The Passing, video, 3 m 20 s, 2006
Video in the series Ordinary Voyeurism (1995–2006)
Exhibited: Video as Urban Condition, Lentos Kunstmsueum/Museum of Modern Art, Linz, 2007
With bitter irony, Daučíková appropriates the title and part of the soundtrack of Bill Viola’s The Passing (1991) for a short video of a man sleeping on the street in Moscow. People pass by indifferently in dutiful slow motion. Viola’s 54-minute work, created from home videos as a masterpiece for television, is configured as the interior vision of a man sleeping (the artist himself). The work epitomises the narcissistic subjectivity that attempted to align video art with the claims of masculine genius and, in Viola’s case, with the claims of religious art in which women (actually videos of Viola’s wife giving birth to their son and his mother dying) appear as ciphers of transition perpetuating male immortality. In contrast, Daučíková's poignant observation neatly pricks such empty profundity and challenges the viewer as hypocrite voyeur.