On one cool, dusky Sunday evening we bundled and strutted our way up to the Yonge/Eglinton intersection to view a screening of Transmedia 2000's videos on an outdoor LED billboard. While trying to view the dozen shorts, we were asked directions by several lost souls. I suppose we were begging for it, posing unwittingly as friendly wackos leaning against our fave newspaper boxes. Each artistic video short, it turned out, was followed by about ninety seconds of TV and movie ads, all adding to our experience of that street corner.

The works that stood out and outsmarted the barrage of intensely competing and dulling advertising were simple in design, of modest intent, and employed fascinating close-ups. Louise McKissick's i love you captivated with its framing of a woman's lips mouthing, "i love you" at the edge of a bowl filled with ladybugs. Methane, by Willy Le Maitre and Eric Rozenzveig, is a single shot of a large bubble with the cameraman's reflection disappearing once the bubble pops. Like a cheap version of Zelig, Michelle Kasprzak's Solidarity intercuts fulsome images of the Pope and of herself, establishing an ironic, specious relationship.

Most of the remaining videos were a little too ambitious for the spatial and temporal constraints of the project. They were often far too complicated and too layered in imagery and text. Apparently, this is yet another millennial project with little conceptual point, itself very distant and a far cry from earlier more engaged interventionist public art.

Well, Bambi claims to have seen some of the hottest performance films in ages with Enlightened Nonsense - recent film shorts on repetition by Deirdre Logue (at YYZ Artists' Outlet). Doyenne extraordinaire of endurance, Logue herself performs rather daring acts in nearly every short flick - basketballs pound her head in "Moohead," she licks a gravel road in "Roadtrip," imbibes a relentless stream of milk and whipped cream in "Milk and Cream," picks burrs from her privates in "Scratch," and wraps and painfully unwraps sticky tape from her head and face in "Tape." The ten titles in twenty minutes provide quite a rollercoaster of excess.

Whoever said that length does not matter? Well, Douglas Gordon certainly exploits the contrary view in his 24 Hour Psycho (1993). (Trixie found out that The Power Plant is not permitting sleep-overs to take in the whole piece at one go; instead the keener has to make three trips.) Gordon's game is to take the readymade popular film and manipulate it in order to tease out the strange in the banal. In this installation he stretches Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) out to twenty-four hours and mutes the soundtrack. The film is nearly rendered a still image, allowing close, unhurried inspection of any element within the frame. The narrative itself is impossible to experience. It is assumed common knowledge. It creates an occasionally impatient viewing, always anticipating another shot from memory. Gordon's through a looking glass (1999) comprises two full-sized wall projections, nearly facing one another and often reversed, with the sequence from Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver (1976) in which De Niro is practising his aggression ("you talking to me?"). This sequence is recut many times; sometimes both walls fall in synch, other times one appears to respond to the other. These variations endure over two hours. After several minutes Trixie could think of nothing but the fragile masculinity of this insipid character.

Logue and Gordon meet somewhere in their strategy of repetition and subtle variation. The former's more modest in formal extent but unsettling in her themes, the latter's reworking of readymade pop cinema is radical in a near minimalist extreme. We suppose length matters, but who's measuring? XoXo

P.S. Keep sending those loving letters to us at bambi.acconci@disinfo.net

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