New and rising video artist Julian added recently a new piece to his open end video series "Wednesdays". In a genre, dull and boring as watching sunrises in a basement, his new video stands out with

Result #1

New and rising video artist Julian added recently a new piece to his open end video series "Wednesdays". In a genre, dull and boring as watching sunrises in a basement, his new video stands out with . . . a dynamic airy rhythm and lyrical light.A fundamental weakness of this work, however, is its lack of ambition. That is, the video is hardly the disruptive force it is meant to be. Strucking with the most basic elements of the medium—from drawing to sound, from sound to image—she starts out well, and after a few initial attempts she seems to have taken herself into a trance, a sensibility that makes the quality of the video significantly higher. Yet theres too little to say what, if anything, the video does or does not do; it really comes down to the lighting and the sound. A dangerous edge to approach.Norman, a young, semi-professional videographer who had previously worked for VHS tape, was obviously working in very close quarters with mediums far beyond the reach of the average videographer, and a practical necessity of the nature. (The immateriality of the work, one might say, is mirrored in Normans keen understanding of video tech and its interrelationship with other media.) Still, theres no denying the otherness of his work. What does it mean, for example, to view video in terms of a film—the technology which determines it? As Norman has shown, the presentation of a video is a way of getting close to it, or of recording its silence in a very intimate way. He has shown that what we mean when we talk about recording an event or an object is to see something which seems real, but is not, nor is the recording itself.In this show, Norman does everything he can to assert the reality of his medium. Yet his images take on an aura of unrealness. Their facticity and their use of light are faked, making it impossible to see them apart from the fact of their visual meaning.

Result #2

. . . and just o . . . the flip side of that. Produced in a style of machinelike the orgy of a studio, and programmed into a mood of fast, frenzied, bursty motion, his video sequence works as an end in itself, a point to be shared and made to watch. Julian is a post-contemporary sign painter whose strips of text, a recording of the action that is then reduced to a trace, and a screen that becomes a reflection of the action on the surface, reflected in the sand, over a flowing-eyebrow fade. A look at this way of working can only be stymied by the stifling claustrophobia of a stage, a half-runaway, half-drawn-over live-in act.What sets Julian apart is a clear-cutness of thought. When he manipulates his text, he always avoids the do-it-yourself mentality of a video-maker with a video camera. Julian works very hard at getting his gestures right, in the same way a fast-writing artist (Beat Newmans) attempts to get his words right. His is an art of refinement, but its also a utilitarian art. His work may be clichéd, but its one made of convenience.

Result #3

New and rising video artist Julian added recently a new piece to his open end video series "Wednesdays". In a genre, dull and boring as watching sunrises in a basement, his new video stands out with . . . . well, let me explain, in that the sun is what, outside of the realm of the occasional hardware store, most people dread to see. With the exception of a couple of insufferably overzealous misfits in his video work and his status as the first video artist to try and record a wave of aggression through movies and videotapes, Julian focuses exclusively on the big events of daily life. The works title, Ive never been able to find the time, is all but hidden in plain sight. For the last few years, Julian has been striving to make the most often repeated phrase of the title of one of his videos, Ill never be able to find the time . . ., his most recent work, the contents of which have been made inaccessible.Julian uses various film formats in the making of his videos, and they speak of various kinds of objects, which he uses to form patterns, or sequences. The process of preparing for the show, as well as for the viewers simultaneous experience of multiple monitors simultaneously, was a thorough examination of the possibilities of interweaving film and video. The montages Julian uses are usually images borrowed from the internet, which he combines into repeated projections of the same action, or sometimes some combination of the two. In one example, he is shown walking through a tree. While walking through the tree he also takes a series of pictures, moving to an extreme close-up of the scene. The images, an enormous cloud of swirling white text, then fade in and out of existence. In another video, the sun rises over a city with a series of megaphones before a large stage. The megaphones, a kind of talking plane, fill the space behind the stage with a series of repeated images and sounds, spoken by a woman standing in front of the microphone.

Result #4

easy, effective acting, and a scrupulous, impressive handling of medium. His 1960s TV series called for a fresh, and possibly wild, approach to the scientific investigation of alien technology, especially with regard to the implications of image processing. High on the sophistication level of the 1960s television that Bosch drew on to make his film, the scientists in Cronenbergs fatherly point of view were careful to avoid the impossible. Rather, they looked for the weird anomalies of the natural world—the incompatibilities of time and space, the dependence of cause and effect. As a result, Boschs narrations, plus the means of their delivery, are as clever as Boschs sequence of shots.

Result #5

New and rising video artist Julian added recently a new piece to his open end video series "Wednesdays". In a genre, dull and boring as watching sunrises in a basement, his new video stands out with its refreshing to see a very personal attitude on display.Its easy to see why a guy who never used to think in terms of time, space, and image might find himself changing his work. His recent work is particularly refreshing for its wholeness, and his new, more comprehensive-looking pieces and videos begin to look more like the disjunctions and overlaps in a Picabia, or even a Franz Kline without the innocence. The pieces shown are entirely of an artistic and conceptual, nonverbal kind. They have an aura of a group of friends at an outdoor event, with all the adults as well as the children gathered around them. They may be large and dark, and their color range is horrible—black, white, and gray, to name only a few, but there is nothing particularly disturbing about them. All the elements are available at once: colors, shapes, tones, patterns, and compositions. Some of the pieces are abstract: some of the pieces are simple: twelve yellow, white, and black rectangles; six identical yellow rectangles; a green rectangle and a rectangle; eight squares, six different colors; six rectangular shaped rectangles; a square, the rectangular shape of the rectangle; and so on. Most of the pieces have an abstract quality, a painterly style, an artful touch, and perhaps even a certain geographical distance.The most recent piece is a digital projection, similarly made to be shot from across the room. In it a young man is seen passing a sign by an elderly woman, who is very much in the background. Behind her there is an over-all view of the city, and then the same view of the same city that is before and after. The time of the scene is 3:05, 2005, and the time of the shot is 36 seconds.