains sound. Not that it will help you figure out what the heck is going on, since you’ll hear little more than explosions. Without the omniscient voice of a BBC newscaster, providing death tolls and other important battle statistics, raw footage is rather meaningless.
But not entirely. What you do see — in Raw Footage, as well as in Mik’s fictional pieces — are situations in which the prevailing social order has been turned on its head. In so many cases, people look around desperately, as if to ask, “Who is in charge?” Mik has created his own raw footage. And it can be as grippingly voyeuristic as the real stuff on the BBC.
The exhibit its up through July 27.
