Found objects have had a place in art for nearly a century, but the practice has seemed particularly pervasive in recent years, as approaches from both contemporary and historical perspectives have attempted to redefine it as appropriation, nonmonumental, unmonumental, or “combining crap with crap.” Fascination with old or overlooked marginalia could be regressive melancholia spawned of the Bush era’s resigned cynicism, or sympathy for the poor objects in spite of high-tech consumption. Whatever the case, the sensibility saturates Shana Moulton’s Whispering Pines, a series of videos and performances. While sculptural assemblage clusters objects in space, Moulton spreads her thrift-store and gift-shop finds over time. Rather than tracing the artist’s web of references through stationary contemplation, the viewer of Whispering Pines is led through the process as Cynthia, the heroine, interacts with the things she has chosen to surround herself with. A Magic Eye 3D poster transports her to a zone of free movement. A swamp-colored facial mask opens a green-screen gateway to a forest clearing. If, in a readymade or sculptural assemblage, the artist endows objects with totemic power by isolating and emphasizing their formal properties (or the subjective associations they evoke for her), then Moulton gives that principle a radically literal interpretation in Whispering Pines, where objects’ properties and associations acquire the power to shape the narrative.

Moulton gets inspiration for episodes from her finds rather than “casting” them in predetermined storylines. Objects drive the plot. Wonder at a thing’s appearance can be a narrative hook that doubles as a more conventional dilemma, and ultimately offers a key to an episode’s insight. At the beginning of Whispering Pines 3, Cynthia is composing a diary entry about her runaway cat and a newly acquired knickknack that baffles her with its twisted script. “I found a wonderful wall hanging today,” she says in a voiceover. “I really like its texture. But I can’t understand what it is trying to say.” Next Cynthia is in a forest, chasing her cat with a butterfly net, when she spots her wall hanging, turned on its end in the gnarl of a tree. Cocking her head, she can suddenly read it: “Towels?!” Back in her armchair, Cynthia fingers a plush cat’s head nestled in her collar as she sits beneath the “Towels” sign. She’s content. But the viewer feels uneasy. Did Cynthia ever have a cat? Or did she misplace a toy that she equates with the living thing it represents? And now that she knows what the wall hanging says, shouldn’t she put it where it presumably belongs–above a towel rack? Consideration of the wall hanging leads to a conclusion of its ridiculous redundancy–it’s a sign meant to index a nearby object that can easily be identified by its appearance, while the sign itself is ornate to the point of illegibility. The real referent of the “Towels” sign is not towels, but domestic comfort. Moulton arrives at this idea by giving the wall hanging the power to send Cynthia home, and matching it to the cozy act of stroking a pet–even as she retains the aura of strangeness around it with the abrupt cut from forest to house, and the unsettling sight of Cynthia nuzzling a disembodied stuffed animal.

In one interview, Moulton said her tutors at De Ateliers in Amsterdam asked her if she was trying to make children’s television. Indeed, the flashes of magic in a pastel-hued, innocuous suburban setting give Whispering Pines a faint resemblance to late-twentieth century escapist fantasies for tweens –”Out of This World” and “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch” come to mind. Those heroines, however, deployed supernatural powers to fix problems with boys, friends, and parents, whereas Cynthia exists in a social vacuum. Her concerns are limited to her problems and her belongings, and the latter, not Cynthia, possess the magic. Whispering Pines blends Nickelodeon abracadabra with the consumer’s faith that purchases–home decor, skin care products, self-help books–will make life better and happier. But, as Cynthia’s mute bewilderment reminds us, agency lies in the objects, and the results are never what Cynthia or the viewer might expect — like the off-brand pore-cleansing strips that conjure a singing Sphinx in the bathroom mirror. And for all her attempts to improve her life, Cynthia, like a sitcom character, registers no net change from episode to episode (a fact reinforced by the non-chronological numeric sequence of some episodes). Sure, the products aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, but this is far from a critique of the market and its sham promises. It’s just a way to keep the slate blank for further explorations of the subject’s relation to her surroundings.

