Thousands of Men Become One

“4,000 Shots,” a video by the Brazilian artist Jonathas de Andrade, is one of the highlights of the New Museum’s second Triennial, now up in New York. De Andrade has filled 4,000 frames of super-8 film—three minutes’ worth—with that many shots of different men caught on the streets of Buenos Aires, and then looped them into a one-hour video. The effect is compelling: It’s as though an entire population were distilled into a single, flickering image of itself. The piece hovers between stillness and motion; between averaging-out and individuating. It’s also elegiac: All those blurred faces inevitably conjure images of the Latin American men “disappeared” over the years by their oppressive regimes. And erotic: Andrade’s camera seems to have an infinite appetite for its subjects.

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