In 1964, Canadian cultural theorist Marshall McLuhan coined his famous phrase, “the medium is the message.” His assertion that the nature of the medium changes how its content is understood can be applied to how video has influenced the art it facilitates. The transience of video art means it can operate in liminal spaces that allows it to act as signifiers of subversion. Unlike the near hegemonic and far-reaching stability that is often expressed in film, the liminal nature of video lends itself a quality that is well suited to express politics of uncertainty and tension. The very nature of video allows it to encapsulate a subjectivity that puts established paradigms of visual representation into question.
Video is unique in that it is a medium whose articulations are largely defined by its technical qualities and limitations. Traditional VCR tapes and their properties such as noise and tape length often force artists to work around them, which have resulted in works that are informed and distorted by its self-contained forms. The unique subjectivity that video facilitates makes it an ideal medium to explore issues that are relevant in a Canadian context, where histories are informed by narratives of migration, displacement, and diasporic tension in relation to place. Artists in what is now Canada often leveraged the ‘limitations’ of video to articulate narratives of uncertainty that put the cohesion of the nation state into question.
In her 2003 video The Shirt, Kanienʼkehá:ka artist Shelley Niro challenges the authority of the colonial state by using fragmented narratives to articulate visions of sovereignty and self determination. However, she eschews the stability of film in favour of a series of vignettes that paint a disturbing portrait of colonial violence and dispossession. Instead of using a fixed point of reference, her video seemingly wavers between beautiful landscapes and images of an Indigenous woman wearing a shirt with various phrases that narrate the violent relationships between Indigenous peoples and the nation state. However, flow and continuity are disrupted in favour of presenting rapid juxtapositions that allude to this tense and fraught history. By subverting the filmic conventions of structural narrative, Niro transfixes the viewer into a state of listlessness and anxiety, one that evokes the feelings of displacement Indigenous peoples have often felt because of settler colonialism. In doing so, Niro forces the viewer to confront brutal truths that would not have been as impactful if the work had embraced the inherent linearity of film.
What makes Niro’s video more compelling is the fact that while she exposes the fragility of the nation state and its canonical art forms, she simultaneously manages to to solidify inherent ties between Indigenous presence and the land itself. By using the medium of video to unground Indigeneity from the structural paradigms of coloniality, Niro enacts a practice of sovereignty that forces viewers to reorient their relationships to the nation state and its forms of unity and cohesion. Returning to McLuhan’s famous proclamation, Niro’s use of video becomes integral to her vision of pan-Indigenous liberation.
Article Photo: Skeena Reece – Please Do Not Disturb Me (2009), video installation, Vancouver. Artwork © Skeena Reece, Photo credit: Neal Jennings, licensed under CC.
