At Art Basel: Paintings That Move

MIAMI—Sitting at the café in the middle of Art Basel Miami Beach, it was hard to miss Marian Goodman’s wall of Thomas Struth pictures from his Museo del Prado series. Like it or not, this series is already a classic example of how contemporary photography has modeled itself on painting—in scale, beauty, and color, not to mention price. And sure enough, much of the photography at the fair was large, luminous (lightboxes everywhere), and gorgeous.

So was—perhaps more surprisingly—a lot of the video art. Despite the rather grainy aesthetic associated with pioneering video art from the ’70s, this fair is no place for black-and-white, single-channel, video-as-media-critique pieces. Nor was it big on funny or hokey do-it-yourself YouTube–style shorts. The video art at ABMB tended, in keeping with the paintings, to have high production values and high prices.

A number of videos function, in fact, almost as paintings—they are beautifully (if sometimes accidentally) composed and carefully framed by the plasma TVs or sculptures masking them. Many lack narrative, creating a timelessness uncommon in a time-based medium.

Take Loris Greaud’s triptych video at Yvon Lambert of New York and Paris, in which popcorn kernels explode in slow motion on three screens (set within a simple sculpture designed to hide the TV sets), creating spectacular shapes. (The gallery has sold two of its edition of five, with a third on reserve to a museum, for $45,000 each.)

Cristian Silva’s Silver Bells video installation at The Project of New York has a similar effect, with abstract shapes created not by popcorn hatching but by liquid mercury congealing, framed in a rather baroque wall drawing of a fireplace. (The work is offered for $15,000 in an edition of three.)

And in Doug Aitken’s 2005 video Lighttrain, at 303 Gallery of New York, street scenes play across five screens arranged in a cross-like pattern. (The video was selling for $250,000 in an edition of four.)

Many of the videos are time-based but not time-consuming.

Even at Kukje Gallery’s New York affiliate, Tina Kim Fine Art, Seoul-based Yeondoo Jung’s new video, an 85-minute loop of six different scenes including a cow grazing in front of a stage-set version of a pasture, has a kind of stillness that points to painting. Dealer Jaime Schwartz calls the piece “well-suited to the art fair setting because the intention is that people can watch just a few minutes, wander around, and come back. It’s not heavily narrative.”

Nor is Bill Viola’s Ablutions from 2005, a diptych featuring ritualistic images of a man and woman bathing that he shot for Peter Sellars’s recent production of Tristan and Isolde. New York gallerist James Cohan, who sold at the fair the last remaining example from an edition of seven, sees the work as “a great opportunity to slow people down, to let them digest something. As Peter Sellars has often said about Bill, he has the uncanny ability to manipulate your pulse.”

Cohan added that bringing Viola to the fair was a no-brainer—“he has been one of the great crossover artists, appealing to painting collectors as well as video collectors.” Which is clearly the goal shared by many dealers bringing video to ABMB.