| This exhibition reflects
on the auto/biographical, the personal, and self-portraiture
across and through artistic mediums -- in video, video installation,
photography, animated film, spoken word and sound, written
text, and electronics. The artists in the exhibition use life
as material: Each has taken on the autobiographical as complexity,
identity as multiplicity, the personal as time and memory.
It is popularly perceived that increased technological manipulation
of the image will render the real less ascertainable. The artists
in this exhibition shift this concern through a fluidity of
expression across methodologies and materials to arrive at
a more experiential type of work.
Here the everyday, the particular, and the private experience
- that which is generally unnoticed, unmarked, unspoken,
takes precedent. The artists place themselves within the
work through narrative, physicality and memory. Alter egos,
fictional characters, symbols, camera movement, voice and
body rhythms, mark the artist's presence. At some point the
viewer/receiver steps inside and becomes the embodiment of
the experience, part of the immediate, the urgent and the
universal.
Performance artist and filmmaker Christopher Sullivan uses
autobiographically-based, fictionalized episodic narratives
(in literary terms the roman à clef) to evoke
what he calls the "apparent dysfunction" of his childhood
in Pittsburgh. Consuming Spirits, Part 1, a work-in-progress,
intertwines two different visual worlds in film animation
to describe memory and the present, and the tension between
the inexplicable and the familiar. The hilly landscape of
industrial Pittsburgh, dotted with small homes and sounds
that travel between locales, informs its sense of intimate
scale, yet alienated space. The characters, law, and social
service and government agencies in the story conspire to
create this troubled universe. The inspiration for Sullivan's
film came from finding out family secrets late in life that
re-write his history.
Gregg Bordowitz was actively engaged in the AIDS awareness
movement when at the age of 23 he discovered that he was
HIV-antibody positive. From that moment the most intimate
detail of his life became his material. In the videotape Fast
Trip Long Drop,1993, he confronts his birth father's
abandonment and compares the onslaught of his own illness
to the rash dare devil acts of Evil Kneivel. An alter ego
(Alter Allesman) heightens our awareness of and complicity
in his plight. Bordowitz's subsequent texts more graphically
depict the physical manifestations and emotional realities
of 'everyday' life turned into a vigilance over one's own
mortality. In "The Drug User", a short story written
specifically for this exhibition, we experience Bordowitz's
dilemma through Alexander Pittleman. This allegorical character
expresses the desires and weaknesses of a sick man caught
in the contradictions of our age.
Magdalena Campos-Pons's work revolves around the strong
ties to her African, Cuban, and American roots. Born in Cuba
of African descent, she married and moved to America in 1990.
Exile is inscribed in her experience and she uses portraiture
to describe and to maintain aspects of her multicultural
history and identity, to merge the cultural and the historical
within a new present context. At the center of her work are
the people she cares about.
Multiple forms (performance and sculpture) are combined
with various materials (fabric, glass, video, natural elements)
and symbols (rituals, colors) in her multi-media installations
and large format Polaroid photographs. The layers of form
and meaning create what the artist describes as a "Third
Space: a space between territory, between what is home; between
languages; between media, between performance versus ritual,
between three- and two- dimensional, between all these layers
and what happens there in-between."
Campos-Pons's portrait photographs arranged in differing
compositions express this idea of an interstitial space --
what happens 'in-between'1 -- through performance and stillness.
The triptych in the exhibition, Sagrada Familia 2,
features her nuclear family. A man, a child, a woman (husband,
son, artist), stand with backs toward the camera in three
separate but linearly placed photographs. The figures form
a unit, each of their backs and the eyes painted on them
of different colors and hues that interweave a dialogue of
nurturing, protection, and vigilance over one another. Campos-Pons's
use of autobiography and portraiture is a process that is
not based on a fixed notion of identity, but on the idea
that one should both mark the difference, and find the similarities.
Ximena Cuevas's enigmatic video sketches reflect on passion,
romance and the life of an artist in the larger context of
contemporary Mexican culture. Her single-channel videos express
the duality between inner and outer worlds. The interior
self is reflected by the sense of whispered secrets; the
exterior is chaotic and contradictory. She says, "To live
with the camera as part of my skin is one of the huge qualities
of video. For the first time mankind has the small camera
that undresses you." The claustrophobic video installation La
Puerta, was inspired by a line from T.S. Eliot, "Hell
is oneself. . . There is nothing to escape from and nothing
to escape to."2
David Isay specializes in a unique form of empathetic, non-narrated
sound portraits that draw an intimate connection between
the subjects and the audience. The company he founded, Sound
Portraits Productions, is dedicated to creating radio that
brings neglected American voices to a national arena. His
focus is on the poetics and the beliefs of the seemingly
eccentric, the forgotten, and the poor. He began recording
oral histories, "probably because I felt like a loser as
a kid and appreciate underdogs," and "to shine a light on
the hidden parts of American society." Isay met LeAlan Jones
and Lloyd Newman while conducting research for a radio documentary
series on issues of race and ethnicity in Chicago ("Chicago
Matters"). The two 13 year-old boys responded to his call
for young people interested in telling their own stories.
