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Mungo Thomson

John Connelly Presents

526 West 26th Street, Suite 1003

April 01-May 07

The primary work in this show is New York, New York, New York, New York, 2004, a video installation, projected on four walls, of mundane city street scenes. However, a more compelling work is down the hall in Connelly’s tiny former gallery (now an annex). The Swordsman, 2004, is a simple, one channel video of Bob Anderson, retired Hollywood “sword master,” throwing a sword to a person off screen. Anderson, who threw sharp objects to actors in such movies as Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Pirates of the Caribbean, becomes the star, for once (in the movies, he was always off-screen). But his Florida trailer park surroundings suggest the waning demand for his brand of swashbuckling talent. And yet, he’s a model of precision, skill, and craft–a doppelganger, perhaps for the contemporary artist who worries about his own obsolescence. The simple, looped repetition of The Swordsman recalls classic art video like Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1976, but Thompson’s version is silent, anti-heroic, meditating on human rather than superhuman strengths.