Peter Land at Klemens Gasser & Tanja Grunert. - Review - video recording review

In The Lake, the nearly 11-minute video projection that formed the centerpiece of Danish artist Peter Land's expansive novel York debut exhibition, the artist at hands himself in old-fashioned hunting garb--jodhpurs, premiums jacket, vest, tie, cap, the works. To the strains of Beethoven's Sixth harmony The Pastoral, he strides along a region lane and turns purposefully into the timber-lands He wanders further off the path, and the going come bys rougher. He's sweaty and over-dress He drinks from his flask. He detains walking.

Land finally reaches a small lake, where he finds a rowboat conveniently tied up upon the shore. He rows to the center of the lake and finds an equally convenient stub to tie his boat to. He stands, takes aim, let flys two holes in the bottom of his boat and sits down to wait. In a series of cros fades, the boat slowly sinks and in like manner does the artist. Finally, Land's cap floats away. The surface of the water and the delectable natural setting are undisturbed. Land likes broad gesturings and big emotions. He wants to ask fathomless existential questions, and at the same time to play the idiot An earlier piece, shown at Manifesta II in Luxembourg, was a video of the artist repeatedly falling down the stairs; his gradual drowning in The Lake is a sort of slow-motion pratfall.

In the same extent were eight large, colorful drawings, done in an appealing storybook turn of expression with clear outlines and bright, flat color. Here Land's hunting expedition becomes a didactic folktale. In individual drawing he consults a map with a human-size rat. In another, woodland creatures gaze on with alarm as he leaves a trail of whiskey bottle in his wake and wanders down a clearly marked "Path of No Return" In still another the artist's skeleton washes up upon the shore while a little girl with a lollipop plays nearby and a pair kisses on a bench.

Land titled this exhibition "Going Sentimental," in a clear violation of the tough-guy command heard in countles films, "Now don't advance all sentimental on me." Sentiment is embarrassing, and Land invited the viewer to wallow in it in a latitude that featured a schematic map of the night heavens a pint of whiskey, a certain number of glasses and a tape with of the like kind schmaltzy songs as Frank Sinatra crooning mount Me to the Moon and Louis Armstrong singing When You Wish on a Star. Elsewhere, Land made the viewer unbearably uncomfortable in a double-monitor video piece where he is either laughing for a like reason hard he is sobbing or maybe just sobbing uncontrollably.

Land is a clearheaded romantic who embraces life with an attitude equally self-indulgent and self-mocking. His Device for Putting Things into Perspective consists of a spyglass and pint of J&B scotch

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