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.