Intrinsic Value is a video work built from found footage of American competitive aerobics from the 1980s and 1990s. I edited selected movements, gestures, and sequences to Frédéric Chopin’s Nocturne No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2, so that the footage appears to form a choreography created specifically for the music. The deliberately ironic juxtaposition brings together two seemingly distant orders: the European Romantic musical canon and the aesthetics of American mass culture, televised spectacle, fitness, and athletic competition.
What interests me here is not only the humour produced by this collision, but also the way context can completely transform the meaning of an image. The source material, originally associated with bodily discipline, competition, and spectacle, begins to resemble ballet, performance, or a precisely composed choreography once paired with a different soundtrack. At the same time, the work subtly questions hierarchies between what is considered “high” culture and what is associated with entertainment, pop culture, and the mass-media aesthetics of the late twentieth-century United States.

The title Intrinsic Value refers to the idea of value “in itself.” Do music, images, and gestures possess a fixed meaning and status, or is their value produced through context, editing, and the way they are interpreted? The irony of the work lies in the fact that a combination which initially seems almost like a joke gradually begins to feel surprisingly natural.