Navel Geyser
August 14th, 2009I’m curating a show about videos that trick out movies into trippy abstraction. Not just visual abstraction, but also sound, space, and time. More synesthetic and metaphysical. Included are :
Silver (2006) by Takeshi Murata,
Repeating the End (2007) by Les Leveque
left is right and right is wrong and left is wrong and right is right (1999) by Douglas Gordon, which mirrors Preminger’s Whirlpool with itself, flickering frame by frame from one screen to the other. Like a strobe light, it’s more arresting than Gordon’s more famous 24 Hour Psycho.
My video show wouldn’t be in a gallery, but an abandoned mansion or hotel in the country. It would open only after sunset, because those creepy videos should screen in the dark. The biggest room is reserved for and dedicated to Perpetual Zooz (2005-6) by Michael Joaquin Grey.
Now screening with gut-rattling stereo bass at PS1, the video uses The Wizard of Oz as its material. In a rectangle nestled within the surrounding rectangular projection, the movie “screen” tumbles in 3-dimensional space, contorting into elliptical trapezoids. One facet bears the movie playing forward from the beginning, while the opposite plays backward from the end. Their junction is the scene in which Dorothy opens her door to the world of color.
That reflexive relation is where Douglas Gordon might stop. But MJG adds another ”dimension” by voluminizing the images through custom software (designed with R. Luke DuBois) that maps the images into extreme shaded relief. Throbbing in three-D, Dorothy’s face swells and morphs into the grotesque inflated visage of the Marshmallow Man, and then into the Sierra Nevadas.
Meanwhile, the dynamic digital elevation stalagmites/tites jump with each thump of the stereo sound, a recording of two simultaneous heart beats pumping in and out of phase: those of the artist and his mother. When the phasing lines up and the hearts beat in unison, the th-thump goes THUD, a reciprocal canceling out, like the black holes we make while jumping with a sibling on a big trampoline.
Artist : mother :: black & white : color :: film : digital video :: staying young : growing old
Perpetual Zooz is the climax of an exhibition that reads like a rebus or flowchart about creation, human reproduction, object relations, language development, identity, and adaptation.
One wall displays an astounding cross-pollination of objects: along a parabola from left to right, we see schematics of heterosexual mating, two vinyl stickers before-and-aftering the inevitable union of a pair of red blocks, a stereolithographic sculpture of those blocks, and finally an inkjet print of a baby playing the two red blocks. It’s a narrative arc that blends Aristophanes, Joseph Kosuth, Thomas Edison, and Fisher Price.
Northern Romantic Citrus is a “computational drawing” that very gradually develops from its origin in a readymade landscape painting reproduced digitally. Watch closely enough and you’ll spot one colossal orange after another “growing” on the central tree. (Decades ago, this clever substitution would have saved Guernica from the malodorous mitts of Tony Shafrazi.)
The oranges we track take us back to the navel-gazing baby in an inkjet sequence demonstrating how we learn by distinguishing things from us and vice-versa, how that helps us perceive order, and how that itself is part of a larger order that we measure through science.
“Far from the body being first for us and revealing things to us, it is the instrumental-things which in their original appearance indicate our body to us,” says Sartre.
The spinning baby is the progeny of two diagrams above it that connect a woman’s body with the orbits of the moon, a cosmological frequency with a range vast enough to contain both scientific enlightenment and mythological necessity, with the comfort of two peas in a pod.
In fact, Spiritual proposals find room in this cerebral show. Michael Joaquin Grey decorates the red blocks stickers with mandalas, while naming the stereolithographed blocks Gametes. The slow pace and low position of Northern Romantic Citrus together suggest that you should kneel down and silently concentrate for several minutes. If that doesn’t help you find meditation, then the larger video will help meditation find you.