Dusting a Monologic Dream

Imagine a James Joyce in his fifties, decades later with a mask on, meandering downstairs from the lavishly expanded lobby of MoMA. He sees himself strolling around on a 1935 day, together with dozens of other home and amateur films spanning the entire 20th century, all never before shown. Will he recall his early ambition to iterate the “reality of experience” first in Dubliners? Will he find resonances of epiphanies—extracted from moments of the mundane—among the intimately spectacular 102 silent screens on view? Adjacent to Joyce stand the jolly Salvador Dalí in his vacation residence and the silent film star Carmel Myers singing in a garden, across the aisle a lineup of celebrated photographers, filmmakers, and painters intrigued by family events and quotidian subjects. 

Exhibition view, Private Lives Public Spaces, MoMA, Oct 2019-Feb 2021

Certain hesitation arises about the navigation and categorization of the works. Celebrity, the Experience of Place, and Family. Acclaimed artists and writers take up the mezzanine, open to the massive body of amateur creations further down the elevator. The route brews an exciting energy of those that await to return, in an almost vengeful zest. Or is it a mere projection of me, a glum visitor at the yearend of 2020?

Amid the heartfelt touches of laughter, frivolous games, or utterly trivial family conversations, a visceral yearning yet emerges from a packed festive scene, with young people dancing. It was so jovial and crowded that no one could realistically avoid any physical contact with another for more than a few seconds. How lovely! The sheer necessity of bumping into others, however uncomfortably or reluctantly. 

On the other side of the gallery are Charles Turner’s two films from the first half of the 1940s. Sixth Avenue—Subway—Post earnestly records Turner’s daily ride from home to the US Army Pictorial Service in Queens. Right above is his 9-minute Manhattan Moods, documenting the solemn skyscrapers, besuited pedestrians, and contrails from jets in 1942. Before I connected the images with the same avenue and similar environment that arm the current MoMA, or the wartime tensions globally, I had immediately thought of my grandma. She was born in 1940 into a big family in the Sichuan province of China, when the country was torn by arms and tensions. In a sleek museum structure in New York, watching documentations of the familiar urban landscape about 70 years ago, I thought of her. I was not in a nostalgic mood for home; I would rather think that I was transported there involuntarily. And I envision Joyce pacing right next to me, reflecting on his Dublin.  

The exhibition also floats a revisit of historic moments in collective memory by moving-image professionals and amateurs alike, such as the Disney Animators’ strike in 1941, Ted Kennedy’s 1980 Presidential Campaign, and the Anti-Gulf War March raging across 1991. At the back, a full display case gathers nine models of generational film cameras—Revere, Rollei, Eastman Kodak, Bell & Howell, among others. B&W and color advertisement pages are in their company. Seated as if backstage, the cameras are both objects for retrospective observation and honorable co-authors of the exhibiting films. A shoutout to their contribution seems long due in art museums.   

Consider yet again the curatorial thesis: what is implied by the cameras’ group presentation in this show? An archaeological research on media history? How does media archaeology now cross paths with the contention of common culture versus high art? Is this in resonance with the automata, clocks, scientific instruments included in Making Marvels from the same season at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Is the historiography of art and technology merging at an atemporal contact point of European courts and American homes? 

It is important to note that unlike this selection of collected and preserved films, a majority of home movies might only exist in forms of family memory or dusted collection in forgotten drawers or at flea markets. These films managed to survive the constant evolution and obsolescence of technology due to the museum’s early precaution against their doomed obsoletability. The comeback of such alternative productions evokes the notion of “dark matter” that the American artist Gregory Sholette adumbrates. Sholette proposes attention to the marginalized artists, whose work is both essential to the configuration of the mainstream and possesses the potential to subvert such hierarchy, aided by the rise of affordable communication and audiovisual technology. Thus, rather than a precursor of social media as the exhibition states, home movies fundamentally enable the history of films, free from a desire to make social statements. In other words, they exist as assertive companions of the widely circulated and celebrated cinemas. These alternative formats have survived their numerous contemporaries thanks to their very amateurism and anonymity. Instead of a contrivance that institutional machines necessitated their presence to reinforce the order—of the center and the margin, or the high and the low—their preservation history is perhaps more readily located within the gesture of pioneer film curators who laid the foundation. The films’ distance from the commercial sector further pardons them from decisions of deaccessioning across the decades. They remain dusted and un-dusted in an aloof manner.