They were provided with tape recorders, microphones, and
training which they used over a seven-day period in March
of 1993. Their remarkably candid diary Ghetto Life 101 was
the result. It begins with LeAlan's words, "Good morning.
Day 1. Walking to school, leaving out the door. . . This
is my walk everyday, so I'm taking you on a little journey
through my life. . ." Interviews with family, friends,
and neighbors are recorded with anecdotal detail from the
boys perspective. Editing and sound choices were made in
collaboration with Isay. Several years later when a tragic
incident occurred in the housing projects, the boys decided
with Isay to investigate the reasons behind it. The boys
spent a year interviewing for Remorse: The Fourteen Stories
of Eric Morse that unfolded as an informative and rare
feature-length radio documentary.
Jim Campbell combines his knowledge of mathematics and electrical
engineering with art to create electronic installations that
involve video, media, and the computer and to reflect on
time and memory. He uses the polarities between engineering
(to solve problems) with those of art (to create problems)
to his advantage. He moves between the technical and personal,
the logical and intuitive when conceiving his work. Portrait
of My Father, and Photo of My Mother most clearly
represent how personal content cycles through his work. From Memory
Works (1994 - 98), a series of non-narrative pieces,
each work is based upon a digitally recorded memory of an
event. Some of these electronic records represent a personal
memory and others a collective memory. Using some of the
same tools for interactivity, but deviating from Campbell's
other explorations in participatory works these installations
investigate the artist's interiority rather than viewer-triggered
interaction. The electronic memories are manipulated to transform
an associated object mounted on the wall. The human memories
are recorded as physical processes that involve body rhythms
to dispel the usual notions of memory as an image or as sound.
These works explore the characteristic of invisibility common
to both human and computer memory and are based on the idea
that to represent memories, they must be transformed.>
Autobiographically inspired work has captured contemporary
artists' imaginations. Many artists today share the desire
to render and to claim what happens to them, as do the artists
in Something Happened. Sadie Benning's teenage Pixelvision
diaries, George Kuchar's eccentric video journals, Jonathon
Horowitz's mediated memories, and Tracey Emin's intimate
tales of sexual escapades are just a few additional examples
of artists working from the personal. The proliferation of
small video cameras and the immediacy of recording and image
playback combined with the performative elements found in
current art practices have influenced artists' use of their
own images and experiences. Shifting perspectives concerning
the relationship between truth and falsehood and fiction
and non-fiction forms, and the desire to make contemporary
culture and the technology that surrounds us more human,
have all impacted to broaden the scope of the autobiographical
and the use of the real in contemporary art today.
1. A reference to Homi K. Bhabha, "Beyond
the Pale: Art in the Age of Multicultural Translation" in
Whitney Biennial Exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of
American Art & Harry N. Abrams, Inc. New York, 1993, p 63.
2. "Hell is oneself, Hell is alone, the other figures in it, Merely projections.
There is nothing to escape from, And nothing to escape to. One is always alone." T.
S. Eliot, "The Cocktail Party" (1950). Act.1, Sc. III.
Sally Berger © November 2000
Sally Berger is Assistant Curator in the Department of Film
and Video at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
PRESS RELEASE
Life has a way of overtaking us with huge and overwhelming
events. Sometimes sooner, sometimes later, eventually something
happens that is all-encompassing and inescapably life altering.
The works is this exhibition are autobiographically-based
evocations of such moments. As in Mike Figgis's recent digital
movie Time Code (2000), that places the interrelated
action of the story's protagonists on a four-way split cinema
screen, these works are presented as a group to suggest the
simultaneity of life experiences. Represented are events
from the realities of our age, yet common to all time.
Documentary, narrative and symbolic forms are expressively
used by these artists to dispel the boundaries between their
private experience and their materials. Gregg Bordowitz's
short story features his alter- ego Alexander Pittleman who
is afflicted with a disease that has no cure. Magdalena Campos-Pons
performs tableaux before a large format Polaroid camera to
summon the complex nature of her identity as a Cuban-born
woman of African roots now living in the northeastern U.S.
Two of Jim Campbell's digitally recorded Memory Works (1994-98)
combine electronics, his own body rhythms, and photographs
to evoke his parental bonds. Ximena Cuevas uses the video
camera as an extension of her skin. She compiled the video
series Self-Portraits and Other Myths and recorded
La Puerta while caring for her mother during a long illness
in 1999. Ghetto Life 101 and Remorse: The 14 Stories
of Eric Morse (1993-96) are sound recordings by two young
boys, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman, with David Isay of Sound
Portraits Productions. These candid radio documentaries tell
of daily life and catastrophic events in a public housing
project in Chicago. And in the style of a roman à clef,
Chris Sullivan's episodic animated narrative Consuming
Spirits (Part 1, 1998) evokes the dark secrets of his
childhood in Pittsburgh. |
