Sixteen Minutes Silence (2007)

"During this period, Toth bought his first digital video recorder – tiny, handheld – and made what are clearly studies for the later self-portraits.

Recently I went to see one of these studies at NY MOMA’s video-art archive, located on the eighteenth floor of the huge midtown complex. A wide window in the archive’s reception room opens onto a view of the monorail guideways far below; the long, low silver trapezoids of new residential construction dropping away toward the East River; and, beyond them, on the river’s far bank, one of the Nascanti towers, black, featureless, smooth as glass. The usual swarm of helicopters and light aircraft surrounded it, their running lights winking like fireflies in the early dusk. It was hard to tear myself from the view, yet what I saw inside, in a video-screening room, was no less remarkable.

Sixteen Minutes Silence was made in a Colorado Springs motel room in spring 2007. A fixed shot depicts Toth’s face in a bathroom mirror. The video’s ambient soundtrack records the gentle buzz of an electric razor; a truck gearing down out in the street; melt water running in the building’s drains. Toth methodically shaves his long brown beard, scalp, and eyebrows, until his head is entirely bare. His unsettled blue eyes cautiously examine himself in the mirror.

I asked Toth about this piece. He did not seem particularly pleased that I had seen it. 'That’s – it’s personal work,' he said. 'It wasn’t meant to survive.'

This was disingenuous. Toth exhibited the work twice, once at a commercial Los Angeles gallery, and once in a UK video-art biennale. The work sold to a private Italian collector, who sold it to NY MOMA for an undisclosed sum, six months after Toth’s return from space."
- posted by cjb @ 10:40 AM