The New York Film Festival’s Projections series is an often-overlooked selection of the finest in recent experimental and avant-garde film. Spread over 11 programs, this year’s subjects ranged from documentary to magical realism, from fades to found footage. Aggressive editing techniques and sound collage offered some new and provocative investigations, yet it was the modest program of two seasoned filmmakers — Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler — that beamed with the liveliest verve and curiosity. Partners in love and art for over 50 years, they have earned a following of poets, philosophers and artists steeped in as much affection as respect for “Nick and Jerry.” Like their legendary at-home screenings, this was a show-and-tell of gentle, beautiful things.

The program included three short films — Dorsky’s Autumn and The Dreamer, and Hiler’s Bagatelle II (all works 2016) — each imbued with the pair’s characteristically playful and patient observations of natural and interior life. Autumn, however, stood out as Mr. Dorsky’s most transient tapestry to date, and a significant interpretation of haiku — the pure poetic form that first seized him as a youth. Shot in 2015, during the last months in that year, as California’s drought continued, the film is dedicated to all autumns and ruminates on its essence through nature, using short shots of the California countryside. Inconceivably crisp and luminous, the 16 mm film is 26 minutes long and silent, complimented by the tick-tock of the projector. Dorsky’s films do without narrative structure, allowing the images to speak directly. By such standards, Autumn is verbose.

The film opens slowly, burying us eye-deep in foliage before clearing a space for Dorsky’s found treasures: broad-eared rhododendron and butterfly bushes, wayfaring between islands of light, fade in and out of a blackness that comes to linger within an organic, oneiric, day-for-night tone. Everything seems steeped in twilight — the violet hour, the day’s autumn — where partitions blur and something slips. Flora is constant, becoming a verdant ether, occasionally contrasted by the slick hide of a building, but we are always quickly pulled back under the brush. Each image, dyed in oscuro, is kernelled and then connected by a constant flow of gaze. Vegetation, despite its thirst, pulsates and vacillates throughout while, against reason, bushes blush green. Dorsky is reflective, more mirror than director; his subjects, once pinned to celluloid, are egalitarian: the darkening bough, a sun freckled path, light smeared like jelly across a window, an ache for life.

Such is the poetry of Dorsky, and his interest in haiku has long been shared among filmmakers. In the 1929 essay “Beyond the Shot,” Sergei Eisenstein precisely correlated the natures of montage and haiku. In both practices, it is the copulation of forms to create a “representation of something that cannot be graphically represented.” He offers the Japanese lexicon as example: the combination of water and eye mean to weep, knife and heart mean sorrow. Such laconicism describes haiku as much as Dorsky’s art; to see his film is to see master poet Matsuo Bashō’s 17 syllables glowing at the edge of winter:

Autumn moonlight —
a worm digs silently
into the chestnut.

A self-proclaimed hunter of the Zen occurrence, of satori (the sudden enlightenment), Dorsky applies a number of poetic rules to the film, allowing his images to move us as consistently as Bashō’s cranes, cuckoos and moons. Vital to haiku are kigo (“season words”) — such as cicada, typhoon or grapes — that connote the time of year. Autumn is pregnant with the kigo-laden images of its namesake: rain slick streets, coy ochre moons, hexagonal light and tawny leaves glide down, across and over the screen. This is not simply a rummaging of diaphanous delicacies, however. Cutting is as essential to haiku as montage, and each cut is precise. Cutting works like a punctuation mark, and for Dorsky like a door. Throwing the juxtaposition into revelatory light, it links us to a new dimension — the moment of satori.

Such delightful turns happen throughout the film; seasoned and cut with care, Dorsky’s images become incarnations of linked verse. In one observation, light-tickled water meets a crush of velvet black reeds; the pair, now joined, transforms into an ominous sea urchin. Midway through Autumn, some late afternoon light falls yellow on the nubby back of an armchair or sofa. It glows, beginning to resemble a wheat field, but a crossfade exposes a dark landscape of whirling gears beneath: upholstery and infrastructure combine to reveal parallel universes of leisure and grind, flesh and mechanism. This all quickly falls away again, yet you can still taste a type of yellow, decidedly post-harvest.

In material as much as purpose, both film and haiku are attempts to bottle the moment of revelation, the fleeting experience. Indeed, the haiku is traditionally printed, like celluloid, as a single vertical line. Their kinship culminates towards the end of Autumn, the frame lingering on a voluptuous bit of vegetation. As Dorsky pushes and pulls us in and out by his signature dark fade, we move through a hypnagogic and hesitant collapse (or arising), towards a new vision: constellations of inestimably starry flora. In its final syllable, the film negotiates heaven and Earth: the Milky Way in milk thistle.

The post Flood of Images: Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler at the New York Film Festival appeared first on artcritical.

June 21 to August 5, 2016
519 West 24th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 206 7100

In 1975, Bas Jan Ader disappeared while sailing the Atlantic. This sail was the second part of his trilogy In Search of the Miraculous. Part one is comprised of 18 black-and-white photographs of the artist walking through various parts of Los Angeles at night. The third part never happened. Metro Pictures’ exhibition includes several photographs, two wall-drawing installation pieces, and two short films and reveals that Ader’s work is still relevant, pointed, droll, and strange — perhaps more so now than in 1970s California. The mysterious details of his disappearance create an added allure, even over 40 years after his death. However, it’s not necessary (and perhaps impossible) to separate the details of his death from his life and work, as his work is a confluence of autobiography and conceptualism wherein the viewer follows the artist while he walks, searches, and falls. While I was in the gallery, I overheard someone ask the attendant: “So what do you think, is he dead or not?” I couldn’t make out the response.

Ader’s work edges action and inaction. He illustrates what happens when gravity takes over: the elements get free and the body falls. This might be why his work feels so natural: it feels more like a practice than a performance. In the understated photographs of documented falls, I feel as if I’m watching a person practice falling. Another way of saying this might be: I’m watching a person decide to let gravity take over. Or, finally: I’m watching a person practice dying . It’s funny. Ader’s body is lean and tree-like, making the falls comical and graceful. He falls off of a roof, off of a bridge and into water (one frame depicts only the aftermath, a splash), and he falls from a standing position to a lying down position with no middle information. We never see him get up from the fall. Instead, the photographs end at the bodiless frame — all gravity.

These understated photographs line the walls leading to Please don’t leave me (1969). In this first installation, light bulbs and wire highlight the title’s words, painted on the wall. This politely sad command reminds me that Ader is the subject of his work and he is never not alone. And it’s not only the artist who falls, it’s everything. In Untitled (Tea Party) (1972), six color photographs are aligned vertically. In this first image, Ader sits outside under a cardboard box. The box is propped up by a stick and Ader sips from a teacup. The sequence shows the box’s fall after the stick’s removal. The final photograph depicts a box in the field. The artist is presumably under the box. He makes a situation and then allows for its undoing. He sets himself up as the subject and then leaves.

