Peter Gidal (b. 1946)
Room Film, 1973

An early handheld camera scans the room in low-light and close range, never providing sufficient overview to work out the whole room, rearticulating it as a flow of blurred black and white imagery.

Dusinberre described the genre as ‘structural asceticism’ comprising films that ‘rejected any notion of a goal or transcendence’ (Meigh-Andrews 2014, 95).

In terms of ‘structural asceticism’ I find parallels to my “Happening #001” and the video component of the “Yellow Piece”. I also sympathise with rejection of goal, as in my practice I am trying to avoid ‘reducing’ (surely, some people would rather say ‘elevating’) art to instrumental means for goal-attainment. Then again, this is slippery line of reasoning, as even “making art for art’s sake” can also be framed as a goal in itself, so I’ll better shut up here, as some things do not benefit from being squeezed into words.

References

Meigh-Andrews, Chris. 2014 [2006]. A History of Video Art. NY / London: Bloomsbury.