Aernout Mik: New Museum of Contemporary Art.Aernout Mik's video installation Refraction 1. the act or process of refracting; specifically, the determination of the refractive errors of the eye and their correction with lenses. 2. the deviation of light in passing obliquely from one medium to another of different density.refrac´tive double refraction, 2005, which tracks the aftermath of a bus accident in the Romanian countryside, comes closer to naturalism naturalism, in artnaturalism, in art, a tendency toward strict adherence to the physical appearance of nature and rejection of ideal forms. Artists as diverse as Velázquez, J. F. Millet, and Monet, have followed naturalistic principles.naturalism, in literaturenaturalism, in literature, an approach that proceeds from an analysis of reality in terms of natural forces, e.g., heredity, environment, physical drives. than any of the Dutch artist's earlier moving-image odes to disaster, dislocation, and freakish misadventure misadventure n. a death due to unintentional accident without any violation of law or criminal negligence. Thus, there is no crime. (See: homicide). Previously, Mik's works have featured complex arrangements of screens, dizzying camera movements, ambiguously eschatological scenarios, and an almost Meliesian sense of creepy artifice. But Refraction, projected straightforwardly on a long, low, free-standing wall, at first seems to be merely an extended documentation of the type of event we've all seen a hundred times on the news: It's a cloudy day and a bus has overturned on a highway cutting through a landscape of fields and rolling hills. Cars are backed up nearly to the horizon, and cops, paramedics, firemen, and even soldiers have converged on the scene. Their vehicles are bivouacked around the bus, which lies on its side; stretchers, aluminum cases, and other bits of first-responder materiel are scattered about.As bystanders cluster nearby, the emergency services take care of business, searching the fields with German shepherds or clambering through the bus as if it were a jungle gym. The camera wanders like an inquisitive child everyone's too preoccupied to notice, moving smoothly and constantly, sometimes panning up and back for a panoramic shot, and frequently digressing in the direction of a pigpen by the side of the road whose inmates wallow obliviously in the mud. A flock of sheep that wanders across the highway at one point underscores the pastoral mood, and the video's silence (there's no sound track) reinforces a sense of calm. But slowly, you realize that something is missing--namely, gore, smoke, fire, or indeed any other traces of the havoc that has apparently just been wreaked. There are no injured or dead people, although the overturned bus is full of backpacks and other belongings. Have all the victims been suddenly beamed up by aliens? Their absence drives home the realization that Refraction is not a documentary but an elaborately staged fiction, and it also makes the emergency personnel's entire endeavor seem profoundly bizarre. When the camera sneaks up on a guy in a hazmat suit using a pair of forceps 1. a two-bladed instrument with a handle for compressing or grasping tissues in surgical operations, and for handling sterile dressings, etc. 2. any forcipate organ or part. alligator forceps strong toothed forceps having a double clamp. artery forceps one for grasping and compressing an artery. to pick through the detritus detritus /de·tri·tus/ (de-tri´tus) particulate matter produced by or remaining after the wearing away or disintegration of a substance or tissue.de·tri·tus (d  -tr on the bottom of the bus, as if he might find a Thumbelina-size survivor concealed under an errant ATM card, you think, "What the hell are these people doing?" Also, as you watch, you realize that there is no beginning or end. The video is an absolutely seamless loop, a structure that's more analogous to incantation incantation - Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented that they must be learned from a wizard. "This compiler normally locates initialised data in the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation they will be forced into text space." than to narrative. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Refraction's central conceit conceit, in literature, fanciful or unusual image in which apparently dissimilar things are shown to have a relationship. The Elizabethan poets were fond of Petrarchan conceits, which were conventional comparisons, imitated from the love songs of Petrarch, in which the beloved was compared to a flower, a garden, or the like. The device was also used by the metaphysical poets, who fashioned conceits that were witty, complex, intellectual, and often startling, e.g. is a continuation of Mik's ongoing modus operandi modus operandi (mode-us ah-purr-and-ee or ah-purr-and-eye) n. from Latin, a criminal investigation term for "way of operating," which may prove the accused has a pattern of repeating the same criminal acts using the same method. Examples: a repeat offender always wore a blue ski mask and used a sawed-off shotgun, climbed up trellises to burglarize, pretended to be a telephone repairman to gain entrance, or set up phony companies to disguise a fraudulent scheme.. He subtracts not only the blood and guts from his pseudocinematic scenarios, but the affect as well--lack of affect being a major indicator that somebody (or an entire society) is crazy. Flattening and deranging a plot that most of us find utterly predictable, even reassuring (chaos erupts and people in uniforms show up to restore order), Refraction exposes something more disturbing than chaos running through the warp and woof woof: see weaving. of the social fabric--that is, order itself, ossified, emptied of meaning, and transformed into a series of ritual gestures. |
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