The gallery’s passageway holds a monitor, which plays a short color video, Primary Time (1974). The frame holds the middle section of Ader’s body. The artist is dressed in all black, arranging a set of flowers in a vase. The flowers are red save for a few yellow and one blue. This repetitive action creates a bridge to the second installation piece, Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten (1973), where a tripod, a vase filled with flowers, and a clamp-on lamp sit around the title words. The work is melancholic but is not weighted with gravitas. Untitled (The Elements) (1971/2003), depicts a large seascape with a cliff at sunset. Ader’s body stands in the approximate middle. He faces the camera and holds a sign reading “Fire.” He is pointing to the only element not present in the photograph.

The show toggles between revealing and hiding, searching and giving up. Hollywood tropes mix with Ader’s absurdist gestures. In thinking about the aftermaths of these practices — a big splash (Ader’s body is out of the frame, in the river) or an empty roof (Ader’s body is out of the frame, on the ground) or a cardboard box (Ader’s body is inside the box), I return to the idea of practicing falling — practicing leaving — the Earth. This is maybe the most useful practice one can engage in.

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June 24 to August 26, 2016
12 Berkeley Street (between Stratton Street and Mayfair Place)
London W1J 8DT, +44 20 7491 0100

The distinguishing feature of Bas Jan Ader is the way he brings personal feeling and its hinterland of autobiography into a conceptual practice. That’s what makes him a “Romantic,” topped off by the mysterious manner of his death. Add the counter-intuitive combination of Modernist art history (with Piet Mondrian as focal point) and slapstick à la Buster Keaton, and you have much of Ader’s context. That dovetails with both his Dutch origins and his American residence from 1963, including the final five years which yielded his oeuvre. That consists of just 35 mature works, so it’s unsurprising that Simon Lee has not unearthed the previously overlooked — indeed, the content here is close to Camden Arts Centre’s 2006 retrospective — but the gallery does make an exemplary presentation of seminal pieces, supported by still photographs which acted as studies towards the films.

The most potent biographical interpretation takes us back to the Nazi execution of Ader’s father, who harbored Jews. I’m Too Sad To Tell You (1970–71), the film in which Ader cries, gains from the possibility — but not necessity — that he might be recalling that event and what it says about humanity. Here, the silent black-and-white image is presented on 16mm through a clattering projector with the artist’s head projected to triple life size — factors which undercut the immediacy of the emotion. We’re reminded of the gap between art and life.

Ader’s famous “falling” films are presented as a continuous loop, again on the original 16mm, allowing their similarities and differences to come to the fore. Five times a fall occurs, and in each case the artist disappears from view as a result: in Fall 1, Los Angeles (1970), he tumbles from a chair on an LA roof and into the garden’s bushes; Fall 2, Amsterdam (1970) sees him vanish beneath the water after he and his bicycle tumble into a canal; in Broken fall (geometric) (1971), he ends up in a ditch at the side of the road following the failure of what look far from determined efforts to remain upright. Broken fall (organic) (1971), opens with Ader hanging to a tree, until he loses his grip — like a leaf in autumn — and again vanishes into a canal beneath. Nightfall (1971), not only introduces a pun but applies the process to an object, a stone which Ader drops onto the scene’s lighting, so plunging him into the invisibility of darkness. Ader is often seen as relinquishing control to gravity in these films, but his agency is clear enough in the action of Nightfall, and arguably in Broken Fall (geometric) as well. Moreover, he has set up the effects of gravity in the other three films. The more consistent themes in this set of works are absurdity (again emphasising the gap between art and life) and, given the final vanishing enacted in each, the implication of death. That makes it equally feasible to read them as versions of the fall of Ader’s father, shot in the woods; as plays on the biblical fall from grace; or as existentialist commentaries inspired by Ader’s favourite author, Albert Camus, and in particular his Amsterdam-set novel The Fall (1956).

Broken Fall (geometric) also reflects on Mondrian: the road, we can see, leads to a windmill which features in several of his early paintings. And Ader’s thin form, dressed in black, makes the vertical line Mondrian would have approved — before Ader falls into the diagonal apostolically introduced by Theo van Doesberg. And Mondrian takes centre stage in the remaining works. On the road to a new Neo-Plasticism, Westkapelle, Holland (1971) also shows Ader before “Mondrian’s windmill,” but this time imitating the structure of his classic abstract compositions as he lies— playing dead, perhaps — on a blanket on the ground. In the film Primary Time (1971), we see the black-clothed Ader successively rearrange a multi-colored vase of flowers by adding and removing blooms so that exclusively red, yellow and blue bouquets remain. This, too, is somewhat absurd, and a potentially Sisyphean task is implied. Primary Time could be regarded as a painting reversed into its constituent colors to underline the clichés in the traditions of Dutch floral art, or as a claim that nature can provide a purer outcome than Mondrian’s more artificial reductions.

This grouping of work brings Beckett to mind as much as Camus: Ader performs pointless tasks and sets himself up for failure. Yet the sense is that attempting the apparently pointless is better than giving up, and when he cedes control it comes across as a strategic decision, not a lack of engagement. In his last act, he ceded considerable control to the elements by taking on the Atlantic crossing in a smaller boat than had anyone before him — not fatefully, the rest of his work suggests to me, but experimentally.

All of which is to say: Ader remains poignant and relevant. And if this show fitted a little too well with the air of gloom which descended on London following the decision to leave the European Union, perhaps Ader’s embrace of the ridiculous could be read a message of hope.

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April 19 to May 22, 2016
Wiesner Building, 20 Ames Street (at Amherst Street)
Cambridge, MA, 617 253 4680

At the List Visual Arts Center’s exhibition “Narrative Color,” the first phrase that came to me while watching KP Brehmer’s three-minute film Ideale Lanschaft (Ideal Landscape) (1970), was “schizophrenic gardens,” but I corrected myself. The depicted gardens themselves were not disorderly — in fact, as English gardens, they were the pure image of order, “the triumph of sovereignty over nature,” as the narrator acutely described them. It was only their representations within the film that seemed fleeting, vibrant, paranoia-inducing. This, in itself, becomes a sort of theme within the show, where each of the five films, made by seven artists since the 1970s, deliberately refuses to be structured by a traditional narrative arc, instead using color to explore the construction and deconstruction of language. The show includes work by Brehmer, Bernadette Corporation, Mareike Bernien and Kerstin Schroedinger, Derek Jarman, and Bruce and Norman Yonemoto.

Scenes in Ideale Lanschaft move quickly: only a few scenes of some garden somewhere at a time, occasionally with a dancing man intervening, at first with German dialogue and captions, then interspersed with color blocks and corresponding names of colors. In a seconds-long take, a flowerbed is briefly framed and the camera moves on to a wall of foliage, which becomes a green streak across the screen. A man dancing in the garden appears as a vision when the camera quickly swoops away, as if running away from the image. The scenes become more like color fields, of skies and gardens, largely static but slightly wavering.

