The St. Petersburg Paradox, installation view, Swiss Institute. (from left to right) Sarah Ortmeyer. SANKT PETERSBURG PARADOX, 2014; marble chessboards, copper, iron, brass, and aluminum chess tables, natural ostrich, rhea, goose, chicken, mallard, quail, emu, and duck eggs, artificial marble obsidian, alabaster, and onyx eggs; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist and Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv. Tabor Robak. A*, 2014; 14-channel HD video; 9:46. Courtesy of the Artist and team (gallery, inc.). John Miller. Labyrinth I, 1999; acrylic on canvas with sound component; 54 x 70 in. Courtesy of the Artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Kaspar Müller. Tropic of Cancer, 2014; laser prints on A3 paper; each 12 x 15 ½ in. Courtesy Galerie Francesca Pia, Zürich, The Green Gallery, Milwaukee, and Federico Vavassori, Milan. Cayetano Ferrer. Remnant Recomposition, 2014; carpet remnants, seam tape; 18 x 60 ft. Courtesy of the Artist.

The St. Petersburg Paradox courts the aesthetic of the crapshoot table. The main gallery floor is divided into two sections by a half wall painted the dark forest green of a billiards table. Behind the wall, blocked off like the VIP section of a gambling hall, is a platform area upholstered with Cayetano Ferrer’s Remnant Recomposition, a patchwork of casino-floor carpet samples whose clashing patterns abrasively hum. One almost hallucinates the stale cigar smoke of the parlor, the flash of card sharks’ green visors. Also on the main floor, Sarah Ortmeyer’s elegant installation SANKT PETERSBURG PARADOX creates a delicate maze of upended marble chessboards and tables, upon which onyx, obsidian, alabaster, and actual bird eggs precariously rest. The work impresses upon viewers the fragility of chance.

The exhibition romances the poetics of the gamble as well. For Bad Faith (1994), Douglas Gordon wagered his entire allotted budget for an upcoming exhibition on whether or not it would snow in Stuttgart on the upcoming Christmas Day. Underneath the wall text of Gordon’s poetic letter detailing the bet, two television sets feature analog video of solitary windows overlooking the blue dusk of Stuttgart streets on Christmas Eve, capturing the final hours in which Gordon’s wager would be won or lost. These tense vistas expose the sentimental side of gambling. Looking through these melancholic windows, we are held aloft in the purgatory of hoping, in an elongation of that crucial moment when the dice are still in midair. It seems it may snow any minute in Stuttgart, 1994, but it does not.

Ericka Beckman’s brilliant and terrifying video YOU THE BETTER, installed in the Swiss Institute’s basement, approaches the “game” as a philosophical concept that resists logic and is prone to turn hauntingly absurd. Viewers must pass through an ominous black doorway and round the bend of a brick-lined hallway illuminated in dark blue to access the thirty-minute video, which depicts a single team inscrutably battling what seems to be an imaginary opponent in a repetitive, basketball-like game with ridiculous rules. Unseen cheerleaders encourage the team of five as they compete against no one in the dark gym: “Don’t Surrender! Don’t Stop! Get that ball right over the top!” In Samuel Beckett’s existentialist masterpiece Endgame, characters in a displaced room circle round each other like the last few chess pieces on the board, their speech unraveling into empty cliché. A similarly desperate sense of futility pervades Beckman’s desolate gym. Beckman’s video presents a horror situation in which arbitrary rules possess cosmic significance, and the repetitive throwing of the ball becomes a desperate attempt to uncover what this meaning might be. Perhaps hell is having to play the same game over and over again.

Ericka Beckman. YOU THE BETTER, 1983; HD video from 16mm; 30:00. Produced with funds from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.

In cheery opposition to the mortal gloom of the basement, Tabor Robak’s A* shimmers on the gallery’s main floor. A carbuncle of fourteen massive HD video screens combined to display a stunning composite image, A* demos a series of animated, mobile-phone-style games characterized by flashy graphics and a series of perpetually good-natured wins and losses. A* is a shrine to the mindless variety of digital gaming. The stakes are low; these mesmerizing puzzles, here displayed at an almost religiously large scale, might be played forever without risk of material loss.

