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I don't know what "a yet unknown art" would be, but I know what still surprises me. I am writing this during a short trip to New York, where I went to attend a memorial organized for my friend, the performance/collage artist / film/video maker and writer Stuart Sherman who died of AIDS-related pneumonia on September 14, 2001. I had left New York in 1992, and consequently had not kept up with all the latest developments of his work, and what I saw during this memorial profoundly moved me. On the one hand, it was completely in line with Sherman's obsessional, hyper-controlled, yet humorous and corky decomposition/recomposition of the world, assembling mundane objects, everyday language and people like you and me to create an original discourse structured by a very personal grammar. On the other hand, I witnessed, in Sherman's most recent work, the emergence of more directly homoerotic themes - a subject he was not in the habit of discussing publicly. In the 1990s, at first for financial reasons, Sherman gave up cinema for video, and in "Joe and Me " (1994), he humorously plays with the tropes of gay porn, alternating alluring images of a model (an actor living in the same building as he did, as it turns, and whose muscular body is on display on the Internet) with his own self-portrait - exploring issues of desire and identity with gently self-deprecating humour. In "Endless Meadows ", one of the short plays Sherman penned in the 1960s but staged only in the 1980s and 1990s, two men - a pompous intellectual wearing a suit and tie and a sullen, shirtless youngster sporting dark sunglasses - enact a disturbing metaphor of the "exchange of body fluids". This may not be much, in a time of sexual explicitness, but the obviousness of the pervasive discourse about sex often turns into clichés, and spans a lot of stupidities - as if repression was a thing of the past. It is not, and it continues to kill, as so many gay men do not have the medical coverage needed and/or are ashamed/reluctant of getting regularly tested - as so many women around the world still die from botched illegal abortions, etc. So, what I found novel in Sherman's art was the dialectic it allowed between the said and the unsaid, speech and silence, eroticism and repression.
The next day, another friend, dancer / choreographer / film and video maker Yvonne Rainer showed me her new videotape, "After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: Hybrid ", in which she is pulling together and combining the multiple facets of her long artistic career, creating a totally different visual structure. In 2000, Mikhail Baryshnikov commissioned Rainer to choreograph a piece; in it the classically trained Russian star is asked to recreate one of Rainer's most famous dances from her piece, "Lives of Performers ", in which Valda Setterfield was performing with a balloon. Setterfield's elegant, long cocktail dress is draped around Baryshnikov's front, over his cotton performing suit, like a modernist collage (this being only one of the 40-odd quotations from her previous choreographies Rainer included in the "new" dance). The piece itself unfolds, like different skins of an onion, multiple folders that play with the infinite possibilities of the digital image, gliding over each other, panels of text covering/reframing the image of the dance rehearsal, giving it a different context, a different echo. Rainer had culled quotations (Robert Musil, Carl Schorske, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Oscar Kokoschka, etc. ...) about the relationship between art, architecture, the deterioration of the social/political fabric and the advent of fascism/antisemitism during a prolonged historical crisis, the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht " provides the musical accompaniment/timing of the piece, resonance with contemporary issues slowly emerge: Is the avant-garde dead? Is art complicit with social passivity?
The same night, another friend, writer / visual artist / photographer / film and video maker Leandro Katz showed me his first digital video piece, "Paradox ", shot in Guatemala on the ground of the former United Fruit Company (now Dole, Chiquita, Del Monte and other corporations). While the corporation completely deforested the ground to make room for banana plantations, at its center, a mini rainforest is preserved, complete with haunting animal and bird sounds, and the ancient Maya ruins of Quiriguá that contain temple structures, pyramids, and a magnificent, intriguing sculpture known as "the Dragon". Eschewing commentary, the piece quietly juxtaposes these images of former Mayan splendor with shots of manual labour in the banana plantation (harvesting, carrying, processing, washing, packaging). Like in a Straub-Huillet film about the weight of history, these images - bound by the dense sound-track - suggest the hidden dialectic of colonialism, land appropriation, pillage of a continent, exploitation of manpower, but also the quiet resistance of the bodies of the workers, who offer themselves with grace to the camera, as icons of another life that goes beyond the misery of their labour conditions.
The development in the work of these three artists surprised me because I saw them going in directions they had not explored before. Sherman, Rainer and Katz have been making work since the 1960s, they have inspired the generations that came after them, they have constantly, imaginatively jumped from one medium to the next. They have been exhibited in alternative performance spaces, art galleries, museums, film festivals and theaters. This in itself, in an age where an "art career" is "managed" with great care within a certain "line", has remained original, and it moves me greatly to see younger artists - Sharon Lockhart in the U.S., Valerie Mréjen in France, for example - resume this tradition which for a while seemed lost. Because of their very originality and versatility, of their "border crossing", these artists have sometimes found it difficult to "fit" in the current system of funding, patronage and sponsorship, even though their work has always been met with very positive critical reaction. At the end of his life, Sherman spent most of his time in Europe, because things were financially easier for him there. Rainer has shifted back and forth from dance to film and back to dance again when funding for her film work became problematic. For support, Katz keeps a fine balance between the art world and the film world, between the U.S. and Latin America, between creation and academia. Rejecting what is currently "trendy" in the film world, Rainer and Katz will probably not make another feature film again; Sherman never did.
Yet it is in the work of these three artists, who often use quotes of their own past work (in universes that are both obsessional, intellectually consistent and multi-faceted), but relentlessly explore the fabric of the medium they use as well as the texture of our cultural make-up, that I find the most poignant, most intriguing, most elegant, most challenging, most accomplished figures of the new. To paraphrase Yvonne Rainer quoting Richard Foreman, the new crosses the boundaries of time to constitute itself as a "resistance against the present."
Bérénice Reynaud
Los Angeles
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