The video starts with the image of a beach, of the ocean and of the summer sky, with a thin black line mirroring that of the horizon. A brunette woman (the artist herself) comes into the shot from the left, tightrope walking above the horizon, from one side of the screen to the other, and then exits. The pinnacle of this two minute video is when, under the weight of the artist and her advance towards the center, the wire dips, so it appears she is walking on the line where the sky meets the ocean.
For Janine Antoni, its’ meaning is tied in with the finding of balance, with returning, with searching and fulfilling your hopes. In an interview she talks about coming back to the place where she spent her childhood years (which is where the video was shot), and where her dreams and hopes caught life; it is this return which is the means of finding and holding on to an inner balance. This main theme is masked symbolized by the effort to keeping her body’s balance.
The image of the ocean has powerful symbolic meaning, pointing at the cycle of life and death and the passing nature of things through the swell of the surf and the breaking of the waves against the shore. Even the short-lived appearance of Antoni suggests the miniature scale of human life. In this context the wire can be interpreted as the thread of the three Fates, across which she/we must step towards her goal. This difficult attempt at happiness is illustrated by the continual balancing act needed to go across.
The beauty of Antoni’s metaphor lies in her selflessness( she could not see herself touching the horizon as she was doing it) and in the timeless feel of the shot( the summer sky becomes more of a suggestion of Eden rather than of a specific place and time). Contrasted against Philippe Petit’s 1974 walking the distance between the Twin Towers which was a taming of life through a burning desire to live, Antoni attempts an understanding of the relationship between life and death.
I think this short film is an example of video art because the purpose of recording was not that of documenting, archiving the occurrence of an event. Also, as the event does not have as final output an object, rather the video is itself the artistic product, this cannot be considered a “making of”, a recording of the coming to be of an item. The video becomes the medium in which the artist considers she can best expound her idea, similar to choosing the medium of a single image: painting, drawing or photography, for example.
[ My first year commentary on the video]