I wrote a fake exhibition press release and posted listings on Craigslist, Instagram and Facebook looking for actors. I provided the following basic instructions to each performer interested:
The attached "script' is a fake press release I wrote for a nonexistent art show; it's an amalgamation of my own writing, press releases from the E-Flux archives, and a statement produced by an International Art English online generator. In its final product, the press release is entirely unintelligible - there's no 'correct understanding', the writing is meaningless. As a result, I want each actor to give whatever significance, whatever emotive qualities they want to the words/performance. All I ask is you make a self-tape and recite the actual script given - besides from that, you can take as many creative liberties as you want... you can be on or off book, recite the whole thing or cut a part out, be in costume or in your pajamas, make it a joke or use it as a therapeutic exercise. Give it absolutely any meaning, it's up to you.
Roughly twenty different individuals (ranging in age, race, gender, location) responded to the listing as directed.
I used these self-tapes as the sole footage and audio for the final piece. My video portrays a rotating cast of actors; each performer either recites sentences, fragments of sentences, or single words before proceeding to the next performer. The performance style, quality of footage, and appearance of the actors varies.
Please find the “Press Release” script below.
Ondine Viñao
5 September - 28 October 2019
Preview Wednesday 4 September 2019, 6-8pm
We are pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Argentine-American artist Ondine Viñao (b. 1994, New York, USA).
Known for creating situations in which everyday objects are altered or detached from their natural function, Ondine Viñao’s video works emphasize aesthetics, seducing the viewer into a world of ongoing equilibrium and the interval that articles the stream of daily events. Moments are depicted that only occur to query the socially produced category of the ephemeral, clarifying our existence and finding elegiac meaning in everyday life. Through this awakening of an anonymous material world, we can read a certain history of our modern culture, from the escape that possesses a utopian character to the search for greater material autonomy, as well as the ambiguity and inconsistency of the desire that connects us with objects – chosen only for their manifest obsolescence.
Viñao’s films are given improper functions: significations are inversed, and form and content merge. Shapes are dissociated from their original meaning, by which the system in which they normally function is exposed. Applying specific combinations and certain manipulations, different roles and/or contexts are created. Tensions arise from the discrepancy between the ostensibly playful medium and the storylines, which frequently go to the limits of what is humanly tolerable.Her work contests the division between the realm of memory and the realm of experience, using appropriated materials borrowed from a day-to-day context to reference ideas that are so integrated into the process of the composition of the work that it becomes impossible to view one channel of the series without the specter of the next looming from the verso.
Throughout the exhibition, initially unambiguous meanings are shattered and disseminate endlessly. Employing a radically singular approach that is nevertheless inscribed in the contemporary debate, Viñao presents everyday objects alongside archival relics of the past, as well as references to texts, painting and architecture. Pompous writings and Utopian constructivist designs are juxtaposed with trivial objects. Categories are subtly reversed.
Viñao’s works often radiate a cold and latent violence. At times, disconcerting beauty emerges - a delicate balance between abstraction and depiction, between surface and proportion, between the suggestion of movement and stillness. Their confined formats belie their expansiveness. Many of the videos evoke boundless spaces and actions that have crystallized in novel forms physically manifest yet remain immutable. Structured by the equipollence of multiple elements and without established endings, the pictorial spaces withhold any sense of orientation, confronting the viewer with anxious, enigmatic imperatives.The inherent visual seductiveness, along with the conciseness of the works, further complicates the reception of their manifold layers of meaning. Thoroughly self-referential, yet no less aesthetically pleasing, and therefore deeply inscribed in the history of modernism – made present most palpably in the artist’s exploration of some of the most hallowed of modernist paradigms.
Her collected, altered and own works are being confronted as aesthetically resilient, thematically interrelated material for memory and projection. The possible seems true and the truth exists, but it has many faces, as Hanna Arendt cites from Franz Kafka. Viñao absorbs the tradition of remembrance art into daily practice; this personal follow-up and revival of a past tradition is important as an act of meditation. Her videos are poetic evocations of occurrences; the subtle tensions underscoring the mise-en-scène, doused in dark light and illuminated by spotlights, come together as a trope for the workings of the human mind. What Viñao’s work confronts the viewer with most aggressively, however—and this is precisely where it has successfully challenged the occasional reactionary inclinations of this elitist, among others - is to question this insular tendency, that is, art’s self-isolating ways, by way of the jargon and spirit of art itself: art setting out to save culture from the clutches of the culture industry - an art of righteous populist inspiration (as well as indignation) - a road (back) to relevance, art’s voyage back to the center of a society’s sense of self, may involve negotiating the oftentimes strained, simultaneously antagonistic and symbiotic relationship between art and culture- a distinction that is not without consequence for a better understanding of Viñao’s practice as a whole.
Ondine Viñao currently lives and works in New York.