The Games: Olympic Variations
1984, 25 minutes

Unable to attend the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, Auder decided to make a work using footage taken directly from television. In an ode to human flexibility á la the pelvis, Auder manages to reinstates something of the Olympics' ancient Greek origins. The emphasis is on the expressive capacity of the human physique under athletic strain rather than the drama of international competition.

The work's dominant stylistic feature is the use of scratch video in which brief clips of video are rapidly repeated creating an uncanny sense of deferral. Between Auder's unabashed crotch gazing and his deft use of scratch video, the human body is simultaneously eroticized and mechanized. The production of human perfection, reiterated through repetition, is accompanied by suggestions of its biological reproduction.

Auder's Olympics are a spectacle of their own in which we consciously idealize ourselves and our aquatic origins as a species. The appropriation of television imagery used to critique the media allows Auder to be counted amongst his contemporaries of the period which include Barbara Krueger, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine.