#video-art

#video-art

The 31st edition of the LA Art Show is back this week at the downtown Convention Center, more than a month before Frieze, Felix, and Post-Fair roll into town. Although it is LA's longest-running art fair, the show is somewhat of an outcast, snubbed as pedestrian, too commercial, and out of touch with the cutting edge of the global art world. But at the rear of the cavernous exhibition hall, a pair of projects organized by curator Marisa Caichiolo gives visitors a sense of the fair's cultural and political relevance.

For instance, the Louvre did not own a single video artwork until this year, when Mohamed Bourouissa's piece documenting the Tuileries Garden made its way into the collection. Acquisitions also illustrate networks of power and exchange in the art world. One of Tate Modern's big gets, a stunning Joan Mitchell triptych, came from none other than Miami-based developer and museum founder Jorge Pérez and his wife Darlene.

I'd always thought of myself as too impatient for raw footage and long, unedited takes-I liked my stories synthesized. And I remained unconvinced by the old utopian claims of the fly-on-the-wall view touted by those French filmmakers of the '50s and '60s: even as observational cinema tries to avoid manipulation, it is always inevitably shaped by a director, a team, an angle, a moment in time.

We wanted to do, for the first time, a video portrait of this garden-the largest in the centre of Paris, and the only attached institutionally to a major museum.