L.C. von Sukmeister experienced underestimated artistic concept complex while he was working on his video art (appropriation) as part of the larger New Art Video Appropriation Movement (NAVA). An Asian man and historian of Western contemporary art, having internalized the notion of male-superiority, is doomed to be frustrated when he comes face-to-face with his bigger and stronger Caucasian and art school/academy alumni counterpart. Having started from the sense of art background inferiority (as too intellectual and theoretical) to art school graduates and an attempt to mimic and outdo them, his video works have come to suggest the post-artistic or para-performative perspective of transforming the traditional roles in the art world as a self-critical process. Confronting the grand promise of highbrow art and traditional institutionalized roles in the art field, his visual mimicry of video art making in a lowbrow amateur video style together with the accompanied texts attempt to derange the legitimacy of a variety of actors such as curators, art historians, art critics and of course the art by officially certified art school people and other arrived artists. What is unique to Von Sukmeisters work, then, is the playfulness with which various attempts at instant video shooting and appropriating are made, and that with a very simple optical instrument: the Sony Cybershot 4.1 megapixels. Confronting the grand promise of highbrow art and traditional institutionalized roles in the art field, his visual mimicry of video art making in a lowbrow amateur video style together with the accompanied texts attempt to derange the legitimacy of a variety of actors such as curators, art historians, art critics and of course the art by officially certified art school people and other arrived artists.
Credits:
Art Director: L.C. von Sukmeister
Keynote Speaker: R.S. de Boer
Referent: W.W.
Camera Operator: Rudeland van Ouweweghen Leeuwborg
Location: Trans 8, A.W. de Grootkamer (0.19) Utrecht
Date: 12 December 2008.
Script: Laurent Christoph
Script Assistant: Leopold Chrétien
Series: Art & Conflict