Fortuitously, the first headphones I used were apparently broken: the only soundtrack was heavy breathing in my left ear, which narrowed my focus to the film’s frantic visual scape and heightened the unsettling affect of the film. Watching again, this time with functioning headphones, I followed the dialogue more closely to understand how and why flashes of lush estates and near-stills of tonal skies were woven together. In German, with English subtitles, a male narrator argues quite calmly that we learn how to see, order, and assign color socially and that “Nature’s sphere of influence is determined by society.” The technical necessity of using subtitles for both spoken and unspoken text conveniently enhances the film’s argument that color is learned, for HORIZON BLUE reads as the consequence of “the desire to return to… nature.” The colors’ given names become more and more arcane, and because the subtitles labeling colors do not correspond to speech, the film becomes an exercise in divorcing visual from written and spoken languages. As curator Alise Upitis writes, how might color depend on language?

As the first film in the exhibition, Ideale Lanschaft necessarily colors the others, its arguments influencing the viewer’s impressions of the remaining films. “Narrative Color” must grapple with the very formation of human societies, some long event of conquering. The imposition of language upon color (and all else) is an imposition of power, just as (according to Ideale Lanschaft’s narrator) in Europe, “the ruling classes used laid-out greeneries to demonstrate their power.”

Another exploration of how color operates within society, Rainbow’s Gravity also complicates the plot of human conquest presented in Ideale Lanschaft. The film, directed and produced by Bernien and Schroedinger, is set around an Agfacolor Neu factory, where Nazi concentration camp workers produced color film. The title, Rainbow’s Gravity, alludes to Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel, also set during World War II. As the film opens, a woman narrates what one sees on screen: several women sitting in a dark room where the only light source is a projector that begins to play a film. The speaking woman sits in this room, her voice wavering and self-conscious. Until now, it has not been clear what this projected film is, but as the camera shifts to show a scene of several women dancing, it is revealed as Veit Harlan’s propagandizing Opfergang (The Great Sacrifice) (1944). “Do you remember the colors?” another woman asks in the dark. “My memory is in black and white,” the first answers. “Spielberg said, ‘I think black and white stands for reality. I don’t think color is real,'” she continues. “I think certainly color is certainly to the people who survived the Holocaust.” The women, actors, describe what it must have been like to manufacture color film during the Holocaust, when film was used to propagandize on behalf of the regime that enslaved them.

Bernadette Corporation’s Hell Frozen Over (2001) delves deeper into the linguistic complexities of negation — where the negation of color might be black and white or the active addition and removal of colors. The film opens with several scenes shot against the sublime white of a frozen lake, showing the semiotician Sylvère Lotringer giving an excursus on poet Stéphane Mallarmé, explaining that “‘nothing’ for Mallarmé is very positive… there are four different ways of saying nothing. Each word is saying something.” Interspersed with sparse shots of Lotringer are complex scenes of female models posing for an invisible camera alongside props and backdrops. The negation and assembling of color relationships are haltingly connected to fashion through this footage, as the models move, hide, or otherwise rearrange brightly colored consumer goods. In one segment, for example, a woman removes a red suitcase from underneath a couch and reaches for a series of thermoses perched on a reflective table. As she puts these yellow, blue, white, and black thermoses into the suitcase, one-by-one, the visual appeal of the scene incrementally melts away.

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February 5 to March 26, 2016
528 West 26th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 315 0470

Ana Mendieta’s exhibition of experimental films at Galerie Lelong brings 15 works created by Mendieta from circa 1971 to 1975: nine of them had never been exhibited before, just recently uncovered during a cataloguing process. Besides being new to the audience, these experimental films have been transferred from their originals to digital media, which has added a fresh look to them. As we step into the gallery, our eyes are immediately captivated by an image of Mendieta’s face at the back of the main room. In Sweating Blood (1973), Mendieta’s serene semblance appears to be floating in the surrounding darkness. Her hair vanishes amid both the film’s pitch-black background and the walls. While Sweating Blood and Dripwall (1973) face spectators who enter the gallery, six other films have been distributed around the room on the left and right walls. In an adjacent gallery, we can see five more films, two series of photographs, and ephemera from Mendieta’s Estate, such as film reels, cassette tapes, and a notebook with a sketch for Sweating Blood.

Mendieta produced most of the films in the show during her pre-New York life, when she still lived in Iowa, where she had been exiled from Cuba since the age of 12. When she arrived with her sister, they lived at an orphanage. As a Latina, and outsider, she was ostracized and suffered prejudice. Later on, from 1969 to 1977, Mendieta completed two MFAs at the University of Iowa, the first in painting and the second in multimedia and video. She would move to New York only in 1978. Even though Mendieta participated in many progressive movements of her time, and she was definitely at the forefront of experimentation with the body and performance, it is hard not to feel traces of nostalgia in her work — something that she missed, perhaps due to her arduous life in Midwest, or perhaps as an omen of her tragic passing, her troubled marriage with artist Carl Andre. In the show, death is suggested, repelled and enacted: it begins with her speaking skull in X-Ray (ca. 1975), follows with Sweating Blood and Dripwall, and ends with Moffitt Building Piece (1973).

Sweating Blood, one of the most famous films in the show, is hard to ignore. The work lasts only three minutes, but it feels as if it’s way longer than that. Mendieta’s face, young and beautiful, with her closed eyes, is depicted as a self-portrait: we see her entire face, from the neck up. She does not move onscreen, but we can see when she swallows, or rolls her eyes underneath her eyelids, without opening them. At some point, her skin begins to change: the pores on the top of her forehead, where hair begins to grow, are emphasized, as if she just started to present pox, a rash. A red fluid appears on the top of her mid hairline and soon a drip of “blood” falls from her hair, just to find her left eyebrow. A second drop follows, running towards her left ear. The upper part of her forehead seems to be sweating blood.

In Dripwall (1973), three round holes appear on a white wall, coming from inside, one at a time. Red liquid leaks from them, dripping across the white plane. They reminded me of bullet holes. Moffitt Building Piece shows another of Mendieta’s experiments with blood. It was created in response to the murder of Sarah Ann Ottens, who was beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed in her dorm at the University of Iowa on March 13, 1973. In April of that year, Mendieta staged a violent rape scene in a performance at her apartment, later named Rape Scene, and then started her Moffitt Building Piece, which also responds to Ottens’s murder. Moffitt Building Piece begins with a view of the eponymous storefront in Iowa City. Mendieta is clandestine, filming from inside a car towards the façade of the building. A puddle of blood is seen on the sidewalk, in front of Moffitt’s door. After the camera gives a close-up on the puddle, we notice it’s lumpy, meat-like: Mendieta spilled an animal’s blood and meat on that sidewalk and then filmed the reactions of passersby, who look on the tableau with varying degrees of shock, concern, or disinterest.

