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Smack Mellon Multiplex presents
Infinitu et Contini: Repeated Histories,
Reinvented Resistances
Curated by Denise Carvalho
Kenn Bass, Janet Biggs, Michael Paul Britto, eteam,
Jim Finn, Mariam Ghani, Shalom Gorewitz, Liz Magic Laser, Maritza
Molina, Carlos Motta, Barbara Pollack, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky,
Matthew Suib, Jamil Yamani, and Rona Yefman.
Artists' Reception: Saturday,
November 17, 5:00-8:00 pm
Exhibition Dates: November
17-December 30, 2007
[
click to watch video ]
Infinitu et Contini explores themes of
militarism from various viewpoints and social contexts. The show's
title references the book by philosopher Luc Jardie, one of the
characters in Jean-Pierre Melville's film Army of Shadows.
Luc Jardie is based on the French philosopher of science Jean
Cavaillèr, who took part in the French Resistance within
the Libération movement and was executed by the Gestapo
in 1944. The film is about the French resistance against the
Nazis during WWII, a resistance by a few well-informed citizens
and intellectuals. Cavaillèr's passionate fight as part
of the French resistance shows his belief in the importance of
human engagement in the making of history.
It is clear that the excessive exposure to visual
consumption has made us gradually more resistant to the mechanisms
of control and manipulation. Thus its reverse is also evident:
we have become increasingly programmed to behave agreeably in
public, so as to not disrupt the apparent consensus of the collective.
We seem to constantly traverse the fine line that separates us
as individuals from the fanaticism of totalitarian groups.
The show interweaves three main notions: a) the emergence of
militarist rhetoric and its connection to war; b) how military
ideologies are enacted and resisted by various groups and individuals;
c) and how media spectacle fuses excessive consumption with nationalistic
ideals. Rather than looking at allegories of war, our intention
is to explore collective and personal states of mind and body
that are shaped by militaristic ideologies and by their by-products,
attempting to find some sort of relationship between uniformity
and conformity, matter and thought, issues of time and space,
as well as exposing different artistic responses and resistances
to the topics of patriarchy, war, hyper-masculinity, expansionism,
bondage, and violence. The sense of continuum in the legacy of
Western histories seems to hide the fact that most theoretical
work of the last sixty years has focused on difference through
a formalist scientific scope, rather than as a human experience
that allows dissidence.
These videos are statements on the detrimental
effects of militarization and its by-products: violence, wars,
torture, and other patriarchal deformities, attempting to point
out a sense of continuum within Western histories, perpetuating
megalomaniac systems of power, and the social divisions that
they create.
Smack Mellon Multiplex presents
Infinitu et Contini: Repeated Histories, Reinvented
Resistances
Mariam Ghani's Universal Games (2001-02)
focuses on the relationship between heavy politics, the world
of sports, and war, all through a language of media spectacle.
Her piece addresses a whole week of a strange episode in American
prime time television in October of 2000, in which the two top
stories of New York network news—the Yankees-Mets World
Series and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—were covered
at the same time, suggesting certain similarities between the
topics, the pose of the players, residents, and insurgents, and
the tone of the reporters covering both stories.
Kenn Bass's video Fire Moth (2005-07)
comments on the fragility of the human psyche in contrast to
superhuman demands of warfare, technology, and stress. His video
footage is from a U.S. Navy exercise conducted in the 1950s,
with pilots training to learn to land on aircraft carriers using
curved mirrors as a guidance system. The artist realized that
the use of light in the footage seem to follow a similar blinking
pattern reminiscent of Morse code, which related to earlier pieces
used in telegraphs to control projectors, or to respond to projected
images. The history of telegraphy is inherently tied to its role
as a military tool for communication. Developed in the 1830s
and 1840s, 15,000 miles of telegraph cable were laid purely for
military purposes during the American Civil War. Another part
of the piece that creates a distressful focus is the text that
pops up in the middle of the screen. The text is adapted from
tests at Ross Institute's Dissociative Experience Scale in Winnipeg,
Manitoba, Canada, exploring the mental and physical conditions
experienced after a traumatic event.
Jim Finn shot in Hi-8 analog to
sustain its amateur quality, suggesting the fragility of the
human mind when shaped by an extremist collective ideology. The
Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo, 2007, depicts
one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru, where guerrilla women
from the Maoist Shining Path movement bring to life the performances
of their brutal indoctrination. Filmed at the New Mexico State
Fairgrounds, this fictional film mixes guerrilla poems and interviews,
writings and sayings from the Shining Path's leader, Abimael
Guzman, Macbeth, Marxist rhetoric, and Finn's own writing, emphasizing
how extreme movements in the 21st century are in tune with their
patriarchal histories and expansionist ideologies.
Not all extreme groups live in poor, marginalized
conditions. In fact, extreme ideas are more powerful when their
sources are invisible and their methods are articulated beyond
their frontiers. Carlos Motta's Memory of a Protest, 2007,
is a documentary shot during a public protest by a Chilean human
rights' organization, Kamarikun, against the School of the Americas
in Santiago, Chile, in late 2006. The institution has been an
important asset for US foreign policy in Latin America throughout
and after the Cold War. It was established in 1946 in Fort Gulig,
in the Panama Canal region and relocated to Fort Bening, GA,
in 1984. The school changed its name to Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation in 2001, but its methods and ideologies
remain the same. Opponents of the school claim that it has trained
more than 61,000 Latin American soldiers to perpetuate torture
and violence and to continue fomenting a disregard for human
rights.
