Glass Video Gallery

Groningen, Netherlands

We began our exploration into the concept of  “envelopes” with this video art gallery in Holland, at the occasion of a music and video festival. I wanted it to be about the movement of the body as it goes through the exhibition and the enclosure. We had a small budget and we decided to make it very simple. We were only going to use one material: glass. Everything would be made of glass held by clips, including the vertical supports and the horizontal beams. This is the first real glass house because the glass houses by Mies van der Rohe or by Philip Johnson all had a roof and a steel structure. If you take the glass out of those houses, you still have a shelter, you still have a roof. Here, if you take off the glass, there is nothing left. At night, the space is like many mirrors and reflections, questioning what reality and virtual is, whether the envelope is real or a spectacle. Here the building became the event itself.

The appearance of permanence ( buildings are solid, they are made of steel, concrete, bricks, etc.) is increasingly challenged by the immaterial representation of abstract systems ( television and electronic images ). The invitation extended by the city of Groningen in The Netherlands to design a special environment for viewing pop music videos offered an opportunity to challenge preconceived ideas about television viewing and about privacy. Was the video gallery to be a static and enclosed black box like the architectural type created for cinema, an extended living room with exterior advertising billboards and neon light, or a new “type” that brought what was previously a living room, bar and lounge event into the street by reversing expectations?

Monitors provide unstable facades, glass reflections create mirages and limitless space is suggested. The gallery and urban space also contain both video objects on display and objects for displaying. They encompass monitor walls viewed through television dealership storefronts on the street while exhibiting events like those seen in the sex-video galleries of urban red-light districts.