Europe
John Wood and Paul Harrison
Board
1993
John Wood & Paul Harrison, Board, 1993. Video.
Board by John Wood and Paul Harrison has a deadpan quality worthy of Buster Keaton. With this work, Wood and Harrison create an intimate, formally structured mise-en-scène in which they use their own bodies in interaction with a wooden board. The artists elaborate an orchestration of the comic consequences of inertia, gravity, and the law of falling bodies in this low-tech physics experiment. Their mix of Conceptual art and slapstick conveys a sense of inspired pranksterism. Board is one of the very first works they made in collaboration.
John Wood and Paul Harrison have been working collaboratively since 1993, producing single screen and installation-based video works. Their work investigates the relationship between the human figure and architecture, developed through short form video with particular emphasis on actions being formulated and resolved within a given duration. Their artistic practice spans the use of the frame, minimal aesthetics, associations of everyday objects and low-tech visual tricks, the making of micro-trivial actions – whose results are invariably between obvious failure and random success.