Video P
/4
- Video P
- 1974
- video, b&w, sound
- 10min, 59sec
“Video P” is a brilliant example of Paweł Kwiek’s interpretation of avant-garde art and of the phenomenology of the medium. It consists of a simultaneous presentation of the potential of television, the author’s self-referencing, and the coexistence between a man and technology. The film depicts Kwiek’s dialogue with TV equipment, with the artist drawing abstract lines and circles on the white screen in the television studio, directing and being directed by each of the video’s following frames. That activity was specifically described by him in 1976: “Two corner cameras are targeted at a board where I’m drawing horizontal and vertical lines, or circles. One of the cameras shows it. In this way, I set the borders of the image. A mixer and the second camera allow the background image of me drawing to be pasted in. The borders of the added image are outlined by my gestures. So when I draw a circle, for instance, the screen shows my hand drawing a circle together with the mixed background image.” This gesture was typical of Kwiek’s combination of film, photography and drawing that also appeared in his later works (such as “Video-photographic Pseudo-drawings”, 1978) expressing symbolic meaning and a McLuhanian “manipulative” approach: construction of the message by the man operating the mass medium. It was a further step (after “Video A”) into a “television message about himself,” in this case as a “video drawer,” revealing a new structure of cognition and unmasking a new model of reality. B.P.