David
2013 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
4:43 minutes
Guan Xiao
David is a five-minute pseudo music video that features an upbeat melodic soundtrack with a duet by the artist Guan Xiao and frequent collaborator (and KADIST collection) artist Yu Honglei. Three screens display a collection of home videos filmed and uploaded by tourists at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence capturing Michelangelo’s eponymous masterpiece. The mass popularity and commodification of this artwork is further exaggerated with the numerous forms that we encounter and consume the image or likeness of the sculpture in our daily lives. The artist and Yu cheekily sing about the empty obsession toward this work and how its ubiquitous presence has rendered its true value and significance meaningless and neutral. Guan’s satirical statement on this particular Renaissance icon is twofold. It is a testament to how the influence of the consumption of images has propagated a cycle of overproduced “useless” (poor quality) material and neutralized the spectator’s ability to marvel at the extraordinary. This indifference especially resonates in today’s social media culture where a “like” is but a fleeting and empty sentiment. In addition, Guan’s choice of subject intentionally references what is dominantly considered to be a work of art in its most perfected form. This speaks to the artist’s frustration towards classification—which circles back to her interest in altering perception—and being categorized according to a Western standard.
Guan Xiao is known for her videos composed primarily of found images and videos and her sculptures that explore the logic by which things relate to one another. Her practice addresses ideas of permanence, transformations, and perception Since the beginning of her practice, she began collecting material from various sources including YouTube, DVDs, home video libraries and other footage archives in addition to producing her own original content. Her sculptures often reference forms of the old—mimicking relic-like characteristics and totemic shapes—juxtaposed within a contemporary configuration. For example, The Documentary: Geocentric Puncture (2012) positioned fake artifacts against professional photography studio sets. In a similar way with her videos, Guan initiates a rereading of existing material by presenting a new visual language that is stripped of context and resists pre-conceived associations. Conceding equal importance to objects, people and phenomena, Guan Xiao’s videos often explore how our experience of browsing the Internet shapes our vision of the world and our own – always in transformation – identities.
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