MTAA (M. River & T. Whid Art Assoc.)
Group formed in 1996 and made up by M.River (Iowa, USA, 1967) and T. Whid (Ohio, USA). They work in Brooklyn, New York (USA).

Five Small Videos About Interruption And Disappearing (2003)


Intended to be an update (ironic to a greater or lesser extent) of the forms and themes present in the first performance art works based on video, Five Small Videos About Interruption And Disappearing revisits some of the linguistic, attitude-related and behavioural explorations already proposed in these works, resituating them and subjecting them to new questions and interrogations. Here, the gestures of greeting, of asking the other, “how are you?” are also shown as simple linguistic and social explorations, that may only have a similar answer, produced independently of the question and therefore, not even on a synchronised basis, in a new game with the principles of interruption, simultaneity, immediate past and retard that were so typical in the proposals of the first video-performances. It is highly significant how the white backgrounds surrounding the artists-performers in these videos decontextualise their bodies and actions from a specific environment that could enter as a determining variable of their acts of communication or expression. This would, in a way, allude to the generalised experimental conception of the human condition, which is so present today among the mass media, according to which individuals become elements with which experiments may be carried out, placing them in certain situations in order to see their reactions and interactions and building a show from this (as is the case in the Big Brother television shows, for example). Of course, there is no doubt that in the MTAA proposal, the concept of interaction is close to manipulation. This means that the spectator’s possibility for intervention would not be really participative, but just regulatory. Moreover, both the interaction between the characters that are the protagonists of these videos (the authors themselves) and that of the spectator with them, would end up having the shapes of disappearance. It seems that no human meeting is possible without the escape or dissipation of one of the parties meeting (in all cases, the subject disappears or voluntarily tries to disappear).