Private Lives Public Spaces is not remiss in developing a virtual viewing program, which nonetheless adds ambivalence to the museum’s position in showing homemade moving images. What composes the difference between a casually uploaded Youtube video and a digitally preserved 16mm family film resurfaced from MoMA’s archive, again presented via Youtube for public viewing? The museum identifies this endeavor as its “first exhibition devoted to home movies as a cinematic art form.” Other than an acknowledgment of their mass presence, the rationale behind—why these specific films are in focus at this particular moment—remains ambiguous.  

One consideration is that the experience speaks less about the viewing materials than the viewers. It reminds me of the youtube channels that stream live views from international space stations, juxtaposed with trackers and chat boards for audiences who constantly join and exit the viewing spectacle. Ariella Azoulay, in Civil Contract of Photography, outlines a contractual relationship in which the photographed subjects, especially those deprived of their citizenship in states of emergency, consent to their photographic presence by anticipating the viewer to act on it. The fact that the films were all digitized and shown on silent screens in the downstairs gallery points to the arduous journey they had to make. In what ways will they survive another century? How is a contemporary viewer expected to act on such homemade movies that, unlike the modern phenomenon of social media, were likely not intended to be viewed outside their immediate circle of families and friends? 

Together with a keenly observant Joyce, I dreamed through the century from its own lens, the many moments and movements still contingent on their situations, though unable to tell one from another. Upon arriving home, I put up my antique print from 1948 onto a windowsill, a surrealist commercial by the Harvel watches for Christmas time; the brand, as a large part of the exhibition, now belongs to history. Then I had a hard time comprehending what a $5,500 watch meant in 1948. It was a period of frenzied currency reforms and inflations in China. The amount could screen films in public nonstop for years. What did public space entail back then in this part of the world, when lives were certainly not so private? 

A Certain Plume Reading Himid’s Manual from Underneath

Part four

Plume Work from Underneath

Image: Lubaina Himid, Three Architects (2019), on show at New Museum, June 2019.

The enchanted Plume wakes up in a ship. “Bad day indeed, gloomy sky, floppy biscuits, mumbling engines. I’ll doubt whether the history has been bored to death if the wall manuals are not so bright and sharp; Maybe the manuals are only warning a looming end of everything.” His voice wavered as he looked around.

Plume does not recall how he ended up with such secluded crew, but he feels connected to them, like the threads and paddles that merge into colorful patches. 

Signs give out orders, never exhausted, never ambivalent. Yet symbols seem not to lead anywhere, except the snobbish, satirical echoes from centuries ago. Plume sits down at the table, three men facing him and one on both sides; another staring at the front beyond the world Plume can see. They all look away from where Plume sits, maybe because his suit is too dull, maybe he stays too silent. History can be indeed dull and silent, until it weaves into delicately patterned textiles. Nothing can compete with the textiles. 

Plume finds some slim and colored plates by the wall. They seem to be weaving, well orchestrated to push forward the ship. The strange thing is they cast shadows on a solid surface, shadows dovetailing with one another in a smarter rhythm. Plume is confused.

Dana Powell: Burner/ Too Late to Die Young

You get close and see what could be there, in the biopsy of another time, perhaps. 

The question does not expect inquisitive thinking but a ready existence from the bland, mundane realm. Two fried eggs, a chimney, a doorknob, a loaded power strip—the everyday objects in Powell’s nifty paintings are almost the opposite of Tino Sehgal’s quaint chant “This Is So Contemporary.” Instead of blown to a surreal scale, or extracted from the context, Powell’s objects do not morph into an alternative presence, but suggest an entire absence. The road signs remain reticent, while you poke at their surface, trying hard as if to provoke a napping lion in the zoo, the caged, segregated hero supposedly singing the epic. Rather than the cultural past, what is indeed evoked becomes a viewing experience closer to a wax museum visit. The figures appear so real— you tell your friends at the show— which means you think they’re not. From Powell’s canvas you don’t see a sharp contour that delineates the eggs against the cast iron pan; neither can you picture a slippery illusion when the eggs are burnt and the smoke starts to alert you. Everything is deprived of their individual potential but mashed in a particular moment with a fixed perspective. Stillness. Light is essentially still in your eye, not a rippling wave or a fleeting particle, so you get to capture it on canvas. It requires certain imagination to picture the young Vermeer operating the (speculated) optical device while thrilled by its exquisite capacity, a technique yet to be embraced by art historical studies. You see it as Vermeer did, and you feel proud. 

image: Dana Powell, on view at Tanya Bonakdar, June 2019, photo: Y.Z.

