The Flickering Self:
Video Shorts by Andrew Demirjian, Orlan, and Martin C. de Waal
— A program complementing Imago

March 1 – April 12, 2007

Andrew Demirjian’s short video Residence (view left) takes up the surveillance camera technique and anti-aesthetic to investigate notions of the self and self-portraiture. The self is split, as is the screen, along four channels of influence: What I’m doing, What I ought to be doing, What I want to be doing, What’s just outside my window—self-observation, conscience, desire, and reality. In Scenes From Next Week, Demirjian provides previews of mundane domestic chores to be anticipated “next week,” against an upbeat, urban-detective-show sound track. Only the rhetoric of an adventure score can mask and expose the redundancy of
our lives, Demirjian seems to say.

Search Engine puts into language—poetic, critical, media technological words—what Orlan’s Self-Hybridization series (view left) puts into brilliant imagery. These panels of text, as sheets of counterintuitive imagination and as skins of self-(de)inscription, offer antidotes to the security of sanctified notions of beauty and self. The residue that remains of the modern self is now to be gathered from virtual space. Passing from aesthetic to anesthetic, the self steers toward informational and digital dissemination.

Martin de Waal’s short film (last one on the left) pays homage to Bas Jan Ader (1942 – 1975), an influential Dutch/Californian performance artist, who was last seen in 1975 when he embarked on the smallest boat ever to attempt a crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Ader made a film in 1970 featuring a close-up of himself crying inexplicably. De Waal’s short borrows the same title and performance as Ader’s, but it carries a now more explicable sense of pathos, as tribute.