the whitney just closed 'nostalgia' a video exhibit by omer fast. i have to say, i was really surprised by how much i enjoyed it. i love film. i could talk about it for days. but i've always had a problem with video installations. this is why i decided to take 'the moving image in contemporary art' this semester. and it seems to be helping me grasp it a bit more...what i'm getting at here is fast's comments on how we remember, why and what we remember...this has been a topic of interest of mine for quite some time. so, i'm going to attempt to express that here.
what i like about fast is his focus on how and what we remember. more interesting is the question: is our memory ever really truth? his look at nostalgia and story telling makes me uneasy. it makes me question. everything i believe i remember from my childhood might not be truth.
he questions our sense of memory throughout his entire exhibition. in the first part, we see a scene from a british documentary. a man is in the woods creating an animal trap. spliced over this scene, is an interview fast conducted with a nigeran refugee living in London. already, we question this sense of what is real when we hear this interview and see a disconnected image. there is some congruency in this man in the woods – the man being interviewed tells a story about a trap he built to capture a partridge. this becomes the thread that links the rest of the installation.
in the next room, fast chose to hire actors to recreate the interview. although, this time the script is elaborated on and the words seem more like a play. this interview is less interesting as, i feel, it is much more about the people we are watching. i didn't care as much about what they were saying and i focused more on how they were saying it. The partridge story did come up – in a different way than originally presented to the viewer. in the next room, there was a film made by fast. again, using this story about the partridge yet weaving in a fake past and present. he has completely co-opted this story and placed it in the context of a new life and a new world.
which story is real? which one is fake? in a world of reality television and youtube fast has asked us to check our premises. what are we actually seeing and what do we remember about it? why is the story about the partridge the one we remember from the original interview? what about the other stories? is our brain editing our experiences and, in turn, deciding what we take from a situation rather than keeping the whole situation? were all of our memories elaborated in our minds? is anything really how we remember it? how much of what we remember is actually ours? when we share our stories do they become parts of others memories? as usual, i have no answers.
on another level i think fast is asking us to look at storytelling. why is it important and how can it impact us and others? this is what made me think about the grant group. why are our documentary films important? why do we need to get our message out about the topic of our choice? it's one i've been thinking about in regards to crafting and art. i think the only way a culture can build a past, present, and future is by story telling. i don't mean elaborating on something to the point of incoherence - i mean a sense of oral documentation of our culture. i think fast is commenting on this and how the media has influenced the way in which we tell stories. a real life presentation of the facts is, possibly, not what we always get.
question what you see.
edit what you see.
store away what you want to keep.
and create your own past, present, and future.
for more info:
http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/OmerFast
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCD3IxCZpsM
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