Perhaps because plot points bring changes in Cynthia’s environment, those writing about Whispering Pines have sometimes described them as moments of fluctuation between reality and fantasy. But can we really call the settings that bookend an episode “reality” just because they look like a house, and thus fit easily into a familiar there-and-back-again narrative structure that would make Cynthia yet another Alice or Dorothy? What kind of reality is it if a woman wears a hemorrhoid cushion in her dress? Variations in the videos’ visual texture also suggest a greater complexity. After composing a floral arrangement from Crystal Light beverage powder and plastic branches in Whispering Pines 8, Cynthia ascends a ladder that sprouts from it, like Jack climbing his beanstalk, to a rave. What she finds there isn’t a fairy tale, but the closest Whispering Pines gets to cinéma vérité: a poorly lit warehouse with spirited dancing. The soundtrack also gets more “real”: A full-bodied remix of Enya’s “Orinoco Flow” replaces the thin MIDI version of it that accompanied Cynthia’s home floral arranging. There are no constant visual codes. In Whispering Pines 9, even as Cynthia sits at home watching television, she is green-screened into the setting (the shimmering contour of her body gives it away), just as she was in the mystical cat-hunt scene in Whispering Pines 3 described above. The action in Whispering Pines isn’t split neatly into dreaming and waking, although there are often straightforward suggestions of those activities. Instead, it’s a single, rippled reflection of our reality, and how objects, media, images, and ideas bleed together in ways that cannot be accounted for by obsolete–but still often invoked–categories of the “real” and the “virtual.”

“I am more than my physical body. I am limitless,” intones an audio book that Cynthia listens to in Whispering Pines 4. The storylines and visual effects of Whispering Pines visualize relations where an object, an image of it on paper or a screen, a memory of it or an idealized notion of it share equal standing in a subject’s perception. That philosophy is realized largely through the use of readymades, but editing and narrative add dimensions beyond the scope of sculptural assemblage. The mobility of video circumvents the white cube’s isolation to allow for diverse viewing environments (some episodes of Whispering Pines, by the way, can be viewed here, here, and here), while the prominence of found objects, with their recognizable grain of off-screen existence, mean Whispering Pines isn’t a detached, external representation of our reality, but an extension of it.

These ideas were strikingly manifest in a performance Moulton gave last fall at Art in General. After an attempt to imitate the elegant, dark-skinned women on TV by balancing a jug on her head ended in shattered pottery, Cynthia danced beneath highly ornate pots that floated as projections on the screen above her head. Then she vanished behind a curtain, as a video projection told the rest of the story. Audiences have another chance to see Cynthia on stage this weekend, when Whispering Pines 10 premieres at The Kitchen. Perhaps Moulton’s most ambitious project yet, the new installment of the series is an opera conceived and created in collaboration with Nick Hallett, a composer, musician, and curator. To complement Moulton’s videos and sets and Hallett’s score (with singers vocalizing Cynthia’s internal monologues), Whispering Pines 10 involves interactive sound objects that the collaborators devised during a Harvestworks residency. Skechers Shape-ups, wired to produce sound, will expand the Whispering Pines repertoire of objects enhanced to reveal the layers of being beyond their physical shape.

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Illuminated Manuscripts: Alexandre Singh’s “Assembly Instructions”

Published on Rhizome, November 4, 2009

The metaphor of the brain as a database (or, if you prefer, the database as a brain) flatters and anthropomorphizes the machine more than it explains the mind. Gray matter doesn’t seem to be organized in a way that makes the storage and retrieval of information easy; rather, the classification and categorization that characterize the database are pre-digital technologies invented to manage the ever-increasing amounts of information that civilization requires citizens to master. Cicero used a “memory palace” when delivering orations. As he spoke, he would imagine moving through a house where each room and object represented points he needed to make in his speech and the supporting evidence he needed to make them. The antithesis of such memory systems might be the dream, the mind’s nightly refresher that reconfigures the day’s events and data in disjointed, symbolic narratives. Both the memory palace and the dream are based on irrational elements: subjective experience, arbitrary connections, and word play. That the memory palace is created under the thinker’s deliberate control only highlights the conscious mind’s eagerness to do what the unconscious mind does automatically. Even as Cicero publicly performed the constructs of reason, his brain was circumventing them.

