Video Notions in Motion and Stillness

Two intriguing video art works have quietly snuck into the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s (SBMA) New Media gallery upstairs, and both challenge expectations of the medium and seduce the senses. Moving Pictures: Videos by Liliana Porter/Ana Tiscornia and Christian Marclay might seem to be a wallflower-like afterthought in the louder mix of the Museum’s current programming but is well worth a visit. You may well sit with this art longer than planned.

For one, any appearance by the hard-to-describe multimedia artist Christian Marclay is a newsworthy occasion. The master manipulator and re-contextualizer of music and film media (and more), with a sly, dry wit usually attached, has been shaking up norms — with an understated hand — since he was a proto-turntablist in N.Y.C. in the late ‘70s. Bridging pop culture and art circles is a sign of his mind. (I still have a small pile of broken vintage record fragments he tossed out into the crowd during a concert at the avant-garde festival in Victoriaville, Quebec, many years ago).

Marclay has since extended his curiosity, creative repurposing, and “plunderphonics” aesthetic in the film and video direction, along with musical antics. His famous “Telephones” video piece from 1995 showed at SBMA and, more impressively, Marclay’s landmark epic “The Clock,” a fastidiously stitched, 24-hour montage of time-related clips from cinematic history presented in museums — in sync with that region’s time zone. The work’s run at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2015 was a sensation which drew hordes of viewers lining up for their allotted hour in the gallery space, present company included.

Marclay’s obsession with time and new ways of kneading it is also present, in a vastly simpler way, in the SBMA piece presently screening, in which he deals with the quotidian substance of the title, “Chewing Gum” (2016), as seen in hundreds of still shots packed and choreographed into a mere 1:36 time frame. Warning, once you’re lured into the sensory vortex of the piece, you may be watching the looped video 10 or more times, depending on tolerance and interest levels.

Here, the artist assembled a massive pile of images of pre-chewed gum — mostly in black and white but with occasional color streaks — on presumably public sidewalks and streets, but rescued from its status as a public nuisance into the stuff of art. These asymmetrical gum globules are seen and cleverly arranged in a rapid-fire succession. At times, the disparate gum forms race by the eye in an ephemeral blur. Elsewhere, the forms seem to morph in some alternative stop-motion madness, growing and popping before our eyes.

All in all, Marclay’s gum etude exerts a hypnotic effect on its own terms, transcending the humdrum essence of the subject at hand (and hopefully not underfoot).

Contrast of means and ends awaits on the opposite side of the gallery’s video wall, with the sweetly ambiguous (and ambiguously sweet) “Cuentos Inconclusos (Unfinished Tales),” by Porter and Tiscornia. In this loosely folkloric-like set of tales, tucked into an 11-minute piece, the artists also rely largely on still imagery set into motion. Utilizing quint ceramic figurines, dollhouse furniture, and other innocent minutiae, they spin out intimate narrative fragments which teasingly suggest linear storylines.

A spacious clarity, aided by the lulling musical backdrop by Sylvia Meyer, adds up to a video art persona at once lyrical and calmly experimental. It states its case with minimal means or pretensions, allowing us to feel some disarming sense of a post-narrative solution by video’s end. Just don’t ask for a neat, clear synopsis.

This two-pack of small gems from the SBMA permanent collection is one of those summer-timed escapist treats, with serious artistic undercurrents mixing it up with alluring surfaces. Have a seat and sink in for a spell.

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Moving Pictures: Videos by Liliana Porter/Ana Tiscornia and Christian Marclay is on view at Santa Barbara Museum of Art through January 12, 2025. See sbma.net.