Heartaches & Holy Rites
Pain seems to happen all once. Healing takes time. Pain is a reaction to trauma and tragedy. Healing is a response to pain. This dialectical process from pain to relief is transformational; after recovery, a sufferer is not the same as before. This pain-to-wellness progression is used as a starting point by the artists included in this screening. The work here is a response to personal, symbolic, and anecdotal suffering. These videos employ rituals as a source of comfort and relief. Perhaps since art making is inevitably uncomfortable, even painful, and is certainly ritualistic itself, artists have a special insight into this process. Several of the works included rely on recounting and confronting personal traumas from the artists’ lives. Using techniques based in performance art, narrative filmmaking, and assemblage, these works present a beautiful and provocative interpretation of how hearts are broken and how holy rites are created and performed.
Kate Gilmore (American b. 1975) creates situations that require her to physically escape her surroundings. The traps she sets for herself are straightforward: kicking her way out of a sealed drywall room, breaking something apart, or in the case of Main Squeeze (video, 2006), wriggling herself through a narrow, duct-like crawl space. These situations evoke empathy in the viewer because her struggle and discomfort is unmistakable. She sweats, grunts, and scrapes her way through her task in harrowing ways. Yet despite their realism, Gilmore’s situations are ripe with ritual and metaphor because of their highly contrived, nearly comic nature. She ensnares herself for the sake of escaping before her camera. This apparent contradiction between manufactured peril and genuine struggle not only make her videos captivating, they also earn the viewer’s sympathy. The artist becomes hero and we root for her to escape. This sets her performances apart from other artistic feats of endurance because the videos take on a theatrical narrative quality. Even her wardrobe choice of an everyday outfit is emblematic of a common woman overcoming hardship through struggle. Gilmore’s escapes become symbolic rituals for perseverance through hardship and pain and present an odd sense of inspiration as we watch her break free.
A less straightforward look at heartache can be seen Emily Vey Duke (Canadian, b. 1972)/ and Cooper Battersby’s (Canadian, b. 1971) Beauty Plus Pity (video, 2009). Here several lamentable stories are told with irony and humor by singing narrators and animated animals. The overall theme of man’s dominion over animals sets the stage for dark narratives of a god who suffers from dementia, childhood alcoholism, and humanity’s penchant for ruining everything. There is spiritual angst—even despair—that suggests we are doomed to these kinds of troubles, yet it is not an entirely damning video. It has moments of great humor and grace that suggest people are more hapless than evil. In Beauty Plus Pity the pursuit of pleasure and comfort inevitably add to tragedy and disgrace. The power of this video is that the heartaches demonstrated are like those in real life: wrenching, preposterous, gorgeous, and puzzling.
Oliver Laric’s interest in spiritual acts eschews narrative in favor of an almost anthropological look at the ritual of baptism. In his work Down Up (digital video, 2008) Laric compiles dozens of found videos of adults being baptized by complete submersion. Since baptism is viewed as a necessary sacrament for salvation, the ritual is somber and earnest. Yet there is a tension in these clips; one can hear cheers and applause after the submersions. Despite the sacredness of the ritual, the footage is remarkable for its ordinariness. Candidates wear t-shirts and bathing suits and the water they are dipped into is often that of banal swimming pools and humble ponds. Laric’s video is a split screen that begins each clip as stills. The footage cuts in half with the left side of the screen showing the candidate being submerged into water and the right half showing the candidate being lifted out. By doing this Laric suggests that the candidates emerge new and different from what they were before. This ordinary spirituality, combined with the rhythmic monotony of the video, prompts viewers to wonder: Who are these people being plunged into water? What has brought them to this holy rite?
The pain that brought Linda Montano (American, b. 1942) to create her personal ritual is the sudden and unexpected death of a loved one. Mitchell’s Death (video, 1979) is a documentation of the artist chanting her experience of discovering that her ex-husband had died and her subsequent trip to Kansas City for his funeral. Montano’s narrative is a harrowing stream of consciousness commentary of details about their relationship during and after marriage and her own relentless imagining of the tragedy. Visually the film is a close-up shot of Montano in a harsh high contrast black and white. Acupuncture needles that hang from her face are initially cringe inducