Visual arts review: I am a Camera/Barbara Probst

Published on Monday 13 July 2009 19:03

I AM A CAMERA *** SORCHA DALLAS, GLASGOW BARBARA PROBST *** STILLS GALLERY, EDINBURGH

VIDEO is taken for granted these days as an artistic medium, and the range is diverse, from works like Douglas Gordon's Zidane, which wouldn't be out of place in a mainstream cinema, to experimental shorts which push film in new and often difficult directions.

The playbill of films currently showing at Sorcha Dallas, which traces links between early artists' films from the 1950s and 1960s and the work of Scottish contemporary artists, is in the second category. All of these films are in some way concerned with the relationship between art and moving image, where the act of drawing meets the art of the camera.

The age of a work of art frequently has nothing to do with how fresh it looks. The oldest film here, Len Lye's Free Radicals, made in 1950, sparkles with energy. In it, he pioneers the idea of drawing and scratching directly on to the film, resulting in a fluid, moving line which marries perfectly with the energy of his jazz soundtrack. It stands on the cusp between drawing and film – not just taking a line for a walk, but making it dance.

If Free Radicals looks new, Katy Dove's animations look retro, despite having access to digital techniques Lye couldn't dream of. Her dancing kaleidoscopes are based on hand-drawn shapes, like abstract paintings brought to life, and have a similarly integral relationship to music. The newer piece here, Welcome, has a soundtrack by Muscles of Joy, of which Dove is a member, with several other Glasgow artists.

Forty years ago, John Latham was animating shapes in a much more confrontational way. Speak, made in 1962, is an 11-minute endurance test of throbbing, flashing images, with a frenzied soundtrack which finds its way into your head like a trapped wasp. It makes its point, pushing film to a point at which it is barely watchable.

Kate Davis's first film, Disgrace, is also a bit of an endurance test. She, too, is exploring a place where drawing meets film, as well as continuing her dialogue with the representations of women in art history. The camera focuses for ten-second intervals on a nude by Modigliani, each time showing more scribbled lines which Davis has added. Between each is ten seconds of black-out in which a chorus of voices chant "Boo-hoo, boo-hoo". This goes on for nine-and-a-half minutes, and instead of working with what the medium has to offer, it barely seems like film at all, just a sequence of still images punctuated by sound.

Home by Steina & Woody Vasulka, feels like a piece of playful experimentation, subjecting different household objects to a series of imaging processes and animating them. It is, perhaps, a still life set in motion, though it feels as though the couple's concerns are less with weight of art history than, "What happens if you do this to the tea pot?"

It makes an interesting comparison with Craig Mulholland, who uses some similar types of image processing combined with stop-frame devices. Like his installations, Mulholland's films are rich, cerebral and highly polished, referencing writers and thinkers, Old Masters and Moderns. His 2004 film Plastic Casino explores not only a rich web of ideas but also the possibilities of mood which cinema offers. As a darkly surreal urban journey, it rewards repeat viewings.

Meanwhile, New York- and Munich-based artist Barbara Probst at Stills Gallery is concerned with the still image. She creates complex photoshoots where several cameras – sometimes as many as 12 – are triggered to capture the same scene from different angles at exactly the same moment. She enhances the differences between them by making some black and white, some zoomed in and so on.

Some of her scenes are would-be fashion shoots, but polished and clever as they are they have little to hold our interest beyond solving the immediate puzzle of where the cameras are. Those with more inherent drama or emotional resonance are the cinematic shots, such a girl in a green coat walking through Grand Central Station, or those captured from everyday life, including a child standing on a zebra crossing captured both impersonally (from above) and intimately (from close by).

Most compelling, perhaps, are her double portraits. Exposure #48, Munich Minerviusstrasse shows a young woman, head resting on her hand, taken from two slightly different angles. The moods are strikingly different: in one she meets our gaze, in the other lost in her own thoughts, leaving us feeling that we are intruding on a private moment.

There is no doubt about the production quality of Probst's work, but at times her fascination with mechanics over subject matter shows more than it should. The ideas in which she is interested – that the single perspective is an illusion; that viewing is subjective; that the camera is not reliable, but tells the story you want it to tell – are not new, and however polished these works, they don't move those questions forward.

&149 I Am A Camera until 17 July; Barbara Probst until 19 July