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Billboard Blahs

Transmedia 2002 on the Roadside TV Network video billboard (southwest corner of Yonge and Isabella) to November 15. Rating: NN

Rating: NN


Between the church of scientology and heaven is a guy getting a 35-minute blow job in 15 seconds.On a video billboard high above L. Ron Hubbard’s Yonge Street location, digital artworks like Michael Alstad’s blow job piece are intermixed with Casino Niagara commercials and Eminem movie previews.

It’s part of Transmedia 2002, an effort to put art on a big public screen. Unfortunately, the art is as forgettable as the advertising.

The theme of the show is 15 Seconds Of Fame, a reference to Andy Warhol’s prediction that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. Alstad’s blow job piece goes all the way with Warhol, taking the pop artist’s 35-minute video of a young man getting oral sex — you only see his face — and compacting it into 15 seconds. The result looks more like epileptic shock than writhing pleasure.

The rest of the work is lacklustre. Jason Bader interweaves shots of an empty street with those of the same street teeming with life — interesting, but it’s been done before.

Marina Zurkow’s animations are delightful but have been excerpted from a longer piece and feel abortive. Others make 15 seconds seem like a long time.

Given the scale of the billboard screen, you’d anticipate more inspired work that would be a greater reward for having to watch ads for the top three box-office draws at the movies and tidbits like the “Doggy fact of the day” (dog saliva is cleaner than human saliva) again and again.thmoas@sympatico.ca

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