Video

ART THIEVES

Gunilla Josephson

2009, 19:00 minutes, colour, English, w/ subtitles in: English, French, or Swedish

TAPECODE 645.24

Two Vivisectors from the Department of Truth discover the meaning in Art.

A video that can be defined as part of The Third Cinema – neither consumer goods nor avant-garde, or an experiment. In the 1930s this kind of art form/film/cultural expression was seen as an instrument of revolutionary consciousness, whose products the system could not assimilate. Paradoxically it is also a self-portrait of a (my) personal relationship to art and its magnificent invincibility.

A woman and a man, who might be escapees from a painting, crash into and set up camp in a semi-abandoned museum somewhere in rural France. Equipped with a variety of peculiar tools they set to work, tuning, smelling, listening, scraping, drilling into art, using knives, machines, talking shells, tubes and brushes and mumbling things like “We need the big tools and machines to make the big statements” or “I’m for art that’s badly dressed and has miss-matched socks.” Who are they? Conservationists, buyers, artists, art critics, curators, thieves, art police, appraisers? And, what do they want? Vivisections? Money? Truth? Lies? Art? Entertainment? Escape? Spirituality? Beauty? Once their tasks are done they leave, the same way they came in, bringing with them a swathed bundle the size of a baby but return again and again, condemned to a chronic state of scrutiny inside a gilded frame.

DVD menu options:
Loop with no credits or Play Once with credits
No subtitles + Frame
English s/t + Frame
English s/t
French s/t
Swedish s/t

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