The New Freedom Founders

Pleasure Dome presents The New Freedom Founders by Cooper Battersby & Emily Vey Duke

THE NEW FREEDOM FOUNDERS 2004
Being Fucked Up 2001 10:16
The Fine Arts 2002 3:38
Bad Ideas For Paradise 2002 20:00
Curious About Existence 2003 11:00 at Mercer Union

They make it look so easy. Or, at least, they used to. You might say that they sold out in 2002 with The Fine Arts, a clever little self-sustaining and self-effacing tape that features a creatively stagnant Emily Vey Duke displaying her fictional blockage, in the flesh, for our amusement: even her lamentations are uninspired (or so she laments). It’s the sort of thing that does quite well on the festival circuit, a palatable three minutes of video which confirm the ubiquitous suspicion that the fringe has only one viable remaining tactic: making fun of itself. Anybody who sees The Fine Arts without the context of Duke and Battersby’s other work might think that to be their position as well.

Being Fucked Up plays the same game, but in earnest. Its first episode is the flipside of The Fine Arts, vey Duke attempting to asphyxiate herself into a happier place while her voice sings a refrain of professed unworthiness. The careful writing of Being Fucked Up’s central and longest piece, “Monologue For Robots,” cements the tone: the yearning is funny but not a joke. “Triumph does not come. Or, worse, it comes and goes.”

Duke and Battersby are practicing the art of dissatisfaction, of the cosmic grass-is-greener syndrome. This will be familiar to anybody who’s ever seen a Woody Allen movie: the world is shit but so are we, so why complain? Let’s accept it and have a good laugh… or, better yet, let’s try and construct something out of our acceptance. This something comes at the very end of Being Fucked Up’s last segment, “Headbangers.” A simple rule-of-three repetition provides formal satisfaction, and Gordon B. Isnor’s music makes the third time more than mere charm: synth bass swells unabashedly under the guitar ostinato, doing what Hollywood musical scores used to try to do before they forgot it: wed sound to image in search of a little feeling we might as well call transcendence.

The worst that could be said of the episodic approach of Being Fucked Up is that it wears its chic disaffection in aphoristic form, as could be said of Douglas Coupland or Harmony Korine that they throw a series of pith-bits at the page or the screen in order to see what sticks. But things are pretty sticky here; even more so with the similarly segmented Bad Ideas For Paradise: the disparate monologues (first-person animal consciousness, the hedonistic flatulent ideal of boyhood, the chronological progression of shame) are laced together around a common theme of hapless, directionless, satisfaction-less desire.

It’s easy enough to complain that things are boring. The trick is to imagine a world in which they are not. And if the way to this world involves speaking backwards and scoping out the space “between chunks of time,” well, don’t knock it till you’ve tried it. The New Freedom Founders is a roadmap to utopia. Placing said city just off the edge of the page might seem like lazy cartography, but what makes this Duke and Battersby’s stickiest work yet is their willingness to embrace the language of cinema—maybe because hugging something is the best way to crush it. The first part of the New Freedom Founders triptych, “I am a Conjuror,” derives its style partially from European cinema but more specifically from that cinema’s derivatives (Hal Hartley with a dash of SCTV). Foreign films have already been parodied to death, but when the language that the subtitles translate is manifestly not human, the identity of the onscreen characters becomes harder to pin down. Part 2, “A Cure For Being Ordinary,” styles itself as a shot-reverse-shot sequence (axis admittedly fractured) in order to explicitly raise the question of where these people—actors and/or characters —go between the cuts. The final piece, “Attention Public,” invokes faux-documentary style but, in the wake of the preceding segments’ queries, its presentation of two contemporaneous times makes us acknowledge the lie of fiction before we swallow it.

The essential core of Duke and Battersby’s work is a boy and girl at play. So far, the focus has been on the product of their games. The New Freedom Founders busts things open just wide enough for us to see their back yard—or, rather, back yards, in three parallel universes side by side and one after the other. The differences between language spoken and language heard, between time recorded and time experienced, between performing and existing, become negligible; Duke and Battersby’s play is an invitation for us to do the same.

(And through all these videos, the cats wend their indifferent ways. It is possible that they are the New Freedom Founders, that their language is the secret one which would open the door sought by Duke and Battersby’s onscreen personas, that the cats are the ones who will “come to show us how trivial it is to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine.” They seem to have no need for triumph; they certainly have no need for videos. They make it look so easy. But, for the time being, it seems that we do need triumph, and we do need videos. So, for the time being, these ones will have to do.)

Daniel Cockburn
October 2004