2010

single channel SD video with sound

dimensions variable

total run time 14 minutes, 10 seconds

 

Aura Dies Hard (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy) is an essay film in which the viewer joins the artist after having just returned from a museum survey exhibition of video art. Through the course of the ensuing narrative, the artist reflects on the rhetoric of "dematerialization" often linked with early video (and conceptual and performance art more generally). Proposing an alternative, "materialist" read, in which the (often unauthorized) duplication and circulation of artist video paradoxically help perpetuate its mythic beginnings, the artist ultimately reveals that copying technologies and art world protocol have made it possible for him to have already obtained all the videos encountered at the museum show, clips of which are played throughout the film.

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