Acting Out.
Gaskell, Ivan
Acting Out
Institute of Contemporary Art | Boston, Massachusetts
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The five videos selected by Jen Mergel for "Acting Out: Social
Experiments in Video" (through October 18) explore the dynamics of
social relationships in a variety of test situations. Phil
Collins's he who laughs last laughs longest (2006) records a
laughing contest in that dourest of countries, Scotland; whoever laughs
longest wins. Happily, an hour and three-quarters of hilarity is
distilled into seven-and-a-half minutes. The familiar trope of
laughter's ambiguity lends itself to easy theorizing, so
Collins's piece has enjoyed much attention since it was first shown
at the 2007 International Film Festival Rotterdam. Far more telling
explorations of alienation in urban settings are offered by Swedish
artist Johanna Billing's Magical World (2005), shown at P.S.1 in
2006, and Polish filmmaker Artur Zmijewski's THEM (SIE) (2007),
shown at Documenta 12. Billings shoots resigned music teachers leading
children in Zagreb through a performance of "Magical World"
from Rotary Connection's kitschy 1968 album Aladdin. The video is a
compendium of informative details--a wall clock in the form of a
ballerina, a nervous child's repetitive foot-jerking--all edited to
give a sense of Croatian longing for a Western sophistication that
actually doesn't exist.
Zmijewski gathered four groups of people with varied opinions in
Warsaw: conservative Catholics, Polish nationalists, Jewish activists,
and leftists. He invited each to create a visual representation of their
group's ideals, then to modify the others' products in a
series of workshops characterized by escalating confrontations. If one
sets store by wit in such circumstances, the Jewish activists come out
way on top, using colored tape to turn the white-and-red ribbon wound
around the sword of the Polish nationalists--the Szczerbiec--into a
rainbow symbolizing sexual tolerance. Later, three of them sit on the
floor in a row--literally seeing, hearing, speaking no evil-while a
second group burns the image of a third. This was a potentially
dangerous venture. While the video reveals the positive role conflict
can play in the symbolic realm, a growing tension results from not
knowing whether the participants will extend their actions beyond it.
Like Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1965) and Marina Abramoviae's
Rhythm 0 (1974), THEM unleashes social forces Zmijewski may not
necessarily have been able to constrain.
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In Wild Seeds (2005), Tel Aviv/Amsterdam artist Yael Bartana also
set in motion a process over which she has little control. She filmed a
group of teenagers, who had refused to serve in the Israel Defense
Forces, playing a game on a Palestinian hillside representing police
removing colonists from an illegal settlement. It is not clear whether
these youths refused to serve because they object to the occupation of
Palestinian territory, or to the role of the IDF in such forced
evacuations--both are reasons sarvanim (or "refuseniks")
commonly give. Either way, they are compromised by their participation
in the colonization of Palestine. If Mergel had wanted to address
artists' responses to daily cruelties in Palestine more
productively, she might have shown a work such as Emily Jacir's
Crossing Surda (2003), a quietly terrifying video recorded clandestinely
while Jacir walked the road, closed by the IDF to all but foot traffic,
between Ramallah and Birzeit University.
The jewel of the show is New York-based Venezuelan artist Javier
Tellez's Letter on the Blind, For the Use of Those Who See (2007),
shown at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. This 27-minute film evokes not only
the Indian fable of the six blind men examining an elephant, each of
whom touches a different part without grasping its totality, but also
the philosophical reading of self-portraits of the blind by Jacques
Derrida. Shot amidst the crumbling grandeur of the abandoned McCarren
Park Pool, Brooklyn provides a Tarkovsky-like setting of concrete
unfamiliarity. Six blind people shuffle in to take their seats facing an
archway through which, like an apparition, an elephant appears. Each
person approaches the elephant in turn, and describes what he or she
perceives. They all give a different interpretation: the skin is like a
rubber tire, or goatskin, or furnishing fabric, or a strangely warm
reptile, or the flesh of a vulture without feathers. While the camera
lingers on the gently shifting skin of the elephant, inviting the
sighted to find comparisons of their own--desiccated mud, a crazed
lakebed, a network of canyons--the person who has just examined the
elephant also shares with us reflections on his or her blindness. The
insights offered by these people are profound. As one of them eloquently
puts it, to be curious is to be awake to the world. Tellez brilliantly
conveys the everyday transcendence mirrored in fractured or damaged
selves.
