Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Images “Listen to me. I want to tell you something. Come closer. Don’t be upset and don’t get emotional.
Nostalgia Just get near me and pay attention, please. Look, I know that you’re scared. I know what you’re
2009, three-part video installaion
afraid of.You mistrust your body. Lately it has been looking more and more foreign. It’s been doing
Still from Nostalgia II, two-channel HD videos (synchronized)
strange things.You suspect that it has been keeping something from you; that knowledge of your own
with sound
death is already programmed inside it somehow; that it’s stored in a primitive organ; that in between
All images are courtesy of the artist; gb agency, Paris; Arratia
the crush of blood and digestion your appendix or spleen sits obliviously still like an overgrown traffic
Beer, Berlin; Postmasters, New York island keeping watch over a terrible secret.”
(From Omer Fast’s CNN Concatenated, 2002)
. .02.Spring.2010. .108.109.
I
think we will see a full-feature show “Death Race 2000,” curated by sculptor way Hollywood films work. Showing the Inspired by a report about a man in Arizona stopped checking. Within a year the entire
film by Omer Fast soon. It’s only Rachel Lowther and conceptual artist James simulation of the sounds made the different who had secretly copied bits of hardcore porn inventory of videocassettes at all stores was
logical, considering his ongoing Hunt. Fast had received some attention with layers of the film’s sonic landscape visible. But onto rental movies for children, Fast started replaced by DVDs.”[2]
fascination with filmmaking and a surprising video work titled Breaking in a it also proved how narrative, sound and image looking for the film he’d like to overdub.
storytelling – even though, at New Partner, his graduate project at the MFA hinge on one another – each makes the other He found “something violent, stylized, even Pop Culture Schindler
first glance, it might seem that exhibition the same year. Back then it looked convincing and vice versa. cartoonish” in The Terminator. “It was one Hollywood Films continued to hold a strong
the silver screen has little to offer this artist, like a novelty act to me. Crammed in one Fast had opened a door for the viewer to of the first films I saw after moving to the fascination for the artist – and two years
whose sophisticated multi-screen video of the derelict bathrooms of the New York slip into the film, looking not only at what States. The film is about a psychopath from later, he was at it again, this time focusing on
installations reflect the visual rhetorics of nonprofit gallery Thread Waxing Space (run constitutes it, but also at where it places the the future who takes steroids, runs around Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Schindler’s List,
film and television in a way that cinema just by Lia Gangitano), it consisted of two video viewer. For example, when the character killing people, cuts his own eye out, marries a a Hollywood-style narrative dramatization
can’t. His video pieces tap into the sensory screens: One played an outtake of Lethal played by Mel Gibson contemplates suicide Kennedy and then runs for office as governor of the Holocaust that won seven Academy
quality of moving images without investing Weapon (1987) featuring Mel Gibson as a in the solitude of a dismal trailer home and of the world’s eighth largest economy.”[1] Awards and three Golden Globes, and was
in their glamour, but instead taking them into young cop battling suicidal impulses after puts a gun to his head while sobbing onto Dubbing four short interviews on four a worldwide box office smash, in spite of
account as expressions of cultural meaning. losing his wife. Hardly noticeable at first, a photograph of his wedding, the viewer is different points of the video had a remarkable its length of more than three hours. But
Closely knit, his works reflect not only on it was shown without the original sound. simultaneously confronted with the deadpan effect. Incidents from the interviewee’s earlier Spielberg’s film also courted controversy:
the structures of the narratives being told, but In fact, it was the artist, seen on the second image of the artist’s many faces making the life, including instances of “being physically When it premiered Claude Lanzmann,
also on the multilayered signs and the refined screen, who imitated every single piece of different sounds. He shows no compassion disciplined by a parent. Nothing traumatic, the director of Shoah (1985), a nine-hour
visual tropes with which they are told. sound of the film with his voice: not only for the character’s troubles, but he also hardly just the normal stuff that happens in families documentary of collected and edited
Although he was born in Jerusalem in 1972, the lines spoken by the actors, but also the offers comic relief. It made the serious where hands, belts and a stick are used for interviews with Holocaust survivors, criticized
Fast is not a product of the Israeli art- noise of rustling fabric, the click of metal as a scenes that are particularly important for the disciplinary purposes” were described in the Spielberg for fictionalizing the Holocaust.
