"I loooove youuuu" screams the woman, as she stumbles out of a car late at night on a quiet suburban street, collapses on a front lawn and rolls about in the grass, kicking and screaming hysterically. Her partner and two friends manage to subdue her enough to force her into a house.
The scene, a large-screen projection, shot on film and then transferred to video, is re-enacted again and again, each time with slight changes. And that's it. What this mini-tragedy is all about is left to the viewer's imagination and open to whole "other worlds" of interpretation.
Gillian Wearing's piece "I Love You" is one of four installations at "This Other World of Ours," a first-time British Council-sponsored arts project intended to introduce the best-known contemporary British artists to the Russian public. The four pieces and a video program of short art projects have been on display at the Art Media Center TV Gallery since Nov. 17.
While Wearing's psychological drama unfolds, a metal bucket apparently forgotten in a dark corner of one of the gallery's rooms begins to emit the sound of a falling drop of water via a speaker and CD player. "Ceal Floyer's works are very minimal and you find them in strange places," Gianmarco Del Re, co-curator of the exhibition, said. In the same dark-lit room, a man dressed in black and suspended horizontally by ropes slides through a white cardboard structure, a transvestite prostitute is being betrayed by her lover and soda bottles crash on the floor leaving foamy, celestial patterns. All of these two- to three-minute video films are the recent creations of a dozen young artists, most of them based in London.
"There are things I like and others that I find weird, but it's interesting," said Alla Plastinina, a doctor who came to the show to satisfy her curiosity.
The exhibit, which runs until Dec. 12, is certainly a curiosity shop for lovers of new media art.
In Monika Oechsler's 1999 video "For the Very First Time," three young women passionately plunge their noses in red, yellow and lilac tulips in near-ecstatic pleasure. And in "Two Minutes of Experiment and Entertainment," multimedia artist Paul Granjon analyzes jelly molecules and demonstrates how to make a flying synthetic doughnut.
"These are really brilliant jokes. It's the kind of humor you find in everyday situations. It's quite different from Russian humor," British Council assistant arts director Sasha Dugdale said.
Vadim Koshkin, a producer of computerized art films and visitor to the gallery this week, is skeptical. "If you make a film it should have a beginning and an end. And, so far, I haven't seen either of these," he said.
For some, these "other" artistic worlds are too much to take. But for English artists Jane and Louise Wilson, Russia itself is a strange, mysterious world. Having just arrived in Moscow for the first time for the show's opening this week, the 32-year-old twin sisters mused on making video projects in Russia.
"We'd like to look at abandoned military and former nuclear sites," Louise said. The sisters design cinema-scale video installations that are projected on single or multiple walls.
Their work often focuses on secret installations relevant to recent world history - in their "Stasi City," (1997) they filmed the eerily deserted former headquarters of the East German secret police in Berlin. The subject of "Gamma" (1999) is London's Greenham Common defunct nuclear facility.
"Our culture is very film-literate, it's part of our vocabulary," added Louise. The sisters, who have been short-listed for the 1999 Turner Prize Award, Britain's most prestigious art competition, said they seek to engage viewers in an experience they would not come across otherwise.
Projected multiscreen video installations, which became a popular art form in Britain in the early 1980s, are now widely used by artists in Russia. However, Vladimir Salnikov, another visitor, said that Russian modern art lacks financial support. "The Bolsheviks had their own art. Our politicians today don't have one. They don't care about this," he said.
The young British artists do indeed seem a world away from such concerns. In the TV Gallery, the show goes on: Granjon is showing off his cybernetic parrot sausage. He has transferred a fluffy toy parrot's recording device into a Frankfurter sausage. When prompted, it now proudly declares "Ich bin ein Wurst," ("I am a sausage.")
The TV Gallery is located at 6 Ulitsa Bolshaya Yakimanka. Metro Polyanka. Tel. 238-0269. For more information, visit the gallery's site at http://www.glasnet.ru/~tvgallery.