Whether or not we should “take the game seriously” is another paradox this exhibition presents. At the threshold of the main gallery, Giovanni Anselmo’s untitled work, an Arte Povera masterpiece from 1968, taunts viewers with a looming, if presently neutralized, terror. While the constituent concrete slabs may at first appear innocuous, the stones are in fact hugged by two fraying, live electrical wires only just too distant from one another to connect. The dormant stone and its potential electrical threat stand as a warning of a risk we may not take seriously—but perhaps we should.

Often drawing more attention to its curatorial frame and philosophical underpinnings than to the works that compose it, The St. Petersburg Paradox positions itself as omnipotent casino—a haunting maze of chances taken, some trivial, some fatal. The exhibition’s pieces are positioned like a series of strategic moves, provocatively elucidating the presented theme. In this show, the house most certainly wins.

The St. Petersburg Paradox is on view at Swiss Institute through August 17. Swiss Institute, 18 Wooster Street, New York City, 10013.

The world doesn’t need any more films. The world doesn’t need any more video art. So if you’re going to bring an image into the world, you have to think it through. –Kodwo Eshun

After 50 years of production, distinct periods are appearing in the history of video art. Not distinct ism’s or manifesto driven bubbles, but separate works that seem palpably similar. As the technology used to make movies evolves past the time limits of tape, emerging digital technologies have given artists the ability to create works that seem unlimited in size, length, or production schedule. In 1993, Douglas Gordon laid down the gauntlet by slowing Hitchcock’s Psycho to 2 frames a minute, stretching it into a 24 hour composition. Since then, there have been numerous videos that have tested the stamina of the creators through decade long production schedules or the audience by being unwatchable in one sitting. Boston and Cambridge recently hosted three examples of these monumental works: The Cremaster Cycle, the Otolith Trilogy, and The Clock. Together, these movies point to a new, epic sized production practice and away from traditional art school skills (do any art schools teach bull riding?).

The Cremaster Cycle (Brattle Theatre, October 1-4) is a five movie series filmed between 1994 and 2003. It forms a self-referential system that both functions as a movie and an “Aesthetic System” for Barney’s prints, sculptures, and other ephemera. The entire program hangs on a series of analogies to bodily functions (the title is named after the muscle that raises and lowers the testes) that consider the creative act through a biological motif.

Still from Otolith III. HD Video. © The Otolith Collective. Image courtesy of MIT LIst Visual Art Center

The Otolith Group Trilogy (MIT List Art Center, September 6- 22) was filmed between 2003 and 2009. It is the shortest series considered here, all three movies total under 2 hours, but the production involved a multinational filming schedule, help from more than 8 art groups across multiple continents, and do not include the numerous spin off productions. The Otolith Trilogy is a collage of found film segments and original images. Named for a portion of the inner ear, the otolith structure help us keep our balance and handle the effects of gravity. All three movies are obliquely about the effects of time and how we keep our stability in a changing world. Otolith I (2003), assembled in response to the invasion of Iraq, documents a new species of humans who can only live in low gravity. Otolith II (2007) is primarily a visual comparison between Mumbai’s Dharavi and Le Corbusier’s planned city, Chandigarh. Otolith III (2009) is a prequel to the unrealized film The Alien from Indian director Satyajit Ray.

While The Clock (The MFA, Boston, September 16- December 31) is the most hyped, it’s also the least deliberated of today’s “it” art works.  It’s a 24 hour, continuous blanket of samples from movies and TV where the film mentions or shows a clock on screen indicating the time. These segments are cleverly mixed together to reflect the current time as you are watching.

Chrstian Marclay. Still from The Clock, 2010. Single-channel video, 24 hours. Photo: Todd White Photography.