While blood in Mendieta’s work has been labeled as “abject,” at Lelong, blood is empowering. Even though she created Moffitt Building Piece in reaction to the pervasive sexual violence against women, blood was not always a negative element for her. Instead, she used it as force, concomitant with her interest in Catholicism and the Afro-Caribbean religion Santería. In Sweating Blood, in Moffitt Building Piece and in Dripwall, blood evokes both presence and absence of a body: the power of blood to induce a trancelike state points to what happens beyond the body, a wall earns its “life” through bleeding like a body, and a woman’s death is exposed through the reminiscence of her corpse. These gestures are far from being abject; blood sanctions Mendieta’s body and creates bounds with our bodies, as spectators.

Magic is everywhere, as if these works were fragments of fairytales, or cautionary tales from a childhood in Latin America. In Dog (1974), filmed during a summer program in Mexico, Mendieta’s small silhouette is seen, moving far afield on an unpaved street in San Felipe, Oaxaca. As the camera focuses on her, we see she is on all fours, wearing a fur skin over her face and possibly naked body. She crawls. A man walks up the street, and ignores “the dog.” A woman and a boy pass next to her, no interaction. She still crawls, vulnerable, as if half-alive, recoiling, hesitant, woman, animal, and outsider.

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DARREN JONES: What drew you to Fire Island as a subject for this body of work?

GABRIEL MARTINEZ: As a child growing up in Little Havana, Miami, I was first introduced to Fire Island through the Village People’s song of the same name. I was just nine years old when that song came out in 1977. I was instinctively drawn to the image of masculinity on the cover of the album, the song’s rhythmic disco beat and to the lyrics: “Don’t go in the bushes/Someone might grab ya…” I had a subtle sense of what those lines referred to. It took me 36 years to actually step foot upon this mythical location, and I’m still not sure if it actually exists.

For most of my artistic career, I’ve investigated various themes related to masculinity from a Queer perspective. Lately, I’ve been specifically focused on Queer history, with a particular interest in the time period between Stonewall and 1981, including Donna Summer, AIDS, the films of Wakefield Poole, the novels of John Rechy, and now Fire Island. I’m intrigued by the national sites of particular importance to the history of gay culture.

What is Fire Island to you?

It’s a place of intense beauty and sorrow. It’s a living memorial, a sacred space, a state of mind.

Fire Island is rife with personal transformative encounters and shared collective experiences. I want the exhibition to reflect both points of view.

The title of the show is redolent of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, The Sacred & Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (1945) — a story that while in a different time, deals with a lifestyle and environment hitherto unknown to the narrator. The story touches on homosexuality, desire and nostalgia. It is observed of Brideshead Castle that it had “”the atmosphere of a better age.” How did you come to choose the title?

Any associations with Waugh’s novel are conscious, yet general and loose. I worked closely and collaboratively with John Caperton, the Print Center’s Jensen Bryan Curator, on all aspects of the exhibition, including the title. This show is presented as part of the Center’s Centennial, and so an exploration of history itself, in various dimensions, is an integral aspect of the exhibition. For instance, the beginnings of the island’s Cherry Grove as a safe haven for queer people can be traced back to the mid 1930s. The show also explores issues deeply interrelated to narration, homosexual desire, camaraderie and nostalgia.

Fire Island is associated primarily with the summer season. You have included winter scenes in the exhibition — silence, desolation, aloneness. Why did you expand the exhibition into a time of year that so few have experienced?

Traveling to Cherry Grove or Fire Island Pines via the ferry from Sayville during the winter months is impossible. The bay is usually frozen. I wanted to experience this sense of impossibility and to explore the quality of the island, by myself, during a moment that is the polar opposite of the high season. s a sort of pilgrimage, I hiked five hours in freezing temperatures from Robert Moses Park to reach Cherry Grove and Fire Island Pines. What I discovered was isolated and solemn, yet powerfully charged. I wanted these images to present an atmospheric antithesis of the festive social scene that was/is Fire Island. I created multi-layered hybrid prints (silkscreen, inkjet and silver leaf) that evoke and mirror a sense of what I felt that particular day: decay, tragedy and trauma.

Mythology is a major currency in the perception and story of Fire Island. It is a place that almost seems to evaporate as soon as you are back in “reality.” How much does the concept of that place conflict with or complement the actuality of it in your work?

This factors greatly in “Bayside Revisited.” Once you enter through Donna Summer, your journey begins. The space is dimly lit alluding to a nocturnal experience. The soundtrack to Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand permeates the space with angelic voices. You are within the fantasy. Stepping back out of the main exhibition space, you are coldly reminded of the paradise to which you immediately long to return.

By projecting an original copy of Boys in the Sand onto a mirrored ball you splinter it into a kaleidoscope, giving tantalizing glimpses rather than a full screen. Why?

I’m indebted to the source material and at the same time feel that it’s imperative for me to transform it. By projecting the 16mm print the film disperses into the realm of the cosmos, day into night. The images seem to radiate around you, enveloping the viewer. The wall onto which the film is projected via the mirror ball is coated with sand from the Meat Rack [a section of the island known for public sex], and glitter. Both the ephemeral and tangible are depicted.

The viewer enters the exhibition through a wall-to-wall curtain of Donna Summer in ecstatic voice against a blazing sunset: it’s carnivalesque, implying something to be discovered on the other side. It could be illusionary, supernatural or historical. What do you intend to communicate through the supernatural or magical artifice inherent in the subject?

On July 7, 1979, Donna Summer was scheduled to perform before an audience of 5,000 adoring gay men on the oceanfront there, but she canceled last minute. Many speculated that the “queen of disco,” growing increasingly religious, did not want to be so directly connected or associated with the gay community.

Last year, I placed her iconic Live and More (1978) album cover on the Fire Island seashore and let the waves drag her away. Through photography, Summer now posthumously performs on the island for the first time ever.

That image has been converted into a curtain that signals the beginning of your journey through the exhibition. I definitely intended to set up a kind of funhouse atmosphere resplendent with wonder and excitement, with just a touch of anxiety and apprehension. You’re entering Neverland; let the Peter Pan Syndrome take over.

There is the vaguest sense that you long for a Fire Island that no longer exists. You are too young to have been there in its ‘70s heyday, and it is understandable for men of our generations to wish to have seen a pre-AIDS Fire Island. How do you negotiate the distance between you and the times you portray?

I look back at the ‘70s with a great sense of admiration and empathy. It was a time of intense struggle, but also of outrageous courage and creativity. Yes, I wish to have lived though that era, and at the same time grateful that I came out when I did, in the mid ‘80s.