When the protagonist’s house is set on fire in Dominga Sotomayor’s Too Late to Die Young—probably because of Powell’s burner—and she escapes into the forest, you don’t seem to see a way out. The boundary between the object, the character, the backdrop, and the historical context are all washed, though they remain perfectly legible at a retinal level. Imaginarily, the world is cut open and waits for an autopsy deadly still, while yearning to see and tell. 

The potential sits comfortably at where it trembles, refusing the idea of a synthetic and digestible creation. It actually decays and lingers. A contemporary voyeur might be baffled by the object that attempts to muffle its aroma or clattering noise, whereas a remote visitor gets to gasp at the timeless glamor of the vestiges, unearthed accidentally. Readers, unlike those deeply captivated in the cinema, are invited to stand and peruse from afar; this invitation, of course, is embedded with a reductive expectation that observers only perform an observatory function. 

Everything That Happened and Would Happen/ Against the Grain

You feel related, but you want to circumvent the daunting frame of relational aesthetics. You don’t want to give up your feeling to an interpreter, either. You hate the burden of action, of conclusion. There is no conclusion to history, or art, or when the two come to merge. The performance yet collapses into an open wound, and you’re expected to examine it, and empathize.

It is the second installment of Against the Grain, initiated by the poet Paul Muldoon. You’re surrounded by the immediate friends of the guests tonight, poets, writers, musicians, anyone who might frankly frown upon the midtown dust on your suit. The dust is noisy and cold, like those central AC systems on the 24th floor, and yes, irresponsible. Denial does not help much with your dissonance. You allow yourself to fall for the loose and open composition, until you realize this backstage milieu has become the reality you live in. The percussion, supposedly speaking low to your heart, becomes ever more unsettling. It merges with the poem, language turning visceral, and you suddenly feel lost in an ascending cloud. It urges you to think, understand, and respond —indeed, you do—but you want to repress the provocation. Where is the path leading to? You see the moment is turning historical, embracing the nature that appears so alien. In the smallest dust rises an intelligence that resists the rules of this world. Awakening from the horror surrounding the indie theatre in Williamsburg, you sit tight, tuck away your plastic cup of beer, and join the heartless mammoths on stage at Park Avenue Armory. You stare at the Fachwerkhause that floats on the floor, their shadows heavy and thick as a robe trudging from the Middle Ages, and the rags that drags and pulls before they draw a modern wall-torn map. 

Now you miss the grumpy coffee machine, printer, or wifi router, in which you may as well seek the spiritual.

Death is Elsewhere/Synecdoche New York

The idea sounds jubilant and inviting, at first; soon it grins with a senile smile. A theatre director wins a McArthur genius award that encourages him to create a timeless masterpiece without concerning the finance, and a couple walks singing backdropped in the Icelandic landscape, guitar in hand and wind interweaving with the music. 

The liberated performances yet fail to land with a relatable warmth. Instead, it coils, twists, resists your effort to read. Behind the mask of the lens, both music and plays are supposed to be performed live, to have a stage and then extend beyond the stage. A camera yet restrings the seated audience from a theatre to its boundary, a force that aims for a chilling blend-in.

The artist views his video installation as a “kinetic sculpture” (artist’s interview), encouraging exploration from different physical angles that complement each other. Viewers are moved, indeed, but only to be barred from the created illusion on the screen. It is fairly rare to see a contemporary Icelandic artist premiering their work at the Metropolitan, and this means that the idyllic landscape in Death is rendered otherworldly from its home-coming nature.

You are awed and subdued by this escape from the metropolitan, until you see a visitor starting to approach the circular screens. Dressed in a bright orange T-shirt, unseemly as those alerting roadblocks in a hot summer day, he appears to be both reaching for the landscape and playfully shadowing himself in the projected image. The singing couples, of course, do not respond. They are well protected in a world without cause and consequence— the world is folded into a loop, allowing no accidental bifurcations or deviations—and death is kept away with no passing of time.

You take out the phone when a message rings through — connecting you to your world where, unlike here on the lower floor of Lehman wing, the signals are robust and constantly flood you with information and direction — and you realize 45 minutes have passed since you trapped yourself in this loop. When watches become often a badge of class rather than keeper of time, is time freed to elapse in a frivolous manner? You begin to picture a tuxedoed bald man waltzes his way as if weaving across the seven screens around you and blindfold you against the passing. 

So where do you stand? Which world, if there’s any self-contained world, are you breathing in? You cannot tolerate an ambivalence as such, risking your life on a dangling cliff. The same question rises when you find yourself almost frustrated with the never-ending constructions in Synecdoche New York.