A deep, chocolatey brown paste covers the screen, an imperfectly coated top right edge revealing it to be an opaque material layering an otherwise transparent surface. A couple of seconds later, an upward stroke dissolves a strip of this gooey matter, rendering it translucent. A shadowy presence emerges from the left, rapidly creating two, three, four, five, six such upward strokes. With each murky clearing in the viscous overlay, the presence of a figure becomes increasingly apparent, and we begin to discern a face entering the frame whose tongue produces each mark on what appears to be the surface of the screen but is in fact a transparent pane of glass placed in front of the lens. It is the accompanying soundtrack—John Coltrane’s 1964 jazz classic “A Love Supreme”—that lends Dineo Seshee Bopape’s 2006 video its title, and attunes the viewer to the play of intimacy and adoration between screen and subject that is slowly brought into focus in this work, and by extension, in the exhibition Homage: Queer lineages on video . The oft-cited and endlessly revisited early theorization of the “video monitor as mirror” and the associated articulation of “an aesthetics of narcissism” is visualized here with a literalness that can only be read as humorously subversive and poignantly self-reflexive. 1 In the decades separating video’s emergence within the artist’s toolbox as a mode of practice that exploded pretensions of medium specificity, self- referentiality and immanence, video has—among its many uses and abuses—been deployed to document and memorialize, to profess admiration and devotion, to bestow historical significance and contemporary resonance, to express love and enact critical intimacy between makers and their elected interlocutors. Video, in this
esthetics of Narcissism,” , “Video: The A 1 See Rosalind Krauss . 76): 50 1 (Spring 19 October
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