The theme of AIDS has been embedded in my multidisciplinary projects from the outset of my career. I have created works that pay homage to those who perished since the start of the epidemic. I have also created various works dedicated to the memory of those who have lost their lives while seeking freedom from oppression.

Lately, I find myself positioned in the middle, both as a mid-career artist and as an openly gay Latino man centered between the older and younger generations. I sympathize greatly with the older generation, a group of individuals who fought so vehemently, faced such animosity and experienced such profound loss. I liken my current role as an artist to that as conduit between the two generations, as inter-generational mediator.

“Gabriel Martinez: Bayside Revisited” is on view at the Print Center, Philadelphia, through December 19. For more information please visit printcenter.org/100

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JAY SANDERS: When did you meet Jack?

FELIX BERNSTEIN: Well, I was really young, and Jack, at the end, nobody really liked him, I would just hang out on the lower east side, I was a poser, I wasn’t an artist, I wasn’t really interested in culture, I just found the lower east side a compelling place to experience things.

I would pick up guys, I would cruise, basically one of the guys was Jack, and he had all these punk neo-Nazis hanging around with him. Ludlum was over, and the Club Kids were a mess, and Jack was really generous, and I wouldn’t be an artist or anything if it weren’t for his generosity. He would tell me to meet him for a rendezvous or whatever, but he wouldn’t even show up. But that taught me a lot. Him not giving me attention made me show up in wilder and wilder costumes. I was called a child prostitute, but I wouldn’t think of myself as that, but as a rebel. We had a lot of encounters where we wouldn’t talk. He would give just little statements, not positive or negative, that just pushed me along. I think of that as generous. Pina Bausch, or someone like that, is very hands on, obviously…. Jack wasn’t even there. It was a teaching in absence.

Was it difficult?

Yeah cause you’re put on the spot and there’s no one there for you. His father died when he was very young, in a sea accident.

I don’t want to say I came into my own because he didn’t want me to come into my own. I wasn’t self-possessed; I didn’t have a self, and he took that material and used it.

Anyone who evaluated him was ascribed as a monster, patriarchal, crazy. I grew up in a world where there was no evaluation. You can imagine that having a teacher like that wasn’t an easy situation. He wasn’t evaluated and didn’t evaluate me, but I learned from him to evaluate others. But nowadays, German art magazines pay me to say the sort of stuff Jack Smith said. They love to see me bite the hand that feeds.

What about ideas? Did he have any ideas?

His ideas were already out there, and people used them all the time. When I was on St. Marks Place I was bored, cause everyone wanted to be Jack, and I didn’t. I didn’t want anything to do with him, and I think that’s why he found me.

I had no diva worship for Jack, and I don’t like Jack and I don’t like who you think he is. To put it cutely, You Don’t Know Jack, and that was the space of our interaction. I’m not gonna dress up as a Flaming Creature and dance around Barbara Gladstone gallery or at a Pride parade. He would hate that. In fact, I’ll let you know: he hates you, if you do that. And if you say performance art is subversive in a museum, he’ll kill you.

Did you ever have sex?

The phallus is an organ belonging to the father, and Jack’s father was dead but he didn’t care. Jack had no phallus: he hated phallic men. He just had a flaccid penis, hanging around all the time. That’s what’s so “obscene” about his film Flaming Creatures; there are no erections.

Jack was at that weird time: the birth of pop art. Like Warhol, he didn’t want to be a subject; he wanted to be an object. But unlike Warhol, he didn’t want to be a commodity, even though he loved the world of commodities—Maria Montez and the starlets. But Smith liked being the pivot between subject and object. He couldn’t settle on one or the other, and it drove him. Most of us pick. He wouldn’t. He was neither Batman, the hero, the free agent or Dracula, the bloodsucking villain (he played both in his one filmic collaboration with Warhol)—it’s clear that Warhol chose to be a vampire, an undead object who fed off of the lives of subjects.

What did he invent?

Everyone in Greek Theatre knows what this look means. He didn’t splinter the disclosure of thinking but some people think he did. But he wasn’t expressive. It wasn’t about the outpouring of emotion. The beauty of Smith’s Hamlet is that emotion is rendered through objective correlatives, and it connects you to the subject through a skewed view. You directly feel it through indirection, as T.S. Eliot has explained of Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Nowadays all intimacy is delayed through parody and irony…but for Smith there was no deferral. The indirect was always already directed at the viewer. It was an instantaneous transferal through spontaneous yet effective bodily hieroglyphics.

Famed experimental artist Tony Conrad was originally Smith’s intern. Of course, Conrad is a straight, minimal artist. Conrad was using drugs to control his emotions: to go from happy to sad, the two faces of theatre—all very simple, controlled, framed. Jack Smith, Conrad thought, was so corny and emotional. And this helped him reduce emotions to stark symbols. Maximalism became minimalism. In turn, it is true that Smith invented minimalism. And he turned away from Kant’s subjectivism towards a new paradigm: the subject-as-object or the subject as thing. 

For someone like Jack Smith, what’s the boundary of an artwork?

To be or not to be, to be art or not to be art, hard or soft dick, wavering, stuck in wavering, because phallic authority is dead. That lack of resolution became what others manufactured in their attempts to claim his legacy. Even Warhol.

Jack Smith didn’t hate all proper names. He always hated the one, who led the chain gang of signification: Jonas Mekas, that was the master signifier he abhorred. Smith was always playing the crazy polymorphous signified. That was Jack Smith, or Jack Smith was that thing. Mekas uses his subjectivity to interpellate and determine, Smith was always the interpellated thing. Young performance artists and queer academics always say with a smile, “that was Jack Smith.” But perhaps the “that” that was Jack is really just the stab in the back caused by the reclusive and elusive referent. So it is not wrong when everyone says “that was Jack Smith,” the one who sent me that strange and hostile letter. That was him since he was always that thing, and we were always determining him through such anecdotes.

We’ve talked about the reptilian technique. How did Jack Smith convey his own technique?

Interns became baroque apprentices. You can never master baroque art but you can at least be told about it. The student can never be more than a subjective creature; only he was ever really an object; and so he remained better than us. We would decorate or be “flaming,” he would watch us then morph based on what he saw us seeing. Like Warhol, he was a voyeur not a “flaming” participant, like the modern gay/queer artist. But unlike Warhol, he would become what he watched the watcher watching. Thus, Warhol’s cruel glare was more than just a subjective standpoint for Smith—but rather, it was also an internalized compass for designing selfhood.

What do you think about his legacy?

John Waters said about Jack Smith: that he bit the hand that fed him. He’s wrong. Jack Smith was never even fed. Rather, he fed the hand that bit him. Not to over-emphasize the point, but Jack Smith’s dad died at sea. He was untreatable and unfeedable, because you cannot treat someone who does not accept, as an ontological premise, the supplement of health—he was the living embodiment of what Richard Foreman termed the Ontological Hysterical Theater.

