The 2000s to Present
"Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion"
(2001), like the Francis Bacon painting to which the title refers, is a video
triptych that uses art of the past as a springboard for up-to-the-minute
meditations on current social obsessions.
The triptych is made from three miniature video projectors affixed to the wall
on short armatures. The side-by-side projected images are tiny (just 4 by 6
inches), requiring that you stand close and peer into them.
What you see is a short, repeating loop showing a familiar modern spectacle--a
pro basketball game in a huge stadium, witnessed from the court-level closeness
of network TV. The image on the wall is writ small and with concentrated
intensity, like an electronic manuscript illumination.
The crowd-filled bleachers are a silently roaring blur and flashbulbs pop like a
summer meteor shower, but there isn't a basketball player in sight. Pfeiffer has
digitally erased the men, who leave ghost-images in the rippling electronic
ether. All that's clearly seen is the basketball careening through space, back
and forth. It's like essence-of-thrill, pure sensation weirdly abstracted." -
Ubu.com
"Sex Machine," a second, single-image work with a similar format, shows a short loop of a pop singer on stage in close-up and in mid-croon. His facial features have been digitally erased. In any event he's largely obscured by the chunky microphone, which he caresses with both hands. They're clasped around its girth in a manner at once erotic and prayerful (Francis Bacon again). The muffled soundtrack repeats a breathy gasp." - Ubu.com
"Taylor-Wood updates traditional still life imagery. What seems at first to be a quiet arrangement of a dead hare and peach on a table starts to decompose before our eyes. Rather than attempting to capture a moment in time, the viewer is put face to face with a speeded up decomposition of the subject matter. Taylor-Wood brings home the transience of biological life, and the viewer's mortality. This work explores the issue of temporality, an idea which permeates the artist's oeuvre, where a course of action can change radically even within the space of a few seconds."- Ubu.com
"Simmons, best-known for
her photographs of miniature rooms populated by dolls and of oversized objects —
such as a house, birthday cake, and pistol — balanced on female legs, both human
and fake, brings these characters to life in a three-act mini-musical. The film
is inspired by three distinct periods of Simmons’s photographic work: vintage
hand puppets, ventriloquist dummies and walking objects enact tales of ambition,
disappointment, love, loss, and regret. Working with composer Michael Rohaytn
("Personal Velocity") and cameraman Ed Lachman ("The Virgin Suicides" and "Far
From Heaven"), Simmons’s puppets come to life in miniature domestic scenes that
echo real life.
Act one, “The Green Tie,” takes the form of a puppet show/radio play and
recounts a suburban tragedy where one simple decision wreaks havoc on the
fragile ecology of everyday life. Simmons uses rubber hand puppets in four
scenes to recount a story occurring over several generations and involving two
feuding families.
Act two, “The Music of Regret,” is based on a 1994 photograph of the same name
and takes its structure from the American musical, which relies on melody and
lyric to move the narrative forward. A girl ventriloquist dummy resembling the
artist, surrounded by boy dummy suitors, slowly becomes a real woman who
wistfully reminisces about regret and its many guises in love.
Act three, “The Audition,” is shot from a producer’s, and audience’s,
perspective of an audition for an unspecified part in a dance revue. Gigantic
objects with legs dance tango, tap, and ballet, while a pocket watch ticks
patiently in the wings for its opportunity to finally show its stuff.
The Music of Regret. 2006. USA. Directed by Laurie Simmons. Executive producers,
Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn and Donald Rosenfeld; associate producer, Fabienne
Stephan; produced by Salon 94 and Performa 05 with RoseLee Goldberg.
Cinematography by Ed Lachman. Music by Michael Rohatyn. Lyrics by Laurie
Simmons. Story by Matthew Weinstein. Written by Laurie Simmons and Matthew
Weinstein. Lighting by John DeBlau. Alvin Ailey 2 Dancers. Choreography, Helen
Pickett. 40 min."
- Ubu.com
"Training Ground (2006), a
looping thirty-eight-minute, two-channel-video installation by the Dutch artist
Aernout Mik, is part on an ongoing investigation into what he characterizes as
defining constituents of contemporary Western society. Having first explored the
notion of civil war in pieces such as Raw Footage and Scapegoats (both 2006), he
then turned his attention to the issue of illegal immigration. Training Ground,
which was at the core of Citizens and Subjects, Mik’s contribution to the
Fifty-second Venice Biennale, is exemplary of his recent engagement with
pressing issues in the larger geopolitical arena and their metaphoric relevance
to the uncertain condition of today’s world.
