Vital Signs: Summer 2005 Group Show

Maya Stendhal Gallery

Vital Signs opens a thoroughfare designed for ambulation in and around the overlapping precincts of language and the body. In this group exhibition, the human skeleton is made to speak for the ordering stricture or scaffolding of language, whilst poetical and political utterance enact a flux of sense making, a slippage that no structure—neither grammar nor the willful cohesiveness of televised (presidential) bodies politic—can seal or verify in an attitude resembling Truth, or its latter-day avatar, stability. Where might meaning reside? Who, or what, speaks language? And what might the body have to say about it?

Barbara Hammer’s video “Vital Signs” is a cutup danse macabre in gritty black and white. Frantic to defy mortality with Eros (John Donne crying “Death thou shalt die!), Hammer romances a human skeleton, licking its foot, waltzing with it, carrying it around in public as if to proclaim it more than a pile of bones. She choreographs not only the finality of loss, but also the pall that lurks in a deadening clinical gaze. What is a dying body? An afflicted body? What becomes of sex, of joy, when the body becomes a mere terrain colonized by sickness, by medicine? Hammer’s thaumaturgy hovers between heartbreaking and slyly macabre, as though beyond the mourning she performs, she wants to mark death as some kind of sick joke, a sly and wicked absconding under whose dominion the erotic is effracted both from the living and the dead. Lurking under—or looming over—“Vital Signs‘, with its glimpses of Hiroshima, is the question of whether a good death is possible in a nuclear, aggressively scientific age. Also consciously invoking the danse macabre tradition is a digital painting by Matthias Groebel, from a series called “collective memory.” Dinosaur and human skeletons, encased and refracted by multiple exposure and reflecting glass, stand in the eerie dimness of some natural history museum or other, in the midst of which a lone human figure (alive and wearing clothes) hangs in phantomic reflection among the bones and display cases. The museological space, with its smooth reflecting surfaces and its aura of silence, prestige, and care, here becomes a ghostly interzone, a place one goes to confront one’s own antecedents (dinosaur bones), and by implication one’s own ends, but also to expose the strange perambulations of evolution and extinction that continue to be the stuff of life.

Portraiture and caricature, movement and distortion: Jeff Scher, Seymour Chwast, and Takahiko Iimura put a face on the question of intelligibility. In “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow”, Jeff Scher treats poor Yorick with characteristic sanguine humor in a series of coaster-sized paintings of a human skull. Scher’s iterative style, derived from his high-speed rotascope animations, never attempts stability. Movement is Scher’s whole medium, so it’s especially witty that he would render a static skull—the very emblem of the dead-- in the frenzy of color and constant flux that are his trademarks. Seymour Chwast’s "Corporate Mirth #2” is a satirical painting of four men in business suits frozen in fake-slaphappy hilarity. There’s more movement and lushness in Scher’s naked skulls than in these bloated faces, with their frigid, gaping maws. That’s precisely the point: a thing can laugh, but that doesn’t guarantee its sentience. These faces are an old-timey newspaper’s version of greed and evil, laughing all the way to the bank. In Takahiko Iimura’s installation of video and caricatural stills, “AIUONN Six Features”, vowels and consonants sound out over onscreen images of English letters and Japanese characters, juxtaposed with mug shot-style photographs. The faces onscreen are systematically bent, prodded, dented, and swollen until they resemble caricatures of Kabuki masks. Skewering the hilarity over-determined pronunciation guides, Iimura’s piece seems at first a witticism on theatricality—six emotional attitudes for six proto-verbal sounds-- only to become an eerie burlesque on the imposition psycholinguistics makes upon unsuspecting phonemes.

In “From the Horse’s Mouth”, Nisi Jacobs portrays First Lady Laura Bush as a digitized, hypercolored Equus. Rendered from Mrs. Dubya’s “showstopping” comedic performance at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner this past April, “From the Horse’s Mouth” scathes, uniting Jacobs’ rich sense of color and texture with pitch-perfect satirical gut punches. When the First Lady compares herself to TV’s Desperate Housewives, when she quips that her husband once attempted to milk a male horse, when she lets it slip that she knows how to “produce—pronounce—nuclear” we know it’s not merely English getting away from Mrs. Bush and the prime-time-ready wit she deploys, but the specter of truth itself, which television could work to unveil, instead of merely screening it with its usual opaque vacuity. Horse’s mouth becomes horse’s ass.

Malapropism and phantom presences (present-ness) order Michael Snow’s triple video installation “That / Cela / Dat”. With three screens displaying the “same” text in English, French, and Dutch, Snow diagrams the clumsy grappling language must enact in order so signify or mark the present here. Peter Rose’s virtuosic video art— uniting precision with lyric urgency-- embodies a semiotically aware poetics, probing and performing the excruciating breakdown of meaning, and its increasingly suspect inscription within language. In “Secondary Currents”, the screen declares “I FEAR I DISSOLVE MY VOICE ELUDING MEANING.” As meaning in language dissipates, so does the “I”, and thereby, the body. “Sprit Matters” threads a polyglot babble of not-quite-languages over a TV image of Ronald Reagan (from when he was President). “Metalogue” is a magnificent mediation on language and denotation. Imagery of Rose’s hand, the fact that, as he says, he can only “stand and point in mute amazement” at life, invoke the sacred incredulity of Saint Thomas. And the whizzing desert landscapes of “The Geosophist’s Tears” express both exhilaration and an uncanny sorrow at the flattening of technologized terrain. Going beyond Turner’s landscapes, with their occasional spuming locomotive, Rose does seeing in locomotion, reminding us of the link between train travel and the moving image, the inception of seeing done at horizontal high speed.

Vital Signs probes the place of medium in the proverbial massage. Works that range across the traditions of painting, cinema, political caricature, poetry, linguistics, and dance perform edgeplay at the boundaries of the plastic and media arts. Contributions by Barbara Hammer, Jeff Scher, and Matthias Groebel invoke vanitas and danse macabre traditions, posing the question of technology’s place within, or effect upon human finitude. Nisi Jacobs and Seymour Chwast do socio-political satire on corrupt bodies of power via video and painting, respectively, while Takahiko Iimura carefully conflates verbal markers with physical distortion. Michael Snow grapples with language’s marks upon the present through a witty comment on translation, and, by implication, suggests the inability of language to presence the present. And Peter Rose‘s magisterial video shorts by run an intensive scan on the dissolution of meaning in language by charting a course between poetic and semiotic text, from Babel to body Babel.

-Ariana Reines

Ariana Reines is a poet based in Brooklyn. She has done graduate work in French and Romance Philology at Columbia and is now a doctoral candidate in Philosophy and Media at the European Graduate School.