Last July, in a New York University faculty residence on West Houston Street where Picasso’s sculpture and I.M. Pei’s architecture face off in a courtyard invisible to Google Earth, Alexandre Singh delivered an installment of his Assembly Instructions Lectures, a series of talks illustrated by a pair of overhead projectors. After introducing his audience to Matteo Ricci, a sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary who taught the memory palace technique to Chinese officials to convince them of the superiority of Western (and by extension, Christian) thought, Singh launched into a detailed recounting of a dream he supposedly had, in which Ingvar Kamprad, founder and principle shareholder of Ikea, announced that the master floor plan implemented in every Ikea store around the world encodes a classification of all human knowledge. For instance, the arrangement of shoes, hangers, and sweaters in a display closet, as Singh demonstrated, represented the kingdoms and phyla of life on Earth. What’s more, the Ikea system of Singh’s dream world does not merely encode–it controls. If something changes in a store–say, a new couch model is introduced for the new season, or a passing child moves a prop coffee-table book around a fake living room–the fabric of reality is altered.

Singh’s talk fleshed out the dim awareness of elaborate systems that one senses in dreams but can hardly recall or convey when awake. As the Ikea thread developed, it snaked in and out of the spotlight–perhaps following the “long natural way,” the meandering path of the Ikea floor plan that makes consumption leisurely and fun while forcing shoppers to view all of the store’s merchandise–and subplots emerged along multiple tangents. Singh argued that brown, not white, was the sum of all colors as he turned over transparency sheets scanned from pages of John Ruskin’s book Modern Painters, where “brown” had been pasted over names of all the colors. Piero Manzoni, the artist who canned the essence of light, made a cameo when Singh’s Dante-like narrator found him sleeping in Ikea’s mattress section. Shortly after, Yves Klein appeared in a bed next to him.

Singh will give the lecture again on November 11 at White Columns, on the third night of a four-part series organized in conjunction with Performa 09. This Monday’s offering, “The Alkahest,” is a sprawling epic that relates golem tales and abstract painting to myths of the creation of the world. Storytelling is the backbone of Singh’s work; several of his exhibition projects were spawned by his thousand-page book, The Marque of the Third Stripe, a fictionalized biography of Adidas founder Adi Dassler. It is probably not uncommon for artists to experience a sense of futility when they set about making objects, when “it’s all been done.” Artists like Singh give heft to their works by imbuing them with symbolic power in the context of narratives of their own making. Singh uses many sources, but professes a fondness for surfing Wikipedia. In an interview with ArtReview, he said: “The Surrealists made an art of finding drawings in the grain of wood. I think I do the same finding stories in the grain of Wikipedia.” The superficiality and transience that make the user-generated encyclopedia a dubious resource for research are boons for a creative reader like Singh, because they make room for drawing new, unlikely connections.

The idea of Wikipedia–or more broadly, the internet–as a restless data set that denies autonomous spaces for myth and history, news and fiction, offers one perspective for considering Singh’s work. The slippery transparency sheets he uses as slides make for a satisfying dramatization of the flat flipping of web pages on a screen. His unbound books become legible for his audience when the overhead projector’s beam of light transforms their horizontal pages into images on the wall–a low-tech, small-scale, fairy-tale version of the mass media beaming content to the people. Of course, the internet metaphor fails to provide an exhaustive reading of the Assembly Instructions Lectures. There is a lot more going on, and all real and imagined similarities between the overhead projector and more sophisticated broadcast media vanish in the striking moments when Singh exploits his chosen medium’s unique physical properties. In the Ikea lecture, as he layered images of equestrian statuary on top of each other to illustrate the conventions of that genre, the darkening filmy buildup of transparencies offered silent “proof” for the thesis that white light is one of the components of brown.

Singh’s work is now on view in another format. “Assembly Instructions (Tangential Logick)”, at Harris Lieberman Gallery through November 14, includes some of the visual aids from the eponymous lecture as framed collages hung on the wall. They are arranged in an order that tells loose tales while simultaneously visualizing potential fallacies and pitfalls in the construction of knowledge. It is divided into three sections, each devoted to a way in which supporting evidence can be combined to achieve a conclusion. “Linear association/causation” is illustrated by a simple progression: a bucket (A) is left outside in the rain (B), and then the bucket full of rainwater (C) is swarmed with mosquitoes (D), which bite the head of a man (E) who succumbs to mental illness (F). “Cross-linear association/causation” occurs when two of the events are connected outside of linear temporality. When (A) and (D) meet, the sight of buckets makes a woman feel itchy, while connecting the dots from (B) to (F) results in psychic unease whenever it rains. “Tangential association/causation,” the concept represented on the gallery’s third wall, is the logic of false etymologies and accidental similarities. The orange, as Singh’s diagram posits, is related to gold by its consonance with the Latin aurum, and thence pirate’s bounty. The resemblance of the orange’s pithy, veiny sections to the hemispheres of the brain evinces its links to inner organs. Other such revelations pile up in a pyramid of errors to yield the final story: “Every winter FLORIDA-FACED Pirates Slaughter and Bathe in the ORANGE JUICE and entrails of SANTA-CLAUS so that the SPRING may COME AGAIN.”

