The Games: Olympic Variations

Auder’s alternative vision of the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles is composed entirely of re-scanned and re-edited footage shot directly from a television set. The athletes’ exertions, fragmented and abstracted by Auder into an incessant flow of crotch shots and body parts, take on a highly sexual, often sadomasochistic edge. Auder exploits the subliminal, raising the violent and sexual subtext of TV sports coverage to the surface. His seamlessly re-edited images and discordant sound pull the viewer into an enigmatic narrative of physicality that is intensely subjective, almost obsessive, in its focus. The underlying principle behind appropriation and ‘scratch’ video of this kind is an inclination to subvert, artistically, the political ideology reflected in the industrial source of the material and TV entertainment (Bob Riley).