The British artists John Wood and Paul Harrison are well known for their playful, ingenious and inventive video artworks in which they explore and investigate, through performative actions, not only the human interactions with architectural space, geometry and objects, but also the major laws of physics as universal gravitation and motion. In- Only Other Point
, the duo transformed their wide hangar studio in Bristol into a sophisticated constructed grey set seemingly made of an impressive succession of rooms, each of which presents specific minimalist architectural characteristics. From a frontal viewpoint, the camera moves on to an apparent circular survey of the rooms, shooting the succession of the singular events happening in each of them, thus putting the viewers in a state of curiosity and expectation.

The artists focus on the rectangular frame formed by the moving image and on what happens through it, reducing the traditional narrative associated with filmmaking to a sort of object theatre where straight and impersonal recorded actions create a series of whimsical, unpredictable and meaningless events. The actions are mostly triggered and performed by invisible hands, mysterious mechanisms or nylon strands dropping, throwing, revolving, spinning, suspending balls of different size, matter, weight, colours and use, mostly recognisable as tennis, golf, ping-pong, squash or beach balls. The fourteen minute long loop sequence of events is extremely well engineered and undoubtedly produces a hypnotic effect.

Wood and Harrison, who are usually the main performers and protagonists of the videos in which they experiment space and objects with their own body as raw material, only make a short appearance here, leaving the balls' actions and interactions with the built units and objects to be the stars of the show. With a typically British phlegmatic humour, the duo fuses references to Samuel Beckett's universe with a genuine sense of wonder.



KS