Can Smith be anything more than a dodo? What does Jack Smith mean for productivity?

Plenty of people will say, Jack Smith is a real artist, but Rent the musical is superficial. They are wrong. Gay Marriage is neoliberal fantasy and so is Rent but your critique is just as neoliberal. Protesting gentrification is gentrification. Jack wouldn’t have cared about Rent: it would’ve been as good as anything else. Idina Menzel might even be our Maria Montez.

Funny story—a budding hip gay artist blocked me from all his social media accounts after I wrote a critique of his safe aesthetics—an hour later, he shared a glossy ArtForum essay that praised Jack Smith for being an aggressive trailblazer. “Never conform,” he tweeted as a caption. Jack Smith is rolling in his grave. Or anyway, Jack Smith is the thing that rolls in a grave.

Bieber Bathos Elegy will be presented in the Whitney Museum’s theater on January 15th & 16th at 9PM. Advanced tickets will be available. More information is forthcoming.

(Transcription by Julien Nguyun)

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You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
-Imagination imagined by Kafka before the Internet.

I wonder about the Internet. Does it in fact exist? Or does it prove an alternate universe? If you sit there surfing long enough it starts to pour right into your head. I’m in the middle of writing or editing something, and for some inexplicable or at least forgettable reason, I’m lead elsewhere and halfway down a rabbit hole to read a joke about some cartoon bears. So, like anyone, I bookmark it as distraction for later. I bring a plum out of my bag, but Allison Cobb won’t let me eat it:

“I know, like Subway low, like bread puffed up

with yoga mat chemicals. Yes I did

steal everyone’s detournement”

Am I now looking at a desert mountain range, a gorge, a rattler’s skin, sand designs left by a Mojave sidewinder, a natural Mandala, the mouth of a deep sea creature, or a series of close-ups of a person’s eye? I can rarely stay on one of these pages long enough to reach its end. All the subsequent descriptions and associations lead in 100,000 directions; exploring the Internet is more divergent than a Raymond Roussel stanza, more plentiful than The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Appealing to my at best curious intentions, as much as distraction and forgetfulness, artcritical’s Bookmarked feature seems a fun idea for anyone willing to share their abandoned to-dos and tabs for inspiration, or for any readily charmable reader. (I’m pressed in this moment to express just why this is. Voyeurism, compulsion, affinity, or just plain curiosity?) Sometimes I fear I won’t find my way back to the new thing I’ve discovered, as if associations won’t work without some kind of guide. Years ago, taking notes while receiving instructions from someone of my grandparents’ generation, I was admonished that excessive notation beguiles memory, which in turn can cause its loss. I think this is true.

My fits and starts on the Internet are, like anyone, a daily occurrence. Everything’s in here, and its access is seemingly ubiquitous. It’s no surprise that the saved tabs the folder of URL shortcuts are ones that I can scarcely remember any reason for having saved. As I continuing to flip through read-later tabs, I’m at a sudden rapt to the ticking of a bedside clock, followed by a soothing French voice that nevertheless sounds as if it’s awoken from a long night beside an ashtray. A sideburned fop pours hot water into a bowl in black and white. It’s Un Homme Qui Dort (1974) Full movie with subs! What is it? Why is it there? I have no recollection, but I love it.

It’s a dream. Wonderful, terrifying, stupid, very ordinary. Researching wildlife online (again, why? because we can), I half-expect a gazelle to leap out of the liquid crystal screen, still baffled by the endless deluge that is the Internet — in the way an early motion-picture crowd feared the train arriving at its station in L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat (1895) might burst right through the screen and into the cinema to overtake them. They ran to the back of the room, then returned to their seats for more.

Here I’m totally distracted by a singularly interesting, eccentric guy. I was a bellhop and John was in town from NYC, needing respite from some unpleasant associations, situations he’d describe to me at the front door on successive nights and mornings. He was cool and a great conversationalist. Told me his brain is swelling and that I ought to get the rich guests to buy all his paintings. He also once commanded, upon my delivery of the Wall Street Journal, that I return to the front desk to have it burned at once. In his underwear, no less. More on this in another essay, but I will add that John is generous, no-bullshit, very funny, and every bit of the creative spirit evinced by his many musical, on-screen, and visual-art works. In his After Dark Episode 1, you’ll catch the above-mentioned attributes straightaway.

Now I remember what I was supposed to do: read an essay by Raphael Rubinstein.

Have you heard of Sue Tompkins? This remains in my read-later tab, and though I’ve heard it many times I don’t think I ever reached the end. Being “heat-faint,” in ecstasy, longing for islands or “24 hours on my favorite planet alone” (my favorite of her hypnotic refrains here), irritation for standing by, wondering “if you feel like I feel.” How about Carla Harryman’s Memory Play? Mile’s Champion’s How to Laugh? Every different emotional state represented outside avatars to distract you. Avert your eyes awhile, you’ll come back soon. Fog everywhere. Sun whenever. Festooned in little pics of food, or all the cute pets your landlord won’t let you house. Years ago, they even foreshortened your audible laughing. What a rotten, wondrous place.

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David Foster Wallace was an amazing writer, of both fiction and nonfiction, and in his interviews and other records he further revealed his humility and humanity — basically two of the most important traits a person can possess. And he won a lot of acclaim for those qualities. He committed suicide in 2008, and I often wish he were still alive, since I’d like to hear him think through contemporary entertainment, the proliferation of screens and images, politics, being a person, the changes in hip-hop, etc.^[1] I never knew him, but I know he was a person.

The End of the Tour, the recently released based-on-true-events film about his 1996 interview by David Lipsky during the finale of Wallace’s book tour promoting his magnum opus, Infinite Jest (1996), tries to share what made him a compelling thinker and writer. The movie stars Jason Segel as Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Lipsky, with a really awesome cameo appearance by Joan Cusack. Eisenberg, who can sometimes be great, is here essentially only Jesse Eisenberg onscreen. Segel has pretty much all of the right gestures and the voice and the mannerisms of the author: the hair, the gigantic stature and build, the glasses, enduring five-o’clock-shadow, and Wallace’s iconic bandana. But throughout the film you see that these are people performing. You can sense the interactions of Wallace and Lipsky in shadows, behind the glaze of two actors who remain present throughout as impersonators on a film set. No matter how faithful to the original material, the movie announces itself over and over: “I am a sham.”

There’s no doubt about the earnestness of the film’s makers — neither the actors, nor director James Ponsoldt, not Lipsky or screenwriter Donald Margulies, nor Danny Elfman, who did the music, which is sparing and nonetheless totally cloying. You get the same impression from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, a 2009 adaptation of Wallace’s short story collection of the same name, written, produced, directed, and co-starring John Krasinski: the people who made this love Wallace’s work and also they can’t help but to muck it up. And although there are things in these movies that Hollywood films^[2] don’t often acknowledge — about misogyny and visibility and detachment in Brief Interviews, and about public persona versus interiority versus the interdependence of personhood as something simultaneously continuous and something peculiarly fleeting and situational in The End of the Tour — they both end up being bad. And The End of the Tour is bad in a way that is actually a fundamental violation of some of the ideas that Wallace was most invested in thinking through, and for which his work is loved.