Each of these video works have supplements that define their character. The Cremaster has numerous sculptures used in filming that have been exhibited with the movies. Seeing it in a movie theater, without the supporting material really drives home that even if you owned copies of the movies, somehow, that extra stuff does make the work feel more ambitious. The Otolith group’s sizable body of work overlaps and functions in a recursive way. Trying to outline the edges of their political activism and their art is a unproductive pursuit. Last, The Clock has made visiting the work an experience; waiting in the line to see it or trying to sketch a database of movies as time progresses. The viewer links the features of the work with the hour that they drop by. The size turns the work into something that you can’t completely experience in the aggregate but also doesn’t prevent the moment from having a distinct sense.

All of these movies were created by groups that have head artists, like a design firms. This doesn’t change how each movie should be received, but does point to collaborative practices as being a successful operational strategy today. Though they were all created in a collaborative environments, the aesthetic framework for each is wildly different.

Still from Otolith I. Video © The Otolith Collective. Image Courtesy of MIT List Visual Art Center.

The Cremaster Cycle is five distinct movies. There are connections between the films, but each stands alone and to decode them you need nothing more than a basic understanding of anatomy (and Masonic rituals for the third movie). Philosophically speaking, the movies are a closed system, that functions independently. Created by traditional filming, the movies have a beginning that flows to an end. Certain portions have stood the test of time, but formally, it feels dated. Their state of the art graphics are passé. The film quality is uneven, the third film (the last filmed) looks best. The myth is just as momentous, but I can’t imagine that this type of work would be possible in today’s economic environment. We should value it for that reason alone: the Cremaster is a time capsule from a time when a gallerist would fund a motivated, but relatively unproven young artist’s five movie cycle and make his career go from promising to prominent.

The Otolith Trilogy is not quite a closed system nor is it a completely unsettled and open ended. Made from a mix of new and historical photos and video, texts spoken over them, and an ambient soundtrack, the result resemble Chris Marker‘s works (Sans Soleil for example). In effect, the trilogy is a collage of real and imaginary events, where “the future feeds forward into the past” creating a confederated present.

The work is a lively montage, but a distinct post-colonial politics shaped these works, so it would be easy to disregard their proficiency as a pedantic heuristic. The non-political elements of each film amplify with repeated viewing, though. Each film is stratified with techniques and themes that are exacting for the viewer. Otolith I is a made up of real events transformed into a visual and textual poem. It asks, but does not answer, if it’s possible to find the courage needed in the face of change. Otolith II concerns itself with the effects of architecture on people. This “reconstruction of gravic space” changes resident’s attitudes and their aspirations. Otolith III questions the capacity to question via artworks. It examines the consequences of our creativity and who owns the lives that are created in narrative.

The Clock, feels larger than you on more than one level. You can’t see the whole thing very easily. Even if you live near one of the institutions that has purchased a copy (MFA Boston/National Gallery of Canada, MoMA, and LACMA), access to the whole 24 hours is hard to come by. It’s a wall of motion and activity from every part of the world and film history. It’s unwilling to reveal the why or what of its aspirations. Why this monster was created, if it a celebration of film’s moments or an allegory, isn’t answered and we are left to unravel what ties the individual moments together, other than obvious sonic and visual associations.

Chrstian Marclay. Still from The Clock, 2010. Single-channel video, 24 hours. Photo: Todd White Photography.

The Clock is a rich tapestry of subjectless players and sounds, with no objective goal. Christian Marclay‘s work depends on emotions and characters that made it through a double editing process, as each movie is edited before he can sample it. Marclay arranges film’s past into the present tense. Breaking the rules at times, implicit watches that don’t explicitly mention the time show that the feeling of these moments are more important than the exact time.

His creative mode is that of a dj rather than a singer/songwriter. Instead of crooning a tightly scheduled album about his/our love life, he selects segments of songs that work together, mixing them in the same witty way a dj cuts and remixes songs live. It’s is one of the best mixtapes I’ve ever looked at. It’s impressive for being able to deliver palpable atmosphere. You go to funerals at 10 AM and not at 10 PM. 6, 7, and 8 PM are different types of after-work experience (commuting, getting drinks, and movie/concert time, respectively). This may be the result of Hollywood’s reductive inclinations. Movies need to be believable and methodical for story telling. Movies distill each moment into consensus, presenting moments that pass our cynical minimum for believability. Despite that, a bad dj can ruin the mood. Marclay does not.