peter campus at Bronx Museum

I am fascinated by video art and its placement in the canon of American art museums. To me, how we treat video art is a training ground for processing, criticizing, and appreciating internet art.

We just don't know how to do it yet.

We place awkward rectangles in white-walled galleries and plug them in. We create black box rooms where people cycle in and out without aim. We have no systematic, accepted ways to view and understand art of this kind.

"The Visitors", by Ragnar Kjartansson, points the way-- a collective experience that compels collective action, dozens of strangers walking through a gallery following video screens timed through a house, with hypnotic chant. We all felt something:

peter campus: video ergo sum, now on exhibition at the Bronx Museum, lays down some markers for collectiveness.

Everything is about us in the art, we're there.

The Internet art is dangerous. Video art is the tip of the spear. We don't know what we have yet, or how to use it, but I think there's something Falun Gong here, a quiet sedition against the Facebook suppression that feels like elephants on our chests, and I want to find it, and set us free.