Press release

Alex Bag
C30 C60 C90-GO! B/W - New Art School
28 April – 9 June 1996


A member of the generation that grew up with the development of the family video, Alex Bag made the VCR her favoured tool. Working with the flux of televisual images, she has produced one of the most promising bodies of work on today’s art scene. She records and samples segments of programmes, music clips, fashion shows and advertisements since, as she says, “It’s so good to capture something with your video recorder, because then you have the proof that it really happened. I like watching things go wrong over and over, it makes me feel less alone.”
While her approach is critical, she does not simply reject television. It is not perceived as a despotic instrument that is somehow destroying “real” culture or “real” life, simply because the gap between the “true” and the “false” is now very slight indeed. To copy, memorise and record have become banal operations which translate our relation to the real.
This exhibition at Le Magasin is Bag’s first show in Europe. Two works will be installed in the project room: Fall 95 and The Do-It-Yourself Library.
The first is a tape about one hour long, looped on a monitor, in which Bag acts out and caricatures a series of characters. In the alternating sequences, we see the main character, a “student at the New York School of Visual Art” over the eight semesters of her studies, with each section being followed by a short sketch consisting of a satirical rejoinder by a banal persona. The rhythm of the piece evokes that of American television, with its commercial breaks every three minutes.
The Do-It-Yourself Library comprises some sixty tapes on open shelves, part of the video library that Bag has built up over the last ten years or so. “You can collect images and swap them with your friends. It makes television less aggressive. Fight it. Change channels. Copy it, make it your own,” she urges. And she applies this principle herself in her own weekly show, “Cash from Chaos”, broadcast on one of the New York public access channels.

On the occasion of this exhibition at Le Magasin, a first catalogue of the artist’s work, with an essay by Collier Schorr, will be published.

ALEX BAG. Born 1969 in New York, lives and works in New York. Studied at the Cooper Union School, New York.