The trappings of logic are all over these collages. The letter Omega marks the final element of each set. “Beta” and “-iii” are dim reminders of high-school math assignments. But added to Singh’s encyclopedic mix of cutouts–Disney’s Snow White and Hindu temples also figure prominently in it–the letters become ritual symbols. It’s no accident that the full title of the related lecture rhymes “Tangential Logick” with “Tangential Magick.” Framed in the narrative of an opium eater’s wandering, hazy mental state, logic and magic are equal opposites, two systems of transfiguration that take one thing and turn it into something else. If Singh’s tales seem to side with magic, it could be because they are balancing out the privileged position of logic. Both are effective and fallible in his explorations of how the creative faculty eases friction between data and consciousness.

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Community Collage

Published on Artforum.com, August 12, 2009

“Where did all these people come from?” There’s only one man on the screen with the middle-aged blonde asking the question, but as her histrionic gaze pierces the fourth wall, her wonderment seems legitimate: Where did we all come from? The snippet is from a video produced for a limited audience—for a local cable-access channel, perhaps, or a church group—but it has found a different, unintended viewership via the Final Cut Pro window of Jacob Ciocci, who took the clip from its context and inserted it into I Let My Nightmares Go, 2008. His seven-minute montage is persistently aware of the instability of audience in today’s expanded media culture; the work is bookended by entries from the vitriolic vlog of a bucktoothed, pimply teen known to his YouTube fans as Sexman and peppered with home videos of kids singing or playacting in masks. Ciocci exploits the Internet’s paradox—tight-knit communities use its tools to share multimedia messages among themselves, but in doing so they make them available to everybody—by mining documentation of how ordinary people enact ordinary dreams and anxieties.

Collage films lengthen the distance between an image’s origin and the viewer’s experience of it, which often creates a sense of fracture, but Ciocci manages to merge fragments into a whole. His sound tracks help. In I Let My Nightmares Go, Ciocci mashes up music by hip-hop artist Young Jeezy and the Christian alt-rock band Paramore—specimens of the professional dream factories that supply homebrew acts with attitudes and affectations. Another unifying factor is the artist’s own on-screen presence. Ciocci splices himself into the frame, sometimes several selves at once, headbanging and lip-synching in a tie-dyed T-shirt that he removes halfway through to reveal another shirt with Google’s rainbow logo. (When present at screenings, the artist repeats these motions live.) He also delivers an extended monologue, in which he counts off rubbery “awareness bracelets” that arbitrarily assign color and form to abstractions (“White awareness: peace. Brown awareness: color cancer.”), like Lucky Charms. Juxtaposed with found footage, the bracelets suggest that the videos are embodiments of emotion—that taking a diatribe or a dance and preserving it in a media artifact is a contemporary form of ritual magic.

Last month, Ciocci took his videos on a nationwide tour. One of the final stops, at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, sandwiched the screening between performances by Andrew Jeffrey Wright and David Wightman, aka Fortress of Amplitude. Wright’s stand-up routine involved a recurring sales pitch for trash bags full of Beanie Babies, while Wightman, after a PowerPoint presentation titled “Favorite Heavy Metal Moment,” played a twenty-minute composition strung together from chunks of repeated, wailing guitar licks that he had synced with rapidly alternating home videos of shredding and headbanging teenagers. Both acts offered illuminating angles on Ciocci’s work. Wright’s excavation of half-forgotten kitsch was a temporal foil to Ciocci’s online rummaging, while Wightman’s attempt to maximally approximate the Platonic ideal of a banging metal jam by isolating and repeating real riffs echoed the way I Let My Nightmares Go combines multiple enactments of strong feeling in a collective noosphere of fun and angst.