school system: He was educated in the U.S., bullet is inserted into a gun barrel, squeaking plot much more interesting to watch. The inserted voice-over. In scenes of extreme Lanzmann had consciously renounced any
earning his undergraduate degree at Tufts furniture, a Bugs Bunny cartoon running in original movie was still there, superficially, violence, as when Schwarzenegger rings the fictionalization, instead focusing on the
Fast’s work does not mourn University and then his MFA at Hunter the background, the sounds of cars, screeching but somehow emptied out, with a vital part doorbells of several women with the same emptiness in the landscapes and the faces
College in 2000. In a recent brief telephone breaks, doors slamming shut, gun shots, even of it removed, mimicked (and ridiculed) and name and guns them down the instant they of those struggling with their memories,
the loss of meaning, nor is it interview, Fast insisted that Hunter was an the musical score plus other sound effects. replaced, the bones of its construction laid confirm their identity, the voice of a man introducing a maxim that any discourse on
a celebration of the absurdity inviting place to study, despite being tough The perfection of the simulation sounds was bare. suddenly interrupts: “He slapped me. And then fascism would have to be one of emptiness.
for a young artist interested in working with startling. I am sure more than one visitor who he slapped me again and again.” Rather than Spielberg’s film went took an entirely
of the elaborate fake. In anything but painting or sculpture: At the didn’t look carefully never noticed this and Surviving the Terminator destroying the flow of the narrative, elements different path: While portraying events rather
allowing the images’ meanings time, the college boasted little if any video never got the point. Omer Fast produced another small piece like these introduce a separate but intimate accurately, it quite effectively reduced the
equipment and hardly any of the faculty was But what exactly was the point? Didn’t it look of work in 2000, once again appropriating layer of meaning to the film’s story, but do trauma of the Holocaust – “which defies
to blur he sharpens the equipped to prepare students for work with just like a party trick, or something one could a classic Hollywood blockbuster from the not interfere with the general plot. These human imagination as it distills a real hell from
viewer’s vision. This strategy electronic media. Still, its main attraction was see in a cheesy television show, I wondered. 1980s, this time turning to John Cameron’s personal stories smuggled into the rental tapes human evil,”[3] as Theodor Adorno famously
providing central studios for the students Hadn’t I seen several works about people who The Terminator (1984). Arnold Schwarzenegger constituted a “hidden record whose purpose put it – to what was often perceived as a
of clarifying by blurring is – and as the courses ran for three years, it was made sound effects? Yet again, the “trick” was doesn’t do much talking in the film, leaving is to communicate its content and survive.” sensationalist, kitschy fairy tale. By violating
reminiscent of Gerhard Richter much cheaper to study than rent a studio in made transparent visually; the artist himself plenty of space for violent action, but also Surviving, however, depended on the quality what Adorno and Lanzmann considered the
Manhattan. This setting was beneficial for looked anything but heroic, yet not exactly for Fast’s interference. Renting out several of the symbiosis of the artwork and the rental rules of representation of an ultimate disaster,
young artists who had already developed funny either. But there was also something VHS copies of the film from video stores, video it inhabited, and the way its audience the movie stirred up a debate on truth and
to a certain degree, and it gave them time else. First of all, there was a sense of dérive: he inserted snippets of personal narratives related and reacted to it. The artist attached representation in mainstream culture. It forced
and, more important, a space, in which to The artist had hijacked the film and, by adding in the film by overdubbing the original a little sticker with the title of the work, T3- its audience to rethink the terms in which the
concentrate on their work. something, had turned key fragments of the sound. In the midst of the action, the viewer AEON, to the tapes, so he could occasionally Holocaust could be imagined, remembered
I first met Fast in his final year at Hunter, interracial cop-buddy story of the action would suddenly hear an unexpected voice- check on them. and given historical meaning.
preparing a project for an ambitious group movie–cum–comedy into a reflection on the over recounting stories culled from real life. “In August 2001 I moved to Germany and If in T3-AEON Omer Fast effectively took
Omer Fast [1] Omer Fast in “Marc Godrey: Playing the System” at http:// [2] Ibid.
Passport still www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue14/playingthesystem.htm
[3] Theodor Adorno in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor,
Blackwell, Oxford, p. 86.
. .02.Spring.2010. .110.111.
Image [4] See Joanna Fiduccia’s interview “Omer Fast: A Multiple ‘I,’” [5] http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/making_history1/
Nostalgia Uovo, April 17, 2008, pp. 156-76.
2009, three-part video installaion
Still from Nostalgia II, two-channel HD videos (synchronized)
with sound
. .02.Spring.2010. .112.113.
Image
Take a Deep Breath
2008, two-channel video