First Impressions, version 2
FIRST IMPRESSIONS, version 2 by Daniel Cockburn
“Do you love humanity but hate people?”
- T. Azimuth Schwitters (thinly disguised L. Ron Hubbard proxy in Soderbergh’s Schizopolis)
LET THERE BE DAMAGE DONE TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS; TO OPINIONS ACQUIRED TOO QUICKLY, SPREAD TOO THICKLY, AND HELD TOO LONG. BENEATH THE BATTERY OF (MASS)CULT ICONOGRAPHY IS A CONSCIOUSNESS STRUGGLING TO COME TO TERMS WITH THAT INUNDATION; BEHIND THE ROILING PULSE OF STROBING LIGHT IS A SERENE VAULT OF SILENT SEA AND SKY.
My first “direct” experience of Jubal Brown was his video Children’s Anal Disco, which is more or less what you’d expect from the title. Afterward, he spun some tunes, a brooding, somber, don’t-even-dare-look-at-me presence behind the turntables (or perhaps he didn’t show up; I’ve forgotten. Either way, the effect was the same). Some time later I read his artist statement, which involved “the express purpose of open dialogue amongst beautiful living creatures,” and was confounded. That must be a joke; how could an artist producing titles like Fuck the Black Hole have a mission even remotely congruent with humanism? As it turns out, the joke was on me; he was being sincere. So too is the joke on anyone who subscribes to the un-researched belief in Jubal Brown as nihilist misanthropic shock guru. Not incorrect, perhaps, but woefully reductive.
I initially thought Daniel Borins’ video The Apotheosis of Everything to be a stunningly inventive but pitiably petulant destruction of meaning via overabundance of signification… and okay, I still do. But (for reasons which only my psychoanalyst could understand) I now see that there is a man behind the curtain after all. He may not want you to know he’s there, or how angry he is, so giddily does he play at authorial obfuscation (for reasons which only his psychoanalyst could understand), but the cracks show and the tainted light of personality shines through. More than elaborate shell games, though never admitting to their more-ness, Borins’ longest and strongest works paint a portrait of a psyche, which, desperate to ward off its own implosion, pretends to be the media. Viewed in this regard, the media critique is cogent and the psychological tone downright dangerous.
Tasman Richardson would seem, on first inspection, to be a robot, slotting single-frame shards of cinematic violence into symmetrically adjacent compartments of mathematical dancemania. Which he indubitably is, and does. But The Hymn to Thanateros, his latest collaboration with Jubal Brown, disperses its explosions between long sequences of unironic, unrobotic melancholy and languor. Viewing Richardson’s previous work in Hymn’s retroactive light will, hopefully, call attention to his invocations of silence; in The Adversary, military machinery and digital ammo rest on a bed of shrill yet tranquil drone; amidst Blackest Sabbath’s heavy-metal light show, a falling body’s trajectory is editorially elongated into slow flotation/flight; even AIO (Brown and Richardson’s prior collaboration), though exhibiting twice the flash of Hymn but none of its emotive core, ends on a long, silent still frame, inhuman eyes staring back at us, daring us to meditate. These serenities are the backdrops against which are set the cavalcades of aggression. If viewers focus more on the latter than the former, then the blame must be shared amongst the artists, audiences, and curators alike (in a distribution ratio to be debated and determined).
Certainly there are self-imposed limitations. Hymn’s undeniably phallic nature drags its universalities back down to gendered earth, a choice which can be only partly justified by the masculine bent of its source material, and further only partly justified by the video’s personal nature. Richardson’s Wonton is dedicated “To the many dead cultures, once noble but now assimilated” but appropriators like Brown/Borins/Richardson are, by virtue of their practice, striving to be assimilator masterminds. Borins’ videos would like to rouse us to revolution, but his infectious pleasure in their semantic freefall is more likely to send us scurrying back home to read some Kant, listen to Isaac Hayes, or play with Photoshop. There is a gleeful basement-boy mentality at work, crushing the remnants of already-destroyed nobility (ancient martial arts tradition —chop-socky films—Wonton) with geeky adolescent wantonness, perhaps reveling in ultimate destruction or hoping that a new nobility can be built from the powdered dust of once-were-icons. I’d like to say “time will tell,” but I rather expect that it will keep things secret like it always does.
Onscreen text in The Apotheosis of Everything reads: “It is better to believe too much than nothing at all.” This is, I believe, a reference or a quote. But there is no footnote. There are no quotation marks around anything in video, especially not this video, and so there are implied quotation marks around everything on display, which themselves imply that “all input is to be mistrusted and feared, especially this input” (David Tebby (paraphrased), 2004, italics mine). And I feel lost.
Brown’s Dead Museum proclaims, via the mouthpiece of Dr. Who, “We have arrived!” Our arrival is at some glorious chimeric zone where neither the canon nor the horror of electronic reproduction hold sway, where individuals remember—and, in remembering, practice —the lost art of existence (hardly the ideal of a misanthrope). It would seem that the work of this self-styled triumvirate will have to annihilate itself to get us there, but we can certainly give it props for trying.