Dr. Videovich: Art, Education and Emancipatory Politics'

 

Davidovich's output involving the use of adhesive tape is vast and open to a variety of interpretations. In some video pieces, such as Blue, Red, Yellow (1974), the television receiver is completely covered with monochrome horizontal lines while emitting only the white noise characteristic of non-broadcast.

This double quality of the television being turned on, where, however, no channel is tuned, can make us reflect on the device as a passive subject or, also, as a neutral object that can lean towards different ideological positions. The use of the three primary colours (characteristic of pigment addition) instead of the three main colours that generate the video image (linked to light subtraction), together with the manual placement of the tapes and their wonderfully imperfect result, makes this work read as both a pictorial action and a graphic video.

The use of tape as a complex and full material took on diverse presences. On monitors, on large walls, as a curtain in a stairwell or in small pieces on paper or cardboard (which acted as sketches for later spatial interventions as well as becoming works in themselves), the use of this material covers surfaces or masks billboards. However, it does not seem to aim at the annulment of that which it covers, but rather at the generation of an other body that enables reflection on what is covered and on what is possible that emerges after the original has been covered, like the suggestion of a tabula rasa from which to imagine new ways of acting in public.