The Peace Tape, the one recent video by Ciocci available on YouTube, takes a similar route. It flickers through clips culled from 1980s animated adventures, school plays, Disney cartoons, Japanese commercials, and geometric fantasias. Ciocci interrupts most of them after a few frames but lets them continue later in the video. It creates a sense of homogeneity, as does the saccharine sound track and the disembodied, bulging cartoon eyes that skitter erratically across the surface of the screen, as though trying and failing to take in all the activity flashing behind them. The Peace Tape is a multitude of fantasies stuffed into a membrane of montage that seems to represent fantasy itself—as such, it seems apt that the video’s last, lingering image is a dog in a dog costume.

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Click Through This

Published on Rhizome, May 5, 2009

Hypertext fiction was proclaimed at its inception as the literary genre of the future, but now it already feels like a relic of the past. Ironically, nineteen years after a software company published the first hypertext story, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, fast internet connections and popular reference sites have made habits of fragmentary, non-linear reading common enough to prepare a wide audience for tackling hypertext fiction (who clicked on the link above before finishing this sentence?), but hardly any artists and writers are making serious attempts at it. Becket Bowes is one exception. His project [sic]ipedia, conceived for and developed during SculptureCenter’s “In Practice” program, takes the form of an evocative description of an arcane curio cabinet, with backstories of the items it contains.

Bowes’ installation in the back of SculptureCenter’s basement was composed of those items—two Ships of Theseus, a Comfortable Chair, a simulation of Alan Turing’s death mask and a model of his bust spinning on a computer monitor, to name a few. [sic]ipedia began as a simple site, with a gray sphere and blank prompt in a stripped-down variation on Wikipedia’s home page. But over the course of the “In Practice” exhibition’s run at SculptureCenter, Bowes gathered his friends—members of the Social Isolate Club, or SIC—inside his installation, to talk out the histories and significance of the objects there. At each meeting, Bowes would take notes in composition books, and then convert the notes into pages on [sic]ipedia. Taken together, [sic]ipedia (the web site) and Social Isolate Club (the installation) suggested parallels between reading hypertext and viewing an installation: both give the viewer a degree of autonomy in ordering their perception of several discrete elements and determining the nature of the connections between them.

[sic]ipedia’s rhyme with Wikipedia and its mimicking design are about more than the major site’s role as the ultimate hypertext: the default choice for finding supporting information on an unfamiliar name or concept, and thus the point to where all links eventually lead. Bowes is also interested in nomic games, where play is governed by mutable and immutable rules (remember Calvinball?). Players can change, cancel, and invent new mutable rules, and even decide whether to make immutable rules mutable. Wikipedia, Bowes says, is like a nomic game. It is a sprawling, constantly expanding system, where guidelines have to be introduced and modified constantly, and any experimentation with Wikipedia’s form and content must be arbitrated by the users who have been “playing” the longest. In the past, Bowes has tried (unsuccessfully) to manipulate the system. He clashed with the Wikipedia’s authorities of a page for a variable “Bill of Rights,” a project that highlighted the nomic nature of law and government. While it lacked the cloying self-referentiality of the embattled Wikipedia Art, Bowes’ Bill of Rights was likewise doomed to deletion. The Social Isolate Club apes Wikipedia’s moderation system just as [sic]ipedia visually imitates the end result. The ideas members propose for the text can be sustained, rejected, and adjusted before Bowes codifies them on the site.

Though the Social Isolate Club continues to convene in other locations, [sic]ipedia has barely changed since the end of “In Practice” in late March, and remains an artifact of the project. Bowes doesn’t intend to change it. Instead, he has his eyes on bigger, novelistic hypertext projects. He believes the genre is not spent, yet is aware that the conditions that have prepared audiences for reading hypertext fiction also pose a serious challenge to it: any work that exists on the internet will have to be engrossing enough to hold readers’ attention in an environment full of distractions.

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Constant Dullaart Re-codes the Readymade

Published on Art in America’s website, March 4, 2009

The Dutch artist Constant Dullaart maintains a small collection of web pages — or “readymades,” as he calls them — united by their common status as empty corners of the Internet.  They are junkyards of sponsored links, error messages, and domains for sale that no one wants to buy. Dullaart keeps the links to these pages in one place with Delicious, a Website that lets registered users save bookmarks and tag them with keywords for easy retrieval. (Dullart sets Readymades apart from the hundreds of links saved on his account by tagging them ”readymade.”) Delicious is a tool designed to help its users bring order to their online experience; Dullaart’s Readymades represent a punk misappropriation of the site to track the chaos of the internet’s misfired synapses.

