No one seems to know what will happen when you blow up Ronald Reagan`s talking head to 25 feet high in Grant Park, in front of perhaps 10,000 people. Maybe spontaneous applause, or 10,000 people running screaming into the night. Or perhaps even a long, communal nap.
Ditto artist William Wegman`s singing navel. At home in the comfort of one`s own living room, such a sight on the TV might provoke mild bemusement, perhaps an impromptu search for the remote control. But on a warm summer night at the Petrillo Bandshell, Wegman`s tuneless umbilicus, more than two stories high, could spark a firestorm of civic unrest.
Kate Horsfield and the Video Data Bank have strung together a separate hour-and-a-half show of artist videos for each night of the ”Video Drive-In,” which runs at 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. ”But even now,” said Horsfield, ”I won`t know if it works or not until I actually see it.
”You can look at it in an editing room but that doesn`t mean too much. The spectacle of seeing it outside and the whole dynamic of having 10,000 people responding is vastly different, and something you just can`t predict.” If numbing predictability is the bugaboo of mainstream TV and video, then the free weekend screenings in Grant Park will at least have the force of novelty. This is only the second ”Drive-In” in Grant Park, and wrapped into both nights` packages are everything from curious Marlboro commercials from the early 1950s to music videos unlike anything on MTV, to performance art videos, vintage political ads, public service announcements, TV comedy pioneer Ernie Kovacs and brief documentary works on racism, AIDS and the environment. Four months` work went into collecting and sifting through hundreds of works at the Video Data Bank, a public program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago that is the nation`s largest non-profit distributor of videotapes by and about contemporary art.
”The Data Bank is hooked right into the center of the media arts community, and numerous people around the country recommended titles to look at,” said Horsfield, a founder-along with the late Lyn Blumenthal-and now executive director of the Video Data Bank. ”Plus we had an open call for local work as well. I must have looked at about 250 videotapes over the past three months. But this is a very hard venue: A lot of video work is surprisingly intimate and doesn`t hold up when you blow it up from a small scale.”
The images turn humongous with the help of something called GE Light Valve technology. Originally developed for flight simulators, the equipment made a big hit at the 1984 Republican National Convention (some may recall an image of Reagan two stories high, towering over wife Nancy onstage). The most recent Rolling Stones tour created spectacular effects with the aid of 19 such Light Valve projectors.
The tapes are played on professional standard Betacam equipment, then fed into the GE Light Valve and expanded to 19 by 25 feet for projection onto a screen. ”It`s about the size of a movie screen,” said Horsfield, ”and the resolution is awesome, three times better than the first drive-in in 1984.”
Since that initial Grant Park affair, the Data Bank has produced similar programs in Spain, Portugal and New York`s Central Park, and the number of people creating video works has exploded. This year`s program, the sixth, will mark the Drive-In`s first return to Chicago.
According to Mindy Faber, associate director of the Data Bank and herself a video artist, ”The expansion in numbers is astronomical. There are so many more people producing now than just five years ago.”
In this year`s Drive-In, she said, ”there are lots of examples of people who are using camcorders and doing personal portraits or street witness kinds of things.” From Chicago, for instance, comes Jaime Tamake and Lori Peterson`s ”Mr. Windex,” a straight-on look at a former hard-luck case whose modest business cleaning cab windows stands as a metaphor for the American Dream.
One of the most compelling works comes from Paul Garrin of New York, who was beaten by police while taping the Tompkins Square riots of two years ago. His footage not only ended up on local and network news but also was transformed by the artist into a virtuosic, visually stunning rhapsody on the meaning of a free society.
”What we`re trying to do is simultaneously present challenging work that is still fairly entertaining and accessible,” said Faber, ”keeping in mind that there`s a potential audience of 10,000 people. It`s a good sampling, because there`s so many different kinds of styles and genres and aesthetics in video-it`s not a monolithic form of expression.”
Chicagoans can expect the unexpected, and in fairly unexpurgated form. According to Horsfield, very little subject matter was declared off-limits for the Drive-In.
”When we did it in 1990 in Central Park, I asked the head of the Summerstage program there where the restrictions were going to fall, and he said, `Oh, Kate, this is a park. Think of all the things people do in parks.` Well, when you`re talking about Central Park, everybody knows it`s everything from people on Rollerblades to dog walkers to mass murderers.
”But New Yorkers are used to having their nervous systems assaulted every day just by walking down the street, and Chicago`s a different city,”
said Horsfield. She invited Kathleen Cahill of the Grant Park Music Festival, which is collaborating with the Data Bank, to her office to look at some of the videos.
”She said, `Look, I`m not putting any restrictions on you. I`ll tell you how I think you should look at it, but I`m not censoring you in any way,`
” Horsfield said. Cahill indicated the Chicago Park District would be nervous about sexual content, and that`s about it, Horsfield said.
If there`s a constant to this year`s program-interspersed with Terry Dibble`s hilarious Kovacs-like jabs at media and Jenny Holzer`s provocative and cryptic text works-politics is it.
If all goes well, the works shown in the ”Video Drive-In” will offer a sort of antidote or inoculation against the narcotic undertow of mainstream television, said Horsfield.
