Apartment Art
Apartment Art, 1974.
Video, black-and-white, sound, 8 min. 35 sec.
Apartment Art is acollection of brief video works in which simple gestures and everyday objects are observed with a playful, often humorous sensibility. The individual clips—Time, Shoe Boat, Plug, 2-2=1, Crayonex, A Snap Is a Slap, Sugar, Light, Sink, Water, Tea Pot Ice Box, Tabasco vs. Catsup, and Test—include actions such as a hand briefly touching a hot iron, a shoe dropped into a sink filled with water, a hand snapping fingers and striking acounter, and a contest between Tabasco and Catsup as they run down a vertical surface.
The series was presented in 1974 in Jay D. McCafferty: Videotapes and Books, the firstexhibition at theLong Beach Museum of Art to include video, launching a decade of itsactive involvement with video art.
Melinda T. Wortz reviewed the exhibition in Artweek:“ In McCafferty's respect for thecommonplace, either manufactured or natural, you sense a deep feeling of empathy between the artist and his environment-an identification with rather than a control of hissurrounding’s—which is more Oriental than Western. His humor and obvious delight with life are contagious.” *
*Melinda T. Wortz, “Jay McCafferty: Videotapes and Books.” Artweek, April 27, 1974, review.
Long Beach Museum of Art Video Archive, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2006.M.7(A.Mcc-4).
© Jay McCaffert
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