In the same way that Wallace followed in the stylistic footsteps of writers like Don DeLillo and Veronica Geng and Thomas Pynchon and Donald Barthelme and cetera, he likewise took up their interest in the image as a thing that people interact with. And he kind of insisted on dealing with the difficult negotiation of wanting to engage with representations and people sincerely, without the defenses of suspicion and critical judgment or cynicism, while also recognizing that everyone (himself included) performs and conceals and advertises and dissimulates, and that the relationship of these images to what they represent or hide is complex and requires critical analysis to understand.[3]

The confusion of metaphor, delusion, reality and representation pervade his work. From his treatise on television and writing (“E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” 1993)^[4] to his essay for Rolling Stone on the 2000 Republican presidential primaries (“Up Simba!” 2008) to his profile of David Lynch (“David Lynch Keeps His Head,” 1996) to his remembrance of the September 11 attacks (“The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” 2001) to Infinite Jest itself — I mean, it really goes on — those entanglements are nearly constant preoccupations. He looked at images and used them and doubted them and grappled with them, in a way that is absolutely no different from a competent artist or art critic.

So the haphazard and trite way that the image of Wallace is used, substituting a type for a person, is distressing. One of the aphoristic lines from Infinite Jest sort of gets to the heart of the problem here: “The vapider [the cliché], the sharper the canines of the real truth it covers.” Clichés, for Wallace, could contain and encode a lot of real and complex truth in their abstract simplicity. But in The End of the Tour, cliché is used to paper over reality. Filmic treacle of plot, cinematography, music, and exposition pervade the movie.

The basic story is this: discouraged writer Lipsky gets a job writing for Rolling Stone and pitches an interview with Wallace, a near-contemporary who’s been receiving effusive praise for his recently published epic, the already-several-times-mentioned Infinite Jest. Lipsky gets OK’d for the profile^[5] and follows Wallace for several days on a book tour jaunt from Bloomington, IL to Minneapolis and back, and along the way they talk and argue and learn about each other and themselves. But the big takeaway message is that in their encounter Lipsky gropes the face of an angel.^[6] It’s a bait and switch: a movie ostensibly about Wallace turns out to be a coming-of-age story about a guy who talked to him exactly once on a five-day trip.

Although Segel/Wallace repeatedly, and probably accurate to the interviews, insists that he’s regular, insecure, difficult, and flawed, the movie sets him up as an oracle and, in order to cement his beatification, frames the entire story around his suicide.[7] And a penultimate image of Wallace, in slow motion, ecstatic and arms cast wide in shafts of light in a church, leaves no doubt that he was an angel on Earth. It really finishes that way. I mean really.

It should come as no surprise that Wallace’s estate didn’t sign off on this thing.^[8]

Look: in one of the movie’s most pointed scenes, Lipsky and Wallace argue about whether Wallace’s persona as a regular guy who enjoys spectatation and candy, whether that persona is an affectation or a real, regular person. Lipsky insists, referring to Infinite Jest, “People don’t crack open a thousand-page novel because they heard the author is a regular guy.” Oh no? At base, all people are no more or less than human. The reason that Wallace receives such love from people like Lipsky, Krasinski, me, et al. is because he is especially adept at articulating the complexity of being a person, in particular a (late-20^th-century, college-educated, middle class, white) regular guy.^[9] He talks about stuff at length, and makes simple problems extremely complex. The aforementioned scene is also one of the longest sustained dialogues the writers get into with each other, even though it ultimately doesn’t provide anything interesting to think about. Although Wallace was well known for verbosity in his prose, and though these two intelligent guys talked for almost a week, their conversation has been distilled into snippets boomeranging from banality to “deep” pronouncement, with nothing lasting more than a minute or two. Surely if these guys are as witty and thoughtful as the movie supposes them to be, the audience could be entertained by more than a clip reel of 90-second excerpts from their conversation.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the film doesn’t really spend any time thinking about the author’s actual work, except to highlight how much praise it received and how enormous (literally and figuratively) his novel is. One scene briefly shows his studio, a black-box room with a computer. That’s it. About two seconds. They note that his work thinks about subjects like loneliness and entertainment and satisfaction, but they don’t ever talk about Wallace’s actual ideas on those topics.

You know, the movie kind of expressly thinks about Wallace as a teacher and suggests a bit of martyrdom/humility in his decision to teach at Illinois State University. What Wallace taught there was creative writing and how to read fiction. In one class he used genre fiction to understand writing, assigning students books by Stephen King, Larry McMurtry, Mary Higgins Clark, Thomas Harris, and other popular authors, rather than supposedly challenging “literary” fare. I assume it’s really difficult to make a biopic without being effusive, reductive, and basically just hammy and at least kind of dishonest — maybe it’s totally impossible. But this is bad. Perhaps something more entertaining and unserious would have worked better: Wallace on the campaign trail, on a cruise ship, at the 1998 Adult Video News porn awards, whatever, anything with some modicum of action and non-pretense.[10] I’m aware of the fact that this likely sounds like a deranged fanboy claiming to know the author better or whatever. In trying to make a considered movie about a guy who thought a lot, what we end up with is fluff, flattery, hokum — a vapid con job. It’s a real downer.

^[1] In 1990, he co-wrote Signifying Rappers with Mark Costello, about the artform’s history and cultural significance and complications.

^[2] Yeah, the definition of “Hollywood film” is pretty loose here.

[3] One thing he wrote really well about was complication and complexity, the difficult ways in which seemingly simple phenomena involute themselves.

^[4] Here’s what I think is an interesting little… I don’t know… thing: in one scene, Eisenberg/Lipsky and Segel/Wallace are touring Minneapolis with Joan Cusack, and they spot Gwendolyn Gillen’s 2002 bronze statue of Mary Tyler Moore, located in the city’s downtown, commemorating the image of the actress tossing her hat on the air at the end of her famous 1970s TV show’s opening credits. So, with this movie set in 1996, the statue is an anachronism. So but then why’s it there, in the story? Because it’s a nod to Wallace and his work, since he, an avid TV watcher, spent a lot of time in “E Unibus Pluram” unpacking the semiotics of an episode of 1980s medical drama St. Elsewhere, produced by Moore’s MTM Productions, starring and guest starring former Mary Tyler Moore Show actors, and featuring a plot about a deluded man who thinks he’s Moore on the original show, even ending with the same gesture of the deluded man tossing his hat into the air just like Moore. And Wallace points out that although the moral lesson of the St. Elsewhere episode is that we shouldn’t watch a lot of TV, the only way to get the whole payoff of interleaved allusions in the episode is by having watched a ton of television. Which also the only way to get the reference in this little throwaway scene in the movie is to know both the television and literary Wallace-canon references. Though if you’ve read that long essay you’ve probably read a lot of other stuff by him which might give you the suspicion that the interaction you’re seeing on screen is by two fabricated people and not at all representative of the author you’ve spent so much time with.