A growth of radical nationalisms and xenophobic
policies can seem as out of control as a cancer. How can fear
of being "invaded" co-exist with the so-called "free" economy
or with any political rhetoric of freedom? Jamil Yamani's 375
Watery Graves, (part one of three: journey), 2001,
exposes the official slaughter of October 19th, 2001, at the
shores of Australia, when Prime Minister John Howard, running
for re-election, maneuvered his xenophobic political campaign
through the media, allowing the boat called SievX (Suspected
Illegal Entry Vessel X) to sink with 352 people, including women
and children, from which only 45 survived with the help of a
fishing boat.
El Espetáculo, 2007,
by Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, appropriates footage
from oft-videotaped celebrity trials and daytime talk shows,
choreographing celebrity gestures with those of military marches
with an original 5.1 soundtrack composed of sounds from a variety
of sources—the paparazzi, the fanatical fans, Oprah's audience,
disasters, and the occasional musical riff—emphasizing
the media's role of manipulating public awareness through the
obsession with banal culture, as a strategy that creates collective
numbness, and politics of war as fictional mechanisms of spectacle.
Shalom Gorewitz's "I Want You," 2007,
is a video with images of the Military Recruitment Center and
its surroundings at Times Square. "I want you" is Uncle
Sam's pointed finger and cruel eyes, but also the cry from the
glut of the radiating media escape. The result is a post-pop
implosion of signs and symbols at the country's cross roads.
The flux of formal colors and lights, are as violent as they
are sexually indulgent.
Eteam's To Go for a Song,
2007, parodies the uniformity and conformity of the military
march, its exaggerated body gestures and lack of individuality,
with one of the artists portraying the cloned soldiers, as a
background voice sings the children's song, "Ten Little
Indians," in German. Made as an animation, the video uses
absurd solutions to infer issues of erasure and cleansing.
Barbara Pollack's America's Army,
2003, is a video of the U.S. Army's interactive internet-based
game targeted to teenage boys, www.americasarmy.com. On a split
screen we follow Pollack's fifteen year-old son and his actions
playing the game. These two separate screens allow us to see
both the objective rules of the game, and the subjective split
between playing it and being played by the game. Pollack writes: "In
the course of ten minutes in real time, Max goes through basic
training, enters a war zone and is killed in action."
Janet Biggs' Performance of Desire,
2007, is a nod to Busby Berkeley's lavish musicals and the US
fascination of military enactment. It depicts cadets performing
a silent drill, relinquishing individuality to become part of
the choreography of war. Paired with ethereal images of weightless
synchronized swimmers suspended in slow motion, the piece suggests
new relationships between beauty and strength, as well as age,
desire and power.
Rona Yefman's 2 Flags (2006),
is an experimental fiction based on a street game called 2 Flags,
with the goal of taking over rival territory, and stealing their
flag. The film's characters are stereotypes of Israel's early
nation builders, and here they are fighting a gang war between
The Hoods and The Stripes. The story takes place in various areas
of Tel Aviv, modern, historic, deserted – portraying the
city as a war zone. Some of the dialogues and monologues are
taken from famous political speeches, resulting in a sense of
loss of hope and values, and having to resort to destruction
and chaos.
Matthew Suib's Cocked (from
the ReVisionist Cinema series), 2003, is a video produced during
the peak of the international debate regarding the United States
initiative to invade Iraq. It is an anti-war statement in the
guise of a minimalist Western, borrowing dozens of short segments
from several Cinema classics of the genre. Cocked expands and
sustains what is usually a brief, tense, cinematic moment—the
showdown—and implodes the quintessential American mythology
of the Western by denying the characteristic redemption of its
protagonists through acts of violence, and instead, here nothing
is resolved.
Maritza Molina's Conquering Space, 2004,
is a multi-layered piece where the artist is fighting against
everything and nothing at the same time, fighting an invisible
battle with the reality that surrounds her, and the impermanent
reality of her own self. The artist writes, "Fueled by my
own energy, I enter into all of those other energies that oppose
me, and struggle to retain the space I occupy. The space that
is attacking me is a palpable entity, and I resist its power
to defeat me."
Liz Magic Laser's Globe (2007) plays
with the dichotomies of a master/slave relationship, in which
the voice of a woman (the artist herself) commands a young
man to perform destructing actions on a globe. The commands
and the actions in the video are full of sexual overtones,
revealing the fine line between power and bondage.
Finally, Michael Paul Britto's Cool-Pose
#1 (2007) deals with issues of race and stigma,
commenting on how society shapes the behavior of young black
men, who on their side play the role created for them as
a way of responding and challenging that same society that
marginalizes them. Inspired by the book by Richard Majors
and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemma of Black
Manhood in America, the video compiles "collected behaviors
associated with portrayal of cool, disaffected, or gangsta-hip
lifestyle," as the artist states, using the shadow as
a metaphor to "blackness." As a projection, the
video fosters interaction with viewers, who also become part
of the piece.
This exhibition is made possible with public
funds from the City of New York Department of Cultural Affairs
and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency,
and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for
the Visual Arts, The Greenwall Foundation, Agnes Gund and Daniel
Shapiro, Jerome Foundation, Richard Massey, Judith and Donald
Rechler Foundation Inc., Eve Sussman and Smack Mellon's Members.
Smack Mellon also receives generous support from
the National Endowment for the Arts, Brooklyn Borough President
Marty Markowitz, City Council Member David Yassky and the New
York City Council, Bloomberg, Foundation for Contemporary Arts,
The Greenwich Collection Ltd., Independence Community Foundation,
Jean and Louis Dreyfus Foundation, Inc., Lily Auchincloss Foundation
Inc., Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., New York Community
Trust, Robert Sterling Clark Foundation, Inc., The Starry Night
Fund of Tides Foundation, and The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation,
Inc.
Space for Smack Mellon's programs is generously
provided by the Walentas Family and Two Trees Management.
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