Into the White Cube

Swimming Lessons (2013) is a film by Anna Gaskell, who is known for coming out of the “Yale school,” a group of artists who studied under Gregory Crewdson. Like her counterparts, Gaskell’s work focuses on young women in a documentary approach, counter to that of Crewdson. However, Gaskell infuses a fantastic element in her work, surrounding rituals, spirituality, and community. Swimming Lessons focuses on a community of girls, PIC, Partners (or Princesses as one girl puts it) in Christ. The 25min. short film weaves the narratives of the girls together, drawing comparisons between each others personal stories of fear, loss, and faith.

Gaskell highlights two stories throughout the film which involve water and the otherworldly experience of submergence. In one, a girl is slowly going blind and would like to get swimming lessons before she looses her sight completely. She recounts in the video how angry she was with God, and how she learned to accept her condition rethink her relationship with and image of God. Most of the girls in the film are struggling with ideas of evil and sin, and how horrific events can occur in their life and in a world where God exists. Another girl recounts the death of her mother throughout the film who died in a flood in her car. She was too afraid to get out when her car broke ice and entered a stream, and didn’t know how to swim. The girl describes that she can hear her mother when she is underwater; being underwater is like being in another world – another state of consciousness. 

http://ubu.com/film/gaskell_swimming.html

SOSW Ballet (2010) is another short film by Gaskell, which abandons traditional narrative all together. The film profiles the children from the Special School of Podgorki in Poland which houses students with various mental disabilities. The children in the film travel in groups throughout the forest behind the school and perform loosely coordinated ballets. Gaskell overlays these shots with different classical music, creating an environment of beauty secluded from the rest of the world. As in much of her work, Gaskell explores a group where community forms an other-wordly experience. By forsaking direct narrative, Gaskell highlights communication through the act of performance, suggesting that physical communication, when coordinated by a group, can go beyond the barriers of language. 

http://ubu.com/film/gaskell_ballet.html

Kathleen Hanna describes her Bikini Kill song, Alien She, as a text written by herself after she was a feminist to herself before she was a feminist, and the difficulties of maintaining ones’ politics in multiple parts of her life. Hanna and many other other artists, musicians, and activists became part of the third wave feminist movement known as Riot Grrrl, which was the subject under investigation in this exhibition. Through ephemeral, music, and fine art, the exhibition tackled a small portion of what Riot Grrl was and still is today. 

I was born in 1991, so although I was completely unaware of the politics behind the Riot Grrrl movement, it was usually for me to be dancing in my living room at the age of five to Sleater Kinney’s break out album Dig Me Out. My older sister was a teen during this time, and had friends who were self-proclaimed riot girls. I was introduced to Kathleen Hanna’s next project, Le Tigre, in middle school and have been loosely following these artists ever since. It was nice to go from listening to The Julie Ruin in my car to walking into the exhibition to listen to Bikini Kill, and affirmed for me that these cultural producers are just as relevant as ever, and are legitimized as time goes on. The show features several iPods with Riot Grrrl punk mixes, and ephemeral in display cases. These objects serve as a kind of document of a social and political movement, and yet also reminded me of the inside of my sister’s car in the late 1990′s.

The exhibition also featured photographs by Tammy Rae Carland, artist and founder of the record label Mr. Lady Records. Her series, Lesbian Beds, depicts the unmade beds of lesbian partners, photographed from directly above. There is a space between intimacy and absence in these works, as they challenge the traditions of representation by not including the partners themselves. The beds serve as a stage for the intimate space of a relationship, and examine codes of representation. I’m Dying Up Here portrays the uncomfortable moments in the acts of the often erased female comic. The photographs isolate objects on stage, showing the transitory space of performance and the stage. Carland also showed An Archive of Feeling, which combined personal objects like cassette mix tapes and book pages on a clinical white background. One print showed the first page of various books, where the author would write the dedication, such as For J, or For my Mother. This reminded me of a Bikini Kill song on their first album, For Tammy Rae, showing the supportive yet progressive community that Riot Grrrl created. 

Recently, I got the change to see two video works by William Pope L. at his current exhibition at the Geffen Contemporary at MoCA. Pope’s work centers around issues of race, politics, and national identity, and this exhibition is a perfect representation of these continued interests.

My favorite video was Small Cup, 2008, which was situated through three large, empty and darkly lit rooms. The projection took the viewers to a type of indoor farm in an abandoned factory. The video started with long exterior shots, with joltingly fast cuts to the interior space. In the factory, there is a small structure that resembles an institutional government building. Throughout the video, more and more animals appear to be eating around the structure, such as chickens and goats. As the video continues, the animals continue to eat at the structure until they eventually tear it apart. On its deepest level, much of the work in this exhibition deals with entropy in a very poignant way. William Pope L.’s use of editing and cuts made this video successful, by implying an uncanny and unsettling tone to the destruction of the feeding device. 

Reenactor, 2012/2015, was a 185 minute video that is screened on a continuous loop for 100 days. It documents people who reenact scenes from the civil war, but instead of filming the reenactments themselves, he records these characters going about daily life. Dressed as Robert E. Lee, a man mops his floor, parents bathe their child, people buy items as a market. Several slave re-enactors sit together huddled outside while bright red liquid is poured over them. The civil war and its subsequent political decisions point to the internalized racial strife the country still faces today. There is no narrative, and the video is divided up between seemingly randomly sequenced actions through a washed out and sepia filter. Since the video is so long, I liked how it was played on three different screens in the exhibition, so that it felt like I got a chance to view more of it than I otherwise would be able to. 

"Race doesn’t exist, [but America] can’t see beyond it."

Hank Willis Thomas

Absolut Power

2003

Review 2:

It has everything to do with me. And I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.

(note: this exhibition was divided into two parts, one at the Pomona College Museum of art and one at Pitzer Gallery. This review discusses the one at the Pomona College Museum of Art).

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ONE EXHIBITION IN TWO PARTS