Sex, Mayhem, and Ghosts of the Unconscious
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SEX, MAYHEM, AND GHOSTS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS Antirealism, visual artifice, and stylized action are helping artists explore the irrationality of a changing world BY ELEANOR HEARTNEY COURTESY THE ARTIST AND DAVID ZWIRNER, NEW YORK AND LONDON/COMMISSIONED BY TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL, 2013 FILM FESTIVAL, ZWIRNER, NEW YORK AND LONDON/COMMISSIONED BY TORONTO INTERNATIONAL AND DAVID THE ARTIST COURTESY MULTIMEDIA.indd 1 12/1/14 11:25 AM MULTIMEDIA.indd 2 12/1/14 11:25 AM 72 ven in a season of blockbuster gallery spectacles in it all means, but there are evocations of such universal New York City, Marcel Dzama’s “Une Danse des themes as birth, death, redemption, and destruction. E Bouffons (A Jester’s Dance)” stood out. This elabo- Dzama, a Canadian-born artist who is best known for rate exhibition last October sprawled over David Zwirn- Surrealist-inspired drawings and dioramas that blend an er Gallery’s two Chelsea spaces and combined sculpture, apparent childlike innocence with scenes of mayhem, painting, and the moving image in a manner deliberately dismemberment, and gore, here channeled such early evoking the interdisciplinary experimentation of artists modernist spectacles as Picasso’s collaborations with Di- during the first half of the 20th century. The video from aghilev and the Ballets Russes, Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 which the exhibition took its name mimes the exaggerat- Triadic Ballet and, a bit later, Dalí’s unforgettable dream ed theatricality and unnatural effects of German Expres- sequences for Hitchcock. This kind of multimedia ex- sionist film from the 1920s. Opening with the awaking travaganza is becoming ever more commonplace in an art of the female nude in Duchamp’s notorious Étant Donnés world where distinctions between entertainment, popular (1946–66), who was modeled after the artist’s real-life culture, performance art, and theater are becoming hard- lover, the sculptor Maria Martins, the looped narrative er and harder to parse. Recent seasons have seen similarly takes his subject through a series of ordeals, during which ambitious productions from artists like Mike Kelley, Paul we glimpse Duchamp being tortured while shouting out McCarthy, William Kentridge, and Matthew Barney. chess moves. The work culminates in a bizarre cabaret In the hands of these artists, outmoded genres like the scene in which torture and entertainment seem indis- Western, the silent film, the folk tale, the horror flick, tinguishable. A trickster figure and a bizarre four-eyed film noir, and vaudeville are exploited for their essential master of ceremonies preside over a series of acts, includ- surrealism, and with anachronism serving as a portal for a ing a Spanish dance by a Minotaur based on a painting sideways look at the changes that are roiling us all. by Picabia, a sensuous ballet by a sword-wielding execu- tioner, and a turn by a cloaked figure referring to Joseph Beuys. The final scene re-creates Picabia’sAdoration of the Video still (previous spread) and installation view at David Calf (1941–42), as the Minotaur looms menacingly over Zwirner (opposite) of Marcel Dzama’s Une dance des bouffons the upraised hands of his worshippers. It’s not clear what (A Jester’s Dance), 2013, black-and-white video projection. 2013 FILM FESTIVAL, ZWIRNER, NEW YORK AND LONDON/COMMISSIONED BY TORONTO INTERNATIONAL AND DAVID THE ARTIST COURTESY JANUARY 2015 MULTIMEDIA.indd 3 12/1/14 11:25 AM MULTIMEDIA.indd 4 12/1/14 11:25 AM MULTIMEDIA.indd 5 12/1/14 11:25 AM But while such spectacles often draw on art history Kelley accompanied her heroine’s commentary with that and mildly discredited forms of popular entertainment of a male soldier and a medical officer who monitored to make oblique commentaries about our own time, it is the brothels. Here, as elsewhere in her work, Reid Kel- clear the history means something rather different from ley transforms rather grim source material into playfully opposite sides of the gender divide. Male artists, such as satirical skits that mock the unbalanced power structures those mentioned above, often replicate the unequal posi- and stilted gender roles that confine her characters. tions of the sexes that are integral to their source materi- Feeling the need to give her heroine more agency, Reid als. Women artists delving into this territory are more Kelley transported her to the French demimonde in The likely to rework and reinvent old genres to cast light on Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011). The film centers on a pregnant their problematic roles in the past and present. Parisian prostitute who exemplifies Baudelaire’s paean to Two cases in point are the multimedia explorations of the superiority of cosmetic over natural beauty. With sets Mary Reid Kelley and Marnie Weber. Reid Kelley is a that shift between