David Claerbout : Shadow Play: 2005

TI is intensely obsessed with the art of David Claerbout at this point in time. Claerbout's work is highlighted by video installations that play with the idea of time passing and time captured by the still and video camera. As Stephan Berg explains in the monograph " Claerbout removes from the photograph a piece of its static quality that is oriented towards fixation and takes from films its impulse of movement". In other words we are treated to photographs that move unexpectedly and films that freeze for significant periods of time. What I love about the work is the detail and the texture of the images. It is as if a dark shadow has fallen on the banal scenes of the modern landscape. An example of the rigor and technical complexity of Claerbout's work is in my favorite art work of his ,"Shadow Piece" . That black and white video, inspired by an archival 50's photograph, features a series of figures (in this frame a man and a woman) vainly attempting to open the doors of a modernist house. Its very Antonioni film meets Vogue Italia spread if I were to be simplistic about it. But in his depictions of a Bauhaus world that has been sold to us as an ideal of geometric perfection, Claerbout captures the frustration and sense of futility that comes with that world. The tension thereof drives to me adore David Claerbout. The book too is beautiful. Black, gray, sepia with the pages edged in black. Must buy!