Picture-in-Picture: Selected Works by Phyllis Baldino (1993-2020)
Phyllis Baldino’s conceptual performance tapes often take a concept and run with it, a modus operandi that leads to playful deconstructions and occasionally paradoxical outcomes. Ahead of the artist’s inclusion in the closing night of the Prismatic Ground festival on May 8th, EAI features a selection of videos by Baldino that experiment with the nature of capturing and viewing images, in a variety of approaches ranging from recapturing screens to surreptitiously recording a father and son watching Battleship Potemkin. These five works, which span from 1993 to the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, will be available to view through May 25th.
Phyllis Baldino, Venice in Berlin in Venice
1993, 5:56 min, color, sound
Phyllis Baldino, Room 1503 in a row
2000, 6:05 min, color, sound
Phyllis Baldino, Suitcase/Not Suitcase/Suitcase
2011, 2:43 min, color, sound
Phyllis Baldino, Battleship Potemkin: Father & Son
2011, 15:22 min, color, sound
Phyllis Baldino, run the gamut
2020, 2:56 min, color, sound
The viewing period for these videos has ended.
The video works of Phyllis Baldino are often predicated on stretching a concept—a scientific principle, an archetype or platitude, a quotidian encounter—into its most stripped-down or extreme conclusion. Though Baldino works in a myriad of forms including installation and sculpture (such as the recent u_n_d_e_r_w_a_t_e_r, a three-channel abstract work inspired by our rising sea levels), her single-channel videos are typically direct, minimalist, and wryly conceptual, taking a variety of approaches including performance, on-the-fly footage, and formal experimentation. In Color without Color (1999), for example—screening on Sunday, May 8th at Anthology Film Archives during the closing night of the Prismatic Ground festival—Baldino explores the condition of complete achromatopsia, or “total color blindness.” The video, which also exists as a 15-channel installation, is comprised of black and white, fluid iris shots of colored objects set to interviews with achromats aged 6 to 74, a study of the variability of perception and the outer limits of communicability.
In this selection of five videos spanning from 1993 to the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Baldino probes the act of viewership itself, often drawing spontaneously from her own experiences. While visiting Berlin in the early ‘90s, for instance, Baldino stumbled upon a live broadcast of Venice Beach, California on a friend’s television—an uncanny stream of surveillance footage of anonymous surfers and sunbathers. The artist recorded the imagery, traveled it back to its location of origin, and replayed the footage on a small portable Sony monitor directly in front of the space it depicted. The result is Venice in Berlin in Venice (1993), an eerie juxtaposition of reality and image, like a band-aid over fractured time and space.
The French writer André Gide coined the term mise en abyme to refer to the recursion of images: a copy of a painting viewable within the painting itself, for example. In Room 1503 in a row, Baldino videotapes three art history lectures at Hunter College taught by Lisa Jaye Young to three classes on the same day. Each successive class watches not only the real-time lecture, but also simultaneously the tape of the previous, a chaotic hall of mirrors that mimics the frantic and self-referential proliferation of visual culture.
Baldino’s Suitcase/Not Suitcase/Suitcase also returns the mediated image into the real world to curious effect. In 2011, Baldino’s 1993 Suitcase/Not Suitcase, an entry in the artist’s “Gray Area” series, was shown on MTV’s large-format LED screen in Times Square as part of a selection of EAI videos on the occasion of the organization’s 40th anniversary. The work depicts an off-screen figure diligently packing clothes into a suitcase with large, inexplicable recesses carved into its base and top. As the figure walks away, the contents spill onto the floor, a catastrophe inspired by the artist’s interest in the fuzzy boundary between function and non-function. In this remediation, Baldino walks underneath the large screen carrying the original prop and reenacting the video’s punchline, an act of guerrilla theater that nearly goes unnoticed amid the bustle of Broadway.
Battleship Potemkin: Father & Son (2011) turns the camera away from the screen and onto the onlooker. While visiting France, Baldino captures artist Ivan Polliart and his young son Witold as they watch the final minutes of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). That viewership is always a process of translation is especially clear as information is relayed across time, culture, and language in real time.
Finally, run the gamut (2020) is the most recent work of this selection, completed by the artist in the early throes of the widespread COVID-19 lockdowns. Having traveled to Clermont-Ferrand, France to install her installation u_n_d_e_r_w_a_t_e_r at Videoformes, the artist ended up stuck in the country for over three months due to travel restrictions because of the virus. Stitching together fleeting moments taken in relative isolation including footage taken from the artist’s plane ride in early March, glimpses of nature on solitary walks, and browsing the web, the sentiment of the video seems to reflect the experience of watching YouTube on shoddy Internet: a large buffering circle overlaid on a choppy, barely-loading video.
2021-2022 marks the 50th anniversary of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), one of the world’s leading resources for video and media art. As we celebrate this milestone, EAI will present a rotating series of video features from across our collection and publish a series of oral histories with key figures. To keep up to date on our anniversary activities, please sign up for our e-mail mailing list.