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Carnegie International: Videos and films are among highlights
Sunday, November 28, 1999 By Mary Thomas, Post-Gazette Art Critic
Video has reached a mini golden era," Carnegie International curator Madeleine Grynsztejn declared recently to explain why there's so much of it in the 1999 exhibition. "The artists have matured, and the medium has matured -- it doesn't break down every five minutes. Also, it's the perfect medium for our time, virtual and physical at the same time."
Included are 11 video works (and others that have a video component) and two films, many of them among the exhibition's highlights. The prestigious, $10,000 Carnegie Prize was awarded to William Kentridge's deserving and gripping "Stereoscope," which invites more than one viewing to be fully appreciated.
Kentridge, who was born and lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, may be familiar to museum visitors who saw his powerful exhibition in the Forum Gallery last year. His narratives come from the personal and the political, but what gives his work a mesmerizing quality is its unique visual aspect. He creates animated films (which he transfers to video) from charcoal drawings that have a shadowed softness while retaining their sharp pictorial component.
After photographing a drawing, which becomes the first frame in a film, he alters it by erasing and/or adding lines. Each change is photographed for the next frame. Thousands of these combine to make the brief, but intense, eight-minute prize winner where each frame seeps into the next with masterful precision.
A soundtrack and agitated bright blue line take the place of the spoken word to dramatically carry the story line, an apparent commentary on the misplaced use of escalating power. When a businessman weeps, it is appropriately through his pockets -- the place closest to his heart -- not his eyes.
Another visually and conceptually rich work is "Soliloquy," by Shirin Neshat, who was born in Iran but now lives in New York. Using two screens placed across the gallery from one another, she effectively illustrates the dichotomy inside a woman who straddles two cultures -- the Islamic one of her birth and the Western one that she lives in -- and belongs to neither.
The woman in long black robe and veil, played by Neshat, looks graceful among the earthen buildings of the Middle East, her silhouette in rhythm with that seemingly timeless place, and appears discordant within crowds rushing an escalator in a Western city. Her evident outsider status in both places is as characteristic of the "new internationalism," as Grynsztejn labels it, as is its cosmopolitan aspect.
While the previous two works occupy darkened, private galleries and are best seen from beginning to end, others engulf large public spaces and may be moved through at will.
Kendell Geers, another South African living in Johannesburg, has chosen the top of the Grand Staircase and the backdrop of John White Alexander's 19th-century murals for his very political "Poetic Justice." On a scaffolding laden with technological components are video screens showing clips of horror, such as a man being forced underwater to drown. Above all of this, a constant, agitated roar of sound shakes anyone within range. Walking through it is the ultimate experience, but not one that the viewer would want to endure for long; the grateful realization is that here, there is the option to leave. If it is heavy-handed, so is the reality of the place where it comes from.
A more serene theatricality informs Diana Thater's "Delphine" in the Carnegie Cafe (which received a new name, carpeting and furniture for the occasion). By covering its floor-to-ceiling windows with colored gels, she casts the restaurant in the video spectrum of red, green and blue, and the diner as a participant in the work. Passers-by and traffic on Forbes Avenue also become part of the installation since they are redefined, as they move within the planes of color.
Thater introduces her ongoing concerns about the environment and man's effect upon it, particularly as he interacts with other species, by way of two large video screens on the cafe's far wall, which show oceanic life, such as dolphins, as well as human divers. The interplay of flickering images on the screens and the reflections caused by passing cars create the illusion that the room is under water. This effective piece not only enlivens the cafe but also animates the entire first floor of the museum.
A second component of the work is in Botany Hall, in the Natural History Museum. Again, Thater uses projections of sea life, but scaled to the intimacy of the space and given different perspective: Here the visitor has the impression of looking skyward from beneath the water's surface. In both installations, added impact comes from the overt transformation of a space and the subconscious responses those changes generate in the visitor.
Jane and Louise Wilson, twin sisters who live in London (and are on the short list for the 20,000-British-pound Turner Prize, which will be announced by the Tate Gallery on Tuesday), are also concerned with the influence that a manipulated environment has on the subconscious.
Their forceful video installation, "Gamma," was filmed at a decommissioned American missile base in England. Projected large-scale into two opposing corners of a small, dark gallery, and filled with overlapping motion, it animates the walls which seem to move toward the visitor who is positioned. between them.
The empty rooms and exaggerated spaces of the military facility do project an air of authority and alienation. But it's the Wilsons' delivery that heightens the emotional power of the work, which says as much about the management of image by artists as it does about the use of the same by the powers-that-be.
Willie Doherty hopes for the same psychological influence with his "Somewhere Else," a commentary on the political conflict in his native Northern Ireland as well as on how that situation has been played by the media.
