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Arm's Length navigates
from the formal austerity of the museum, through the ambience of the
city and daily life of a single parentÕs familial efforts, to lumbering
stalkers amid the Ôred lightÕ district. Produced entirely in Amsterdam,
the weave of image and poetic text, movement and sound gradually reveals
a portrait of the daily negotiations of human intimacy. As these levels,
nuances and varying currencies of relating emerge, so to do our subtle
protective strategies of distancingÉ that keep experience at Ð arm's
length.
--John Sturgeon
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In Arm's Length (2000), Sturgeon's first single-channel
video in over a decade, he aims his sights at a
more subtle means of considering alienation in its various forms. This
return to single-channel video also marks a rededication to the poetic
that was beginning to decay in previous installations due to his aggressive
appropriations of mass media. In this video, Sturgeon fully leaves the
dreamscape of deserts, salt flats, ancient ruins, etc., and takes time
to listen to what the mundane can tell us about non-rational economy.
Sturgeon manages to capture the commonest sights and sounds of everyday
life from such an individualized perspective that they appear as an
alien presence that suggests unnamable currents circulating through
the most routinized experience. For example, he shows that waiting for
and riding on a tram is as good a site as any for his peculiar brand
of archaeology. One can find wonders and horrors of the magnitude usually
reserved for great social disasters like war, and they cannot be privatized,
analyzed, owned or dissected. Such flows are far too elusive. This video
insists that the impossible is possible, but frustratingly just out
of reach. It wants to demonstrate the impossible to the viewer, but
makes no secret that ultimately it cannot. From both within and without,
ArmÕs Length is the representation of soft melancholy and of the will
to continue the quest for understanding.
--Steven Kurtz, C.A.E. (Critical
Art Ensemble), Sept. 2000
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