^[5] The thing was published only as a transcription after Wallace’s death. I haven’t read Lipsky’s book, but in interviews he seems happy with the movie, and even with its inventions.

^[6] Even as Eisenberg/Lipsky repeatedly embarrasses himself by acting like an ass (read: human), Wallace always gives him sage little moral instructions on how to “be a good guy.” Wallace becomes a deus ex machina, rather than a person. In so doing, the film makes Lipsky the focus and whitewashes the flaws in Wallace’s own base humanity, and further raises his sanctity, and thereby raises the stature of whoever the great man would spend so much time divulging himself to (i.e. Lipsky), and verifies the credibility of Lipsky’s role as caretaker of Wallace’s post-suicide legacy, which bookends the whole thing.

[7] It’s sometimes suggested that the work of a person who committed suicide can’t be read except through that lens. This seems absurd and demeaning. Can’t Ernest Hemingway be read apart from his suicide? Sylvia Plath? Marilyn Monroe? Hunter S. Thompson? Or Amy Winehouse, whose self-destruction is chronicled in a documentary that was playing in the same theater? In many cases I would aver that, if we must make such analyses, the interpretation might make more sense running in the reverse: that the death should instead be read from the work. But maybe this is all ancillary.

^[8] This alone doesn’t say anything significant about the movie, of course.

^[9] To answer a friend’s question: although Wallace talks about America a lot, about what particular traits are especially American, I think his writing about America is often aimed seemingly too broad and too narrow. It’s about what it’s like to live in any developed capitalist nation, and what it is to be a young, middle class, college-educated, late-20^th-century white guy in that world.

[10] Few of the conversations run for more than a few minutes, tops. Perhaps like My Dinner with Andre (1981), the audience could be trusted to remain interested in a tête-à-tête — excised from five days of chatter by two smart and interesting guys — that runs an hour-and-a-half.

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February 13, 2015
235 W 23rd St (between 7th and 8th avenues)
New York, 646 862 0833

What does it mean to be woman? Is the divine purpose of our lives tied to marriage and everything that accompanies? Will our “mission be complete” once a man chooses us as his bride?

Is marriage all there is?

Over the course of nine years, performance artist Maria Yoon explored ideas and a range of attitudes toward marriage. Her journey to knowing and unknowing is recorded in Maria the Korean Bride (2013), a 75-minute documentary-style film Yoon directs and stars in. The film, which screened in collaboration with Baang + Burne Contemporary for Valentines Day, features Yoon as Maria the Korean Bride (MtKB) traveling across the country on two-day trips to marry someone — and sometimes something — in each of the 50 states, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. After 50 marriages and thousands of miles zig-zagging across the United States, Yoon didn’t find any definitive answers to these questions about women and marriage, but her quest did lead to provocative questioning and unexpected answers.

Yoon is a first-generation Korean-American and the eldest daughter, born in Seoul, South Korea and raised in New York City. Although much of Yoon’s childhood was spent like a typical American youth, her parents made it clear that they expected their daughters to marry a Korean man, but even more importantly, marry to prove themselves good daughters and honorable women. The film shows how Yoon seems to disappoint time and again — her youngest sister was wed before Yoon began the project, and her father frequently refuses to discuss how he feels about marriage, his daughter’s project, or even to be filmed. Without a serious romantic relationship happening in her life, let alone marriage prospects, Yoon felt increasingly burdened with unfulfilled responsibility and obligation. To highlight the gravity of these expectations, Yoon’s mother gave her a wedding Hanbok, a traditional formal Korean skirt and shirt outfit worn for special occasions, for her 30th birthday. Receiving her wedding Hanbok started Yoon on a journey to explore the differing meanings of marriage around the country; Maria the Korean Bride was born.

Getting married became a well-run production: finding volunteers to assist (coordinating with photographers, finding “husbands ” on Craigslist or through friends and other connections), locating ministers to perform the ceremony, creating vows and rituals specific to the location and situation, getting waivers and paperwork to ensure that the marriages weren’t legally binding. Finally, MtKB’s first wedding to a Diana Ross impersonator took place in Las Vegas in 2002.

Yoon married men, women, a racehorse, an oil pump, a public park, statues and more during her nine-year performance as MtKB. She began to marry inanimate objects after an especially trying trip to the Milwaukee Brewing Company in Wisconsin. A weekend tour manager asked Yoon to “leave” and told her “go back to where you came from” after seeing her wearing the traditional Korean dress. Yoon admits to feeling confused and hurt by the assumptions the tour manager made about her, but determined to have a ceremony in Milwaukee anyway. The incident prompted her to buy a shirt from the gift shop and marry it in lieu of an actual man, freeing up her thinking around what it means to be in union with another.

As Yoon traveled, she spoke to people along the way, asking them to tell her about their own marriage or their choices not to marry. Interviews in the film include a polygamist household that spoke on the benefit of having someone else there to balance things out, while also admitting that this kind of arrangement certainly would not work for everyone. Gay and lesbian couples discussed their appreciation of matrimony because it gives their families and spouses practical legal protections, but questioned the reasoning of tying marriage to the administration of things like healthcare, death benefits and social security to the institution. A minister who performed one of Yoon’s ceremonies admitted to questioning her own marriage as she began to prepare vows for MtKB. This soul searching and consideration of marriage’s meaning led her realize that she should probably get a divorce. Yoon’s mother is featured frequently, with the artist calling her “the glue” for the film. Her mother states that she was proud of her daughter for making a film that made her and others think about what it means to marry.

MtKB’s final wedding took place in Times Square in May 2011. To mark the occasion, Yoon organized a raffle drawing to choose her final husband. She had a cake made, and engaged Jimmy McMillian, leader of The Rent is Too Damn High political party, to officiate. During the Q&A after the screening, Yoon said she was happy when the project ended and grateful that she only had to do it 50 times. She didn’t come away from the project with any greater perspective on actually being married; she realized that one could only know its value once one has actually experienced it.

For Yoon, MtKB began as an act of defiance, an action to prove her worthiness and ability to find a husband — or 50 — whenever she wanted. Rather than a simple voyage of personal discovery, Maria the Korean Bride grew into a journey of understanding that led Yoon to a greater appreciation for the lives and hearts of a range of people also seeking to understand for themselves love, partnership, and union outside of traditional notions of marriage for themselves.

The post Always the Bride: Maria Yoon’s Marriage Experiment appeared first on artcritical.