Untitled (After Violent Incident)

2013
Video


67 minutes. Single Channel.

Images: © Hugo Glendinning

As its title suggests, Etchells’ video Untitled (After Violent Incident) began as a response to Bruce Nauman’s seminal multi-channel video installation Violent Incident (1986). In Nauman’s work a man and a woman are shown across 12 screens in endless out-of-sync takes, enacting and re-enacting a brutal slapstick routine. In Etchells’ version two performers loop the choreography of Nauman’s original video in real time, repeating again and again its sequence of falls, kicks, slaps, and knockings down, until they’re exhausted; a brutal and at the same time comical repetition, achieved through physical duress rather than editing.

Performed by Lucy McCormick and Bruno Roubicek.

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