Several of Dullaart’s Readymades are “link dumps” — domains registered with the purpose of aggregating cheap ads rather than publishing useful content. Some of the services offered through the sponsored links may be tenuously connected to the search terms brought the user there, or associated with the words in the URL. For instance, www.baddomainname.com includes links to domain registration services and, less explicably, to law firms, while the links at www.hopeless.org suggest suicide prevention counseling. Dullaart’s selections also include squatted domains, sites bought for later resale. www.1nt3rn3t.com and www.theinternets.com have yet to find taker

Found media are a favorite subject of Internet artists, who often evoke the anarchy of the Web by sampling oddities from its less traveled paths. Many of Dullaart’s peers seek out specimens of “dirt style,” a term coined by artist Cory Arcangel to describe media that look naïve, crude, or messy.  (An early project in this vein involving the selection and display of entire sites was Alexei Shulgin’s WWWArt Awards, 1995-1997, which the Russian artist bestowed on “web pages that were created not as works of art but gave us definite ‘art’ feeling,” i.e. amateur designs whose awkward juxtapositions yielded uncanny effects.) Dullaart’s Readymades, however, demonstrate his interest in what might be called “default” style – the bland tables of sans serif text and soulless stock photography that frame ads for some of the most common search terms (auto insurance, cheap airline tickets, pornography), baring the underbelly of the internet’s popular use.

But Dullaart¹s Readymades are more than a formalist exploration of the Internet at its most banal. They are also a study in the relationship of the index to its referent, an issue that Rosalind Krauss connected to the readymade in her 1976 essay “Notes on the Index, Part 1.” Krauss defines indices as “the traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify.” She offers footprints and shadows as examples; the domain name would be an analogy to such indices in the internet, since it marks the online location of the site that appears in the browser window below. In Readymades, Dullaart has selected sites where the URL’s content occupies the position of the referent, rather than serving as a place marker. They are domains that someone has staked out as an empty lot, or that generate a metonymic web of sponsored links. His Readymades are sites where footprints come before the feet.

In his Readymades Dullaart turns Delicious into a means of display, as many artists have done with other social media, including blogging platforms and Flickr, the photo sharing site. It’s an exceptional use of the service; like his internet-savvy colleagues, Dullaart primarily uses Delicious to accumulate sources of inspiration. “Contemporary Semantics Beta,” an exhibition that he has organized at Arti et Amicitae gallery in Amsterdam, presents Delicious as a studio and sketchpad. It features artists whom Dullaart met by sharing links on the bookmarking site, and his curatorial strategy of installing works alongside the images that served as the impetus for their creation is meant to reflect the way that Delicious makes an artist’s interests visible and public. Like Readymades, “Contemporary Semantics Beta” establishes Dullaart as a persistent investigator of new modes of constructing and relating meaning brought about by the Internet.

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Pixel Vision

Published on Artforum.com, February 16, 2009

The opening frames of Takeshi Murata’s Untitled (Pink Dot), 2007, alternate between a magenta circle on a black field and a cyan rectangle with a black hole, creating the effect of a single, flickering sign. A cool pulse by sound artist Robert Beatty punctuates the steadiness of the blinking colors throughout the subsequent quickening of action sequences ripped from First Blood (1982), which take turns erupting from fields of pure color. When Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) grabs a bad guy in a half nelson or a warehouse explodes in flame, Murata lets these bursts of violence leave digital footprints as the action moves messily across the screen. First Blood’s washy jungle colors melt into synthetic pink and blue until the screen reverts to its original flicker—the starting point for the next episode.

The artificial palette, flashing lights, abstract patterns, and coarsely pixelated texture of Pink Dot and other works by Murata locate him in the tradition of electronic animation pioneered by John Whitney and Lillian Schwartz. But while his predecessors were testing the computer’s ability to replicate the cinematic illusion of movement, Murata uses the tools of consumer-level film-editing software to undo that illusion, with trails of pixel dust tracking the changing positions of the image from frame to frame. Timewarp Experiments, 2007, takes a different approach to accomplish similar ends. A radical deceleration of the opening credits of the sitcom Three’s Company (1977–84) lets the viewer deliberate on the temporal construction of each gesture. It’s a clinical exercise, but Murata smartly leavens it by making John Ritter’s pratfall and the bimbo grin of Suzanne Somers his guinea pigs.

