The Stranger, January 8, 2004
ART TO COME
Young Seattle Artists Show Their Stuff
by Emily Hall
YSA!!! Howard House, 2017 Second Ave, 256-6399
Through Jan 31. 2004
Rob Zverina's 792 Short Films took me somewhat by surprise. At first
glance it seemed to be exactly the kind of work that I'm so tired of: fragmented
bits of video, something like six hours' worth of it, unanchored to any system,
all things made equal, busily visual and exhausting. It took a good half-hour
of watching--little blips of video shot on one of those tiny 30-second
cameras--before the ideas began to cohere.
"Cohere" is perhaps not the right word for something of so many unrelated
parts, but perhaps it's exactly right when language and art seem to work
in opposition. In this case the elements of postmodernism work in opposition
to that theory's tendency to break things apart beyond recognition, beyond
the possibility of meaning; like Max Frisch's 1980 novel Man in the Holocene
(which assembled seemingly objective information into a really rather personal
narrative), the effect of 792 Short Films is cumulative rather than alienating.
Here's a cat prowling across a roof; here's a girl in the shower; here's
artist Jesse Paul Miller talking sort of dreamily to someone about something;
here's some dishes, and someone laughing. It is precisely the opposite of
Andy Warhol's eight-hour film of a single view of the Empire State Building;
instead of scoping in to notice tiny shifts in light or circumstance, your
perception opens out like a lens. You are never bored, only longing for a
few more seconds here or there, to know what becomes of something, to hear
the end of the sentence. It makes you aware of your capacity for seeing and
taking in and interpreting. It is all generosity.
792 Short Films is one of the pleasures and surprises of YSA!!!, which
means "Young Seattle Artists," which is roughly but not really analogous
to the YBAs, or "Young British Artists," of the '90s. For one thing, you
do not emerge from this show feeling like someone has tried really hard to
shock the pants off you (YSA!!! is much more polite), although it is
exhausting--there are works by some 34 artists, both current gallery artists
and the unaffiliated artists they recommend. I suffered a bit of that Biennial
feeling after YSA!!!, the feeling that I might have liked a lot more of the
art had I seen less of it all at once.
The best of the new work, to my mind, is in video. There's Zverina's, and
then there's another Peter Mundwiler work, with two videos running side by
side: One is of a few minutes filmed in a cafe, and the other of every action
in the first video carefully scripted and reenacted. It's hard, after leaving
the gallery, not to see your every movement as deliberate, and something
that might be noted somewhere. (I'm crossing the street, I'm looking over
my shoulder, I'm stumbling up onto the curb. ) I also loved Gary Owen's daffy
video in which he creates an Ab-Ex-style painting using a broom attached
to a backhoe--not quite the last word in removing the romantic hand from
painting (that would belong to Jason Salavon's painting-producing algorithms),
but still nearly as trenchant as it is funny: a large, loud, bullying, awkward
machine with the broom sort of limply tied to it, and in the end, nothing
to show for it but the video.
In the realm of made objects, there is Jenny Heishman's sculpture made of
brown pompoms modeled into an arch, mounted on a mirror so that the arch
completes an impossible circle. The inspiration for this work lay in the
sandcastles of Heishman's childhood, and tucked somewhere in your mind you
probably remember trying to make sand do what sand will not do; Heishman--who
is to hold a solo show at Howard House later this year--has thoughtfully
defied nature for us. It's a satisfying little thing, and I did not tire
of looking at it.
And although I was glad to see these good works, I'm at a loss for what the
show proposes. Is it meant to be an optimistic gloss on the state of art-to-come
in Seattle? Is it a kind of high-minded focus group? It is, I think, too
much, no matter how optimistic. |
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