Saturday, November 20, 2010

"Insecurity Zone" by Nikolaj Recke

Just discovered this video on youtube. It's painful to watch in some cases (just like I imagine Vito Acconci's Security Zone to be). The jetty is so difficult to walk on to begin with that I could not imagine doing it blindfolded.



The synopsis:
"A blindfolded walk on Spiral Jetty. In the summer of 2009 Nikolaj Recke visited one of the absolute masterpieces of Land Art, Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty (1971), located in Great Salt Lake in Utah. Blindfold, he went, with the help of instructions, all the way out of the spiral shaped and cliff-paved quay. The video paraphrase is a known recording of Smithson himself running off the quay immediately after its completion, by paraphrasing another canonical work from the period, Vito Acconci's Security Zone (1971), where the artist, blindfolded and hands tied behind his backs allowed himself to be led around the New York City pier area by a stranger. Insecurity Zone can be seen partly as a personal tribute to the two works, both as an unpretentious commentary to contemporary art's eternal attempt to move closer to art history. It depicts the history of art as a mental and physical spaced where it is difficult to find a foothold, all the time that we move in spirals, and it is not to determined whether one is led or blindfold.

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