Here, too, are oversized screens, clustered so that the viewer may see two of the eight at any given time. Projected upon them are beautifully filmed, tranquil images of the natural world, which stand in contrast to a narrative about a murder that is delivered, in parts and sequentially, through sets of speakers positioned at the four corners of the work.
While the intent of this sectioning of visual and spoken information is to call attention to the simultaneous existence of varying viewpoints and the near impossibility of knowing them all, it plays against the natural impulse of the visitor to try to hear the story. Rather than experiencing the disconnect, one becomes simply frustrated trying to chase the narrator about the room as one speaker breaks off and another starts up. Too, the openness of the gallery washes out the projection and indicates a passageway rather than a space that one should invest time in to understand.
Pierre Huyghe's "L'Ellipse" also suffers from presentation. The only clues the viewer has to relate the action of three separate projections is the scant narrative, much of which is difficult to hear.
Less ambitious but quite effective are Roman Signer's smartly humorous, short video trio, based upon phenomenon that he originates, and Jose Antonio Hernandez-Diez's "El Ceibo," which captures the reflection that packing household goods inspires, becoming another commentary on contemporary mobility and its accompanying rootlessness.
The two films, which are screened in the Museum of Art Theater, are an eerie pairing that have more common ground than is at first apparent. They add a dark vision of sexuality and violence to the exhibition that is, in comparison, only broached in the upper floors.
In the nerve-wracking and tightly wrought "QM, I think I call her QM," Swedish filmmaker and performance artist Ann-Sofi Siden plays a mute, mud-slathered creature that is the object of a psychiatrist's interest and observation. The setting is the doctor's bland flat which is cluttered with the symbol-laden accouterments of her profession.
At issue is the psychological violence unwittingly carried out against the metaphorical patient by one ostensibly committed to understanding and preventing such behavior, but too far down the road to disintegration herself to see her own contribution to it. Though uncomfortable to watch, it's a rewarding experience developed over a compact 28 minutes.
The tension comes from a different place in Matthew Barney's "Cremaster 2," in which the artist plays Gary Gilmore, the notorious murderer who was executed in 1977. But this is no documentary. Barney, who is also writer and director, has constructed an exotic, surreal world, where behavior and pace have been ritualized.
Instances of Gilmore's life form the structure for a farther-reaching exploration of a psyche adrift, that at moments resembles a Peter Greenaway film. Cremaster is rife with beauty, from costuming to landscape, but, befitting the subject, it's of a tainted kind. While some lingering is necessary to establish the rhythm of the work, scenes like the one at the gas station would profit from judicious editing. One hour and 19 minutes is too long to hold the viewer in this gruesome meditation.
Each of the films are layered with symbolic actions and objects. For example, peppered throughout Cremaster are bees and honeycomb shapes (and a pinched wasp waist or two), an oblique reference to Utah, which has the nickname "Beehive State," where Gilmore lived -- and died. A viewer steeped in analysis may hone in on Dr. Fielding's dream diary in QM, or on the background masks. Having read Norman Mailer's novel about Gilmore, "The Executioner's Song," will make the visitor aware of references Barney incorporates.
Both films present a distorted vision of the real within a recognizable world. The main characters in each have lost the ability to discern reality. The Barney character has drifted into a fantasy world fed by his imagination, and the analyst into a theoretical one that has lost the restraint of scientific discipline.
In all, these works offer a full plate, and not only for visitors. Amy Wilson, curatorial assistant of film and video at the Carnegie, who gained experience with the 1995 Carnegie International, has been involved in the technical aspects of the exhibition from the beginning.
The museum realized that video would play a much larger part this time, she says, and as artists were invited to exhibit she contacted them to plan their technical requirements. She helped to find equipment, when necessary, and lined up electricians to wire galleries that had been designed to hold painting and sculpture. Suchan Kinoshita's rooms alone required a separate breaker box.
Although there are videos contained in some of Kinoshita's 17 enclosures, it was surprising to learn of Wilson's involvement with that artist. "We're in charge of anything that moves or makes noise," she explained. She figures she's worked with 17 or 18 of the 41 artists in this International.
And she isn't finished yet. Wilson and a new "mini-crew of two wonderful people" will keep things running smoothly through the end of March. "With that number of [moving] pieces in the show, we have to have an on-site technical person every day."
At night, it takes them a half hour to 45 minutes to close the show. "There's a little box of remotes that we carry around to turn things off. We turn off the Kippenberger egg table, and crawl through the wall to turn off Hernandez-Diez's cabinet." And they make certain that they turn on the flood lights for the waterlilies in the Orozco pond before they leave.
The films are shown once daily: Siden, 2 p.m. weekdays and 3 p.m. weekends; Barney, 2:35 p.m. weekdays and 3:35 p.m. weekends. The videos run on a continuous loop throughout the day. The International is at the Carnegie Museum of Art through March 26, 2000. The museum is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $6, adults; $5, seniors; $4, students and children; and members free. Information: 412-622-3131.
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