Imagine that you are in a room so dark you can’t see your own feet, much less the other bodies around you. The word “POW” bursts on the wall and repeats across the wall surface, continuing around the room as fast as you can turn your head. “CRACK” appears in colorful lettering 3-feet high across the middle of one wall until it splits down the center to reveal “CRACK” in a different comic book font, which ‘cracks’ to reveal “KRACK” in bright outlined letters. This continues like Russian nesting dolls, but you can’t keep your eyes on it because the letter “M” has started replicating around the edge of the floor. You mentally hum in time. Columns of text shoot down across the walls at a diagonal, while out of the corner of your eye you notice a different word pattern jumping to life. You turn. The words are multiplying so much that the room is getting significantly brighter in the light of their projection.
Up at Paula Cooper Gallery through the end of the week,Christian Marclay’s Surround Sounds (2014-15) is a new video work that consists of “animated onomatopoeias”–that is, Marclay animates the noise words from comic books to mimic the actions that they signify. The video is synchronized onto the four walls of the windowless room in an immersive viewing experience that is constantly pulling your attention from one wall to another. Interestingly these words come to life only by the hum of equipment–there is no audio being played. Yet the visual onslaught of the sound words is so overwhelming, I hardly noticed the silence when I was in the gallery this weekend.
Pacing has always kept Marclay’s meta-film artworks (e.g. Telephone, Clock) compulsively watchable, and that’s certainly true here, where words move with the swiftness of a carnival ride. The subject matter is markedly different. Other works spliced film clips together to create a new film about film and the act of watching. Here, video animation of comic book effects muddles the visual and aural senses. If a work like Clock caused you to become aware of time passing as you watched, Surround Sounds strung me along for its almost 14-minutes of word glut and then some, without me being overly aware it had started over and happily entranced in the “WHIRR” and “CLICK.” The exhibition “Christian Marclay: Surround Sounds” is up at Paula Cooper Gallery through October 17. Be forewarned that it’s a fast ride, and watching may cause motion-sickness.
Currently up at the University of Georgia, Rachel Clarke’s Terra Incognita video provides a zen enticement into the gallery space at the Lamar Dodd School of Art as part of her show Unmapping. The video projects quite large on the far wall in front of a bench, and loops between a white unmapping and black mapping of sorts.
I heard the artist speak about the process of making this work, starting with real maps–American road maps–and digitizing them. Scanning their parts and lines into different parts in Photoshop, Clarke then animated their movement in a deconstructive process that then reverses in the second half of the film. The journey alluded to by maps becomes a transformed journey of movement through the layered lines and marks of maps. For Clarke what was equally important was the traces of the original map and scanning process in the final film, marks of the artist’s hand and materiality that ostensibly are lost in the digital medium.
[Note: I wish I knew why the video is displaying on the far left. Embedding videos in self-hosted WordPress, anyone?]
You will have heard, or will read upon entering, that William Kentridge: Five Themes shows the South African artist dealing with themes of apartheid prominently in his work. This bland statement hardly explains or does justice to the artist’s poetic and humane explorations of aparthied in South Africa, nor does it encompass his whole oervre. The sobering themes in his work are mediated through dreamy moments that are compelling without being overwhelming.
The beginning two themes show the explorations of apartheid that the artist is renowned for, as well as the dexterity with which he turns the most basic video techniques into a moving storyline. The first two videos show the use of silhouettes traveling across a landscape, immediately recalling Kara Walker’s work, with its similar content based upon slavery in the US, to mind. Kentridge’s work is not angry or jarring, but requited resigned and saddened by history, as his figures plod on.
“I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing–the contingent way that images arrive in the work–lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world.”
Video, with its demands for narrative, sound, and movement, is complex and the artist handles it with an apparent simplicity and hand-made feel that if touching. The artist works in black charcoal on white paper, smudging his way from one drawing to the next to create an illusion of movement. This time consuming process constantly shows a trace of what was, which becomes emotionally affecting and markedly individual. Sparse color and apt music lends a poignancy to the troubled episodes of the protagonists. Rather than slick production techniques, the humble use of video technology lends authenticity and personalization to the images.
Kentridge is like a lyric short story writer, with a Surrealist touch and Absurdist undertone. The video series that follows the characters of Soho Eckstein, Mrs. Eckstien, and Felix Teitlebaum through South African life in the last years of apartheid put a human face on a larger suffering. Symbolic details of fish and telephones gain meaning as you proceed through the projection rooms. The artist refuse to plan his storylines, relying on the spontaneity of the process to see him through, and that saves him from being pedantic or overly pointed. Instead, there is a flow of ideas that seem like a dream of consciousness, a consciousness of guilt and overwhelming pain and struggle. The lonely, melancholy atmosphere is utterly absorbing as the charcoal marks on the page flow and burst in emotional turmoil.
The artist at his best in his animations, but less so in the drawings he makes them from. The drawings on the whole are unmoving, and less skilled than his work in action. Glancing at them on your way into the darkened theatres is enough. Then take a seat and get comfortable, for this work is not meant to be rushed.
The middle room, the third theme is the studio, shows a series of seven ongoing film fragments on all sides. Take a seat on the bench and be prepared to swivel your head for a good look. These short videos feature Kentridge himself in the starring role as artist hero and conjurer. At their best they are touching studies of the creative process, and at their worst, convey an image of Kentridge as a magician performing cheap tricks like playing the film backwards.
“Walking, thinking, stalking the image, Many of the hours spent in the studio are hours of walking, pacing back and forth across the space gathering the energy, the clarity to make the first mark…It is as if before the work can begin (the visible, finished work of the drawing, film, or sculpture) a different, invisible work must be done.”
The final two sections are dedicated to theatrical performances he has designed. The first is the Black Box that Kentridge derived from the stage set he did for a production of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. If the preceding room gave the impression of the artist’s wizardry, then this confirms it. In a darkened room on the hour, a miniature stage on a box with moving doors and objects acting in tandem with projected light and cutouts, the tale of magic and dominance is clearly unfolding under a master’s hand. It is engrossing, even if the mechanics never quite fade into the suspension of disbelief. The last room is designated to his work designing The Nose for the Metropolitan Opera, and here, much as with Kentridge’s drawings, one feels the remains are just that: remainders of what might indeed be a spectacular visual feast in action. I wish I had the chance to see it.
On view at MoMA through May 17. If you cannot visit the museum, YouTube has an excellent selection of the artist’s films and there are two interview with the artist here and here. Kentridge was also a focus of Art:21’s Season Five Episode Compassion.
