Narratives of Capture: The Video Works of Gareth Long
By Alissa Firth-Eagland
Through his practice over the past six years, Gareth Long has explored the value, reproducibility, and tactility of video. In crafting modes of the medium that extend outside the limits of single channel screening he has generated artworks that not only expand the category of video, but also of animation, sculpture, installation and performance. Long’s Flipbook (2003) provides one striking example, in which the frames of its mini-narrative, which was shot on video, appears printed on separate sheets of paper and re-assembled. Forty seconds of video were effectively translated into a large book, a brick sized object purposefully too large to hold and animate simultaneously:
“The content of the flipbook highlighted the distance between the video form and popular movies; the flipbook presented a fragment of a generic narrative harkening to a conventional Hollywood trope. The 350 pages made the book difficult to flip, thus reasserting its objectness, and rendering the object nigh useless.” (www.garethlong.net).
By capturing videos in solid states, Gareth Long has built a window through which we can look both forward and back at simplistic binaries such as digital versus analog, language versus non-language, copy versus original. As a kind of response to these awkward divisions, Long chooses to juxtapose technologies from different generations – new and superannuated – to offer a more complicated view.
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Excerpt of essay published in the exhibition catalogue Gareth Long: Second, Third, Fourth featuring texts by Alissa Firth-Eagland, Liam Gillick and AA Bronson. Oakville Galleries (Oakville, CA) 2008.