Robert Whitman, Local Report from the Guggi
Anne Swartz
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City will host Local Report, a new five-screen video and sound installation by Robert Whitman. This installation will show the video and sound works produced during five live performances, held in different shopping centers in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut, each weekend from July 29 to August 28, 2005. The films will play simultaneously but separately, so that the viewer can experience all of the performances as the artist wanted to maintain the integrity of each performance so the sound will be localized to each video projection. This combination of all the performances is a new work.
Sponsored by The Baker Family with support from the National Realty & Development Corporation, Nokia, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), and SOM Education Lab, this series of performances involved thirty local residents contributing image and audio descriptions about their towns from predetermined locations. Using the new video technology of these mobile telephones, Whitman asked them to document and then broadcast their environments, images or experiences in the real time of the thirty-minute performance. He then played them one after another as they came in to create what the artist terms "a cultural map of the everyday," composed in real time. As soon as an image emerged from the verbal text, he would end the call. Dissonance is a clear feature of this work, as the visual and verbal are not in consistent syncopation.
What makes this installation of Local Report especially compelling is that it gives an excellent opportunity for viewers to experience a new take on Whitman?s aesthetic?what could loosely be described as his continued experiments since the late 1950s with performance and technology to capture the beauty in the found visual and aural images of the everyday. Whitman has sought more esoteric ends in his investigation of oft-spontaneous juxtapositions of projected film alongside live action or performance.
Whitman?s work has been enormously influential on artists using technology in performance, projected installations, and on artists who combine performance and installation to draw a sensory picture of a moment or place. A witty tone underscores his work so that the viewer comes away meditating on the moment, embracing what the technology made possible, even when the technology presents problems (as happened on some occasions with Local Report), which become part of the work itself. In the case of Local Report, the low-resolution of the video, the amateur quality of the compositions, the gaps in text or image, the bright sunshine of the images, the common and accessible vernacular scenery (parking lots, suburban or small-town downtowns, and views of the water or of traffic), and the first-person tone of many of the reports combine to subvert the high-end production values and neat confines of television news, where content and advertisements become difficult too distinguish.
Local Report has its origins in a piece Whitman first conceived in 1972, entitled News. The results of that initial performance involved "reporters" calling from pay phones for radio broadcast. In 2002, he updated the piece in Leeds, England, using cell phones, which permitted more mobility for the participants, whose reports were then heard in a town square. This series of performances will live on the Internet, according to the artist, and will also be exhibited in the Guggenheim on December 6, 2005.
Local Report is a visual and sound poem, created by Whitman, to draw people together in creating a sense of place and space at a certain moment in time. The piece resembles life in its repetition, simplicity, banality, and discontinuity. The interwoven and overlapping aspects of time which delicately shift, recall the diffuseness of memory and the imprecise experience of remembering. These performances revel in the everyday in an optimistic way. The straightforward commentary of the reporters, the collaborative effort, the collective involvement, and the artist?s trust in the individual?s perspective prompts anticipation, ultimately, defying expectation.