Sisyphus’s boudoir and the streets of young artist whose work was recently featured in “Mary Paris, the work is an antic romp through Revolutionary Reid Kelley: Working Objects and Videos,” a retrospec- and post Revolutionary France, with brief vignettes involv- tive jointly organized by the Samuel Dorsky Museum of ing everyone from Diderot, Marie Antoinette, and Marat Art at SUNY New Paltz and the University Art Museum to Robespierre, Napoleon, and Haussmann. In a commen- at SUNY Albany. Reid Kelley, who was born in South tary on the fate of overly aggressive women, it ends with Carolina and currently resides in Saratoga Springs, New our rebellious heroine carted off to Charcot’s sanatorium. York, works in collaboration with her husband, artist Reid Kelley is currently at work on a trio of films, two Patrick Kelley. The films they create riff oncommedia of which have been completed. The first, titledPriapus dell’arte, German Expressionist movies, and newspa- Agonistes (2013), is very loosely based on the classical per comic strips, reimagining them in a format that re- Greek myth of the Minotaur. The artist places the now- 75 sembles an animated drawing. They leap promiscuously female monster’s fabled labyrinth in a church basement through history and mythology, emphasizing moments and transforms the Minotaur’s hunter into Priapus, a when gender roles and social structures were in flux. minor Greek fertility god. Here he is imagined as the The films are largely confined to black and white, with cocky star of a church volleyball team who is egged on costumes, sets, and props that, even if ready-made, are by a Greek chorus of contemporary beauty queens. We outlined in thick black lines that give them a cartoonish also get a flashback recounting the seduction of Queen quality. The characters wear homemade masks or faces Pasiphae by a bull, a union that lead to the birth of the painted white with eggs propped in their eye sockets, Minotaur. All characters are played by Reid Kelley her- emphasizing a weirdly skull-like aspect. The narratives self. The second film in this series,Swinburne’s Pasiphae are dominated by chatter, as characters spout rapid- (2014), returns to the seduction scene, this time reenact- fire and often hilarious monologues rife with puns and ing an obscure poetic fragment by the Victorian writer rhymes. In an interview with blogger Tyler Green, Reid Algernon Charles Swinburne that brings out the insa- Kelley notes that she uses these devices to undermine the tiable and socially disruptive nature of female desire. logic of language, embedding a betrayal of meaning in Priapus Agonistes presents sexual politics seen through the spoken texts that mirrors the betrayal of reason por- the simultaneous lens of Greek mythology, 1950s-era trayed in her narratives. American Christianity, and Victorian prudery. History To date, she has completed seven films. The earliest serves as a distorted mirror to suggest the misogyny also are very short and based on women on the frontlines of at work in contemporary society. And indeed, that is the World War I, among them a nurse and a munitions work- message that runs through all Reid Kelley’s films. er. These culminated in the more elaborate You Make Me Politics are more sublimated in the multimedia presenta- Iliad (2010), which focuses on a female sex worker at the tions of Los Angeles–based artist, musician, and performer front. Discovering that the primary sources about pros- Marnie Weber. She is less interested in history per se than in titution in the Great War were all written by men, Reid the themes of female repression and liberation and the dark workings of the unconscious as they manifest themselves in OPPOSITE A production still from Marnie Weber’s Songs that art, fairytales, mythology, and fantasy. Weber’s work draws PHOTO: KATHRIN EDER/ART: COURTESY THE ARTIST COURTESY EDER/ART: PHOTO: KATHRIN Never Die, 2005. on the language of punk rock, Halloween, and spiritualism, JANUARY 2015 MULTIMEDIA.indd 6 12/1/14 11:25 AM which was, of course, another early modernist obsession. encounters monsters, demons, and hallucinogenic crea- Using a mix of digital, Super 8, and 16-millimeter film, tures, including a sinister old witch played by Weber her- she produces what she refers to as “moving dreamscapes” self, as she travels through hell, purgatory, and heaven. in which spirits, monsters, humans, and animals mingle in While the first two realms are full of dark shadows, heav- evocative environments where spatial, temporal, and psy- en is blindingly white, though even here dreams become chic boundaries have dissolved. nightmares. Weber notes that it is meant to resemble a Weber was a musician before she was an artist (and in crack den where our heroine is caught between good and fact, she currently performs with the noise band Faüx- evil. She is working on two related productions that will mish), and it was this that led her to one of her longest extend this narrative into a feature-length film.