For the first ten minutes watching Training Ground, the viewer unfamiliar with
Mik’s work might be fooled into believing that she is looking at footage of an
actual training exercise for police officers in northern Europe as they are
instructed in the ways to apprehend refugees and illegal immigrants. The
uniformed and armed officials are assembled casually, receiving instructions and
watching demonstrations of body searches on one of their own as they furtively
put on their latex gloves, while the subjects of their investigation sit around
and wait for their turn, seemingly unconcerned about what will or will not
happen to them. When it is time for them to participate in the exercise, they do
so with an impassive air, willing participants in a role-play. That something is
slightly amiss readily becomes apparent as we realize that the people playing
the refugees actually look the part. In their ethnic diversity and generational
composition they seem too perfectly cast to be part of a regular law-enforcement
exercise. This impression is further enhanced by the presence of a group of
truck drivers taking a lunch break and watching the goings-on from a safe
distance. Actual training would hardly unfold with such a realistic roster of
actors or in a public arena, and we realize that what we are watching is a
fictional enactment of a training session and not a real situation.
For the most part, the proceedings are recorded from multiple viewpoints within,
provoking a sensation of physical immersion into the scene, which is reinforced
by the work’s presentation. Installed at floor level, the two video screens
mirror the position of the viewer, who by extension becomes part of this larger
social body. About ten minutes into the loop, the perspective suddenly changes
and we observe the action through the windshield of one of the trucks, the view
partially obstructed by a phalanx of superhero figurines occupying the
dashboard. Their intrepid poses and air of self-possession are mocked by a
singular puppet head in their midst, sticking out its tongue at them and, in
extension, at us. As the camera focuses on its ridiculing face, Mik introduces a
different atmospheric element grounded more in notions of irony than of heroism.
With this temporary change of viewpoint, things begin to unravel. Initially, the
roles of police officers, refugees, and truck drivers are performed by the
actors in keeping with conventions of embodiment and reflect established
hierarchies of power. But this system abruptly breaks down: from a distance we
see detainees escape or assuming control, truckers getting involved, and chaos
breaking loose. By the time we find ourselves visually amid the actors again,
the distinctions among police, refugees, and even truck drivers has become
blurred, as their performance no longer corresponds to the behavioral patterns
conventionally associated with their roles. Immigrants take over power, officers
lose control and perform arrest techniques on one another, and truckers are
captured or join arms with the immigrants, who now patrol the perimeter of the
Training Ground with wooden replicas of shotguns. There is the occasional
attempt to restore order, but any compliance with the status quo is temporary
and additionally undermined by some characters entering a delirious stage from
which only a few seem to recover.
If the unresolved and repetitious reversal of fortune among police, refugees,
and the occasional truck driver introduces an element of the absurd, the
trancelike state that some of the characters enter cements the sudden prevalence
of an irrational force that seems to have taken hold of the situation. The
delirious lose any control over their bodies; shaking and drooling, their
civilian selves give way to spiritual possession. In fact, Mik—who usually gives
minimal instructions to his actors, preferring them to feel their way through
their performance based on the relational dynamics of the groups involved—here
asked a few performers to act out states of delirium in direct citation of
scenes from an ethnographic film made in 1954 by Jean Rouch and titled Les
Maîtres Fous (Mad Masters). Rouch documented the ceremonial tradition of the
Hauka, a sect active in parts of Ghana, who coped with its colonial past through
a cathartic reenactment of the oppression during which its members entered a
state of trance and possession by the spirit of their colonists. In Training
Ground, Mik’s actors manifest the same physical ailments that befall the
possessed in Rouch’s film. But here, the distinction between oppressor and
oppressed becomes blurred to the point where we see police officers as well as
refugees undergo spiritual entrancement. More importantly, though, the
ritualistic aspects of Training Ground reveal the practice of exercise itself as
representing a form of exorcism, albeit born out of fear and directed toward the
future and not, as in Rouch’s example, necessitated by the trauma of a time
past.
