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From: Jasper Joffe
Category: Exhibitions, Films
Date: 08 March 2001
Pierrick Sorin's films are not very funny. If you were to turn on the tv and find one on, you would change the channel. However in the context of gallery video art they become the height of entertainment, a huge relief from those endless non narrative bores, noticing the unnoticed, an eye or a hand or nothing much projected up grainily, making you feel so bored for the minute you watch it, that you almost convince yourself that anything that painful must be good. The Galerie Francaise is in the Piazza Navona, the tourist cafe and Bernini fountain centre of Rome, outside the gallery are loads of tables with big umbrellas covering them and a little national flag on each one. It is a classy location, and the gallery director or similar person, writing in the press release, says it is a big challenge catering for the diverse audiences his shows get, on the one hand overfed Americans wandering in looking for good value pizza, on the other underfed art lovers swanning by for the openings flicking back their expensive hair. Pierrick Sorin showed around four boring conventionally unwatchable pieces on small tvs, and the more entertaining films, that have actually been shown on French tv, on a big projection screen. The better films were black and white slapstick with Pierrick hilariously playing (again by video art standards) two brothers renacting a tv football match, chucking eggs at the tv as they watch a home movie, having things fall on them such as garden implements, and throwing eggs at each other, all this happening in quite a realistic domestic interior and crummy garden. The films are obviously very referential to important early cinema and other important films. They are about quotation, voyeurism, filmmaking, and impersonation. Yawn. Really they are quite stylishly made, the locations joltingly accurate in their crappiness, but the comedy third rate. Still they might appeal to dumb tourists looking for a physical comedy laugh.
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