Unwatchable Scenes and Other Unreliable Images … at Public Fiction

Julià’s video, Unwatchable Scenes, is seductive as an abstraction, deflecting quickly any immediate reading; instead acting as an invitation to read be- tween the lines. The work was difficult to discern, despite displaying footage of sometimes recognizable landscapes. The images are obscured by a muddle of black lines and shifting planes: visual clues of damaged video media. Slow and meditative, the work is somewhat evocative of the potential beauty of an abstract painting. Yet it also succeeded in pointing to technology’s inability to provide a clear record of what is purportedly being evidenced. I later learned that the work had been sourced from a found and edited video on YouTube. The artist had pieced together downloaded video footage of the film sets used for a 1981Hollywood film called Inchon, which primarily depicts the Korean war. Inchon is a subject the artist has been obsessed with, and which he has alluded to in his previous works. As a potential meditation on war—or cinema—Unwatchable Scenes is difficult to pin down; powerfully evoking the entropic status of the medium of video while leaving the purpose of those visual connotations difficult to define.