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Glimpses of Unease: Olga Chernysheva

Published on Rhizome, October 20, 2008

Moscow artist Olga Chernysheva seeks out moments of awkwardness and discomfort that arise when reality falls short of the imagination. Whether working with oils or watercolors, analog photography or digital video, Chernysheva uses a plain, unaffected style, deliberately constructing her compositions to be as inconspicuous as she is when fixing her voyeuristic gaze. Tonight at 7:00 p.m. she will present a screening of video works at the Museum of Modern Art. Rhizome Curatorial Fellow Brian Droitcour met with Chernysheva in her Moscow studio.

There’s a park in the north of Moscow called VVTs, or All-Russia Exhibition Center, but Muscovites persist in referring to it by its old name, VDNKh, the Exhibition of the People’s Economic Achievements. Neither name is a good fit. The old one sounds clumsy and communist. The new one seems too ambitious, since most commercial fairs prefer newer, centrally located facilities to VDNKh’s whimsical and ill-equipped pavilions, which were built in the 1930s to showcase products of the Soviet republics or economic sectors whose names they still bear. Today most of them are improvised stores, with plastic banners stretched over marble and gilded facades to advertise the inexpensive goods for sale inside, such as furniture, seeds, radio parts, and honey. As a metaphor for the collision between a Soviet “bright future” and the present’s imperfections, VDNKH seems almost too pat to exist. But this juxtaposition is alive in the experience of the thousands of shoppers and strollers who congregate there every day.

Olga Chernysheva usually looks for material in her neighborhood, and at the VDNKh, just a few kilometers north along a major Moscow thoroughfare, which has provided her with inspiration on many occasions. The park’s mixed roles — as a place of business, an amusement park, a relic of Stalin’s imperial vision — make it rich in the quirks and dissonances that her work thrives on. Chernysheva’s Panorama (2006) was inspired by VDNKh’s cinema-in-the-round, which continues to screen the same handful of films made for its opening in 1959; the paintings in that series highlight the discoloration and fissures in the theater’s curved screens and the idealized images of Soviet life flickering across them. The photographs in Alley of Cosmonauts (2008), taken near VDNKh, feature a silvery, soaring rocket monument and the adjacent walkway, where busts of rocket scientists and space explorers are wrapped in plastic as the alley undergoes renovations. The site honoring past heroes, closed to the public and dusted with snow, looks like an alien landscape.

But Chernysheva’s interest is not limited to ruins; recent developments are just as important to her. The lobby of a new Moscow high-rise is the setting for a photograph in the series Moscow Area (2008); it shows a fountain shaped like a nude girl pouring a jug of water over herself. The sculptor may have aspired to recreate the grace of Greek sculpture, but the result is kitschy, even vulgar. Chernysheva’s video Brand Like a Friend (2007) is an anthology of corporate anthems, sung by uniformed employees. Many singers bungle the lyrics, and shy giggling betrays their discomfort at the imposition of camaraderie through music. The video March (2005) captures what Chernysheva calls the collision of the “American” and the “Soviet.” Prepubescent boys in military uniforms should be standing at attention, but they steal glances at cheerleaders shimmying their bare midriffs a few meters away. They are framed by balloons emblazoned with corporate logos and blunt, quasi-Soviet slogans. The event, Chernysheva says, was planned to celebrate Moscow’s winning bid to host the 2012 Olympics, and was held even after the city lost in the first round of voting.

The Soviet relics and other exotic images of Russia in Chernysheva’s works can distract a foreign viewer’s eye, and tend to engender readings that cleave to a master narrative about a nation’s struggle to cope with historical catastrophes. But the monuments of VDNKh or the jaunty patriotic tune in March are not keys to a political allegory; the associations with the idea of failed utopia that these details evoke simply add depth and resonance to Chernysheva’s specific vignettes about the gap between the real and the ideal. Nor can her work be described as critical of “Wild East” capitalism, since her documentary works pass over the many scenes of Moscow life that would make for much more cutting critique. Instead, Chernysheva’s art represents a soft, sympathetic humanism, both appreciative of the imagination’s heights and grounded in its flawed manifestations.

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