As Mik points out, there is an inherent risk in societies attempting to prepare
for future emergencies such as the possible invasion by refugees and illegal
immigrants alluded to in Training Ground: “We actively shape our present and
future through imagining things to come through the prism of fear, anxiety and
violence. . . . Complex as it is, it also seems that in the very idea of
training, or preparation, a desire is embedded for things to happen in order to
be able to employ the skills acquired. Does it not make things more likely to
happen?”1
With illegal immigration emerging as one of the main challenges to Western
society, the concept of citizenry as a viable foundation for identity and
political governance is increasingly thrown into question. Training Ground
consciously destabilizes the supposedly heroic efforts involved in the
protective mechanism of any nation. While raising questions about the imbalance
of power relationships between those who have legal rights afforded to them by
their nationality and those who don’t, Training Ground also warns of their
potential for impermanence. Who is to say that in the course of the world’s
ongoing ethnic, religious, and geographic reorganization, the national havens of
today may not house the refugees of tomorrow? The reversal of roles is a simple
but powerful demonstration of just such a possibility. Mik’s filmic theater of
the absurd serves as a wake-up call against complacency and encourages
reconsideration of the status quo. The creation of a demonstratively artificial
scenario, here the enactment of a training exercise, allows “space for moral
ambiguity”2 that, by instilling doubt about a situation, carries within it the
possibility of change. This ambiguity becomes especially apparent when we
realize that the actors have no knowledge of actual methods and procedures used
in the enforcement of laws on illegal immigrants and how they affect apprehended
refugees. Their simulation, with its overt emphasis on physicality, in terms of
self-protection of the officials and aggression toward the immigrants, is based
on collective projections or assumptions, oftentimes mitigated through media
images. For Mik, the theatrical situation defines a space “where there is a
possibility of hope and emancipation, or at least a space to test whether a
creative obstruction of the existing pattern is a possibility or not.”3
Training Ground implicitly bears a relation to current events in the
Netherlands, where the hotly debated question of dual citizenship and resulting
political loyalty is tied to ultranationalist concerns. But to interpret the
work solely as a metaphor for this particular conflict and in view of Dutch
immigration policy is falsely reductive. The Dutch situation is only one example
of a broader development of nationalist impulses that seem to have taken the
world hostage and are at the basis of the reigning atmosphere of heightened
anxiety vis-à-vis the issue of immigration. In the context of the global war on
terror, Training Ground’s message of hope and emancipation applies just as much
to the situation in the United States as it does to that in Western Europe. It
matters little if the potential threat comes from the east or the south. The
fear of national invasion and economic erosion by an “other” is universal and
the methods of prevention comparable. If we’re lucky, Mik’s message carries
across national borders and into a collective consciousness where everybody is
considered a citizen of the world. " - ubu.com
"Maya Deren's Sink explores
Deren's concepts of space, time and form through visits and projections filmed
in her Los Angeles and New York homes. The project began after Hammer discovered
a sink formerly owned by Deren at Anthology Film Archives and embarked on an
homage to the "Mother of American Experimental Cinema."
Hammer re-imagines Deren’s film locations of the 1940s in the present, providing
entry into intimate spaces and former times, reclaiming the places that inspired
the influential filmmaker. Hammer interweaves the performance of an actor, as
well as the voices of the current home owners, Judith Malina, Carolee Schneemann,
Ross Lipmann and others. The meditation on space and architecture investigates
the relationship between private and public spheres, creating a unique
architectural portrait of Deren.
The experimental soundtrack is created from the music of Teiji Ito (Deren's
third husband), Tavia Ito, and Teiji’s daughter.
Director of Photography: Erin Harper, Barbara Hammer. Second Camera: K.J. Mohr.
Editor: Stephanie Testa, Barbara Hammer. Actor: Bekka Lindstrom, Tavia Ito:
Daughter of Teiji Ito, Abby Johannes: Writer, Ross Lipman: Filmmaker, Robert
Polito: Writer, Judith Malina: The Living Theatre, John Mhiripiri: Anthology
Film Archives, Gail Ryan: Second Wife of Teiji Ito, May Routh: Los Angeles, Jean
Reynolds: New York, Carolee Schneemann: Artist, Jerry Tallmer: Village Voice.
Alan Wynroth: New York. Sound Design & Mix: Stephanie Testa.
"Lifelines, Handwritten, Operation, Hourglass, Water Music Study, Tenno"
Composed & Performed by Teiji Ito. Courtesy of Tzadik Records. "Flute Music"
Composed & Performed by Tavia Ito. Courtesy of Tavia Ito. "Haitian Music"
Recorded by Maya Deren.
Film Clips: "Meshes of the Afternoon" by Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid. "Ritual
in Transfigured Time" by Maya Deren. "At Land" by Maya Deren. "Divine Horsemen"
by Maya Deren. "Private Life of a Cat" by Alexander Hammid." - ubu.com
