Grant Stevens Why The Long Face?

Words, rhyme and meaning are putty in the hands of Grant Stevens. Like a sculptor of textual fabric, Stevens takes pictures, words and speech and twists them into a shifting field of double entendres, wordplays and sound grabs. His stuff is the cliché of modern life, the slogans and sound bytes that constantly surround us and which are repeated so often that they lose any meaning that they might have had.

Often played out as white text on a black background, these monochromatic moments are set to a saccharine soundtrack or spoken text. The words or phrases are familiar to us yet become somehow sinister, like the way Muzak in an elevator hides the fact that you are sharing a confined space with strangers.

By juxtaposing what we read with what we hear, works such as Like Two Ships (2005) and Why the Long Face? (2005) toy with our perception and even our patience - it's like seeing a printed page slightly off register or the experience of motion sickness. Stevens plays with the senses and in particular the expectation that image and sound are inherently linked. Watch it for too long and you'll go crazy; it's video art that f***s with your mind.

Stevens is interested in narrative, or to be more precise the idea of a compacted narrative. His text-based videos often tell a condensed story, either describing the plot of a Hollywood film or relating snippets of more banal everyday events. He subverts the dominance of visual culture through describing in words what could be happening on the screen in front of us. In The Switch (2006), we read a word-by-word description of a film where the plot lines of a schlock horror and a teen romance are fused together. Set against a soundtrack of sweet music, The Switch creates a perverse mixed-up narrative which distorts the two plot lines into a three-minute, vacuum-packed, action-filled genre-buster. It is a filtered narrative where we encounter a story entertainingly reduced to its bare essentials...

...Stevens uses iconic or uncomfortable movie moments and expands these as a study in repetition. He is interested in the anti-climax, or the subversion of the cinematic denouement. His use of video as a medium is skilful and precise. He understands the use of time and duration in video and nothing is either too short or too long.

Stevens' work is not so much about a resolution of narrative, rather he is interested in the telling and the probing of possible sub-texts. Nothing is of course as it seems, and Stevens digs beneath the surface of cultural assumption to reveal hidden and sublime tensions, desires and expectations.

Julianne Pierce, June 2006 (excerpt)

Information for students - issues / themes / art practice

Sydney-based video artist Grant Stevens chooses language as his target in his video work Why The Long Face? 2005. Stevens' capitalised white text pulses quickly on a black screen. A male voice recites words that sometimes match the words on the screen and at other times seem unrelated or even suggest an opposite meaning.

The effect of sound and image in conflict leads to a feeling of disorientation, even motion sickness. Trying to listen and read simultaneously proves extremely difficult. Stevens sets up a war between the senses. Closing your eyes or blocking your ears brings momentary relief. But you are nonetheless left thinking; do I believe my eyes or my ears?

To make this work Grant Stevens has literally pulled apart jokes separating the beginning of the joke or expression from its punch line, creating a new, often humorous linguistic equation. The voice in Why The Long Face? has a distinctly Australian accent. It is the voice of the archetypal Aussie joker who spins yarns to entertain his mates. The audience is left wondering if they got the joke. Perhaps the joke is the work itself: the act of fooling the audience?

Stevens' work is also indebted to art history, specifically to the Dadaists and Surrealists who played with audience expectations in their own manipulations of text and image. Most famously, René Magritte in his 1929 painting of a pipe titled The Treachery of Images (This is not a pipe) challenged our trust in our senses and in representational art. Decades after the Surrealists made the familiar strange, American artist Barbara Kruger collided text and image to confront and implicate the viewer. Stevens, like Kruger, is an agent provocateur, he gets between the audience and the artwork, invading this hallowed space and subverting our expectations.

According to Grant Stevens: The unexpected relationship between sound and image....is also to call attention to the powerful quality of the audio visual media, particularly as it relates to dominant social and cultural contexts. The differences or gaps between what one sees and hears in these videos, are an attempt to underscore the complex cognitive and social processes of making meaning.

Grant Stevens, artist statement, Harries National Digital Art Prize 2005

Critical reviews / Quotes

"Stevens is an expert at manipulating this moment of cognitive renovation - the moment after the familiar meaning has been drained away up until new beginnings begin to fill the vacuum. "
Mark Pennings and Danni Zuvela, 'Grant Stevens: Questioning the Return', Eyeline, Number 55, Spring 2004, pp.15-18.

For the past few years Stevens has explored the languages of popular culture through his text, image and sound videos. This selection of works appropriate, manipulate and de-contextualise a range of cultural clichés and conventions that seem to surround us everyday. Whether it's through the overabundance of mixed metaphors or the incessant onslaught of predictable plotlines, his works seem to disrupt and challenge the way we read and interpret much mainstream culture.

Starkwhite Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand. Available online: www.starkwhite.co.nz