Art Basel Week in Miami 2012
A Visitor’s Notebook
By Camille Hong Xin

...In 2011, Marck, Daniel Cherbuin (Galerie
Von Braunbehrens) and Gregory Scott
(Catherine Edelman Gallery) were among the
most exciting multimedia artists. Their witty
and innovative works attracted curious crowds
and generated big sales. Cherbuin’s pieces
mock the commercial culture by placing people
in a photograph or a cartoon print watching
an embedded screen that shows his own
video works. On Scott’s works, he paints people
(often himself) who observe his own
thoughts acting out on the embedded screen,
or himself living in a painting on the wall, or
a piece of artwork coming to life. With both
viewers and the viewed within the same
frame, these works further challenge our psychic
while blurring the boundaries between
reality and art, and between different layers
of space.
As for Marck’s video sculptures, I was completely
in awe of the physical interaction between
the inside and outside of the video
screen. He often locks women inside a wall
(either in the video or outside of the video),
or exposes them to a swaying sickle (a real
one coming from outside of the screen), which
inevitably involves the notion of S & M.
Galerie Von Braunbehrens exhibited his swimming
pool series, which I had seen last year,
wherein women are trapped in a tiny pool surrounded
by all kinds of “walls” that look like
they were installed from outside of the screen.
I found Marck’s new video sculpture, Antenne
at Licht Feld Gallery at the CONTEXT Fair. As
usual, Marck filmed a line of women running
in front of a green screen. After taking apart
a regular monitor and building a new metal
frame, Marck installed three car antennas,
their movement synchronized with the time
code of the video. In the final work, three
lines of women are running horizontally on the
transparent glass. The intriguing part is the interaction
between the antennas and the
screen action is that these women would only
run when the antennas extend under their feet,
and after they pass, the antennas retract.
There was a hint of danger, but much less
cruel than his previous works, Sichel and
Humanairsystem....