Manhatta 1999

Directed by Lutz Bacher

Impulsively, Bacher boarded a seaplane in Manhattan. Once above the city, she videotaped the buildings below. Manhatta (1999) hovers over, zooms into and fractures the unfolding panorama of New York into frayed pixels. Such rippling pixelation was not premeditated, but only a happy accident. Bacher transferred the videotape to DVD in reverse and anomalous, glitching playback appeared. Like other moments of disruption and decay in this exhibition, Bacher used the defect to evoke feeling, much like how distortion is used in music. The artwork takes on other contours when the World Trade Center towers come into view, totally intact. It is eerie how Bacher’s footage carries around its edges the luminous ring of coincidence, fate or premonition, how it evokes but does not show that great historical trauma and how it calls to mind all the other operational footage we have seen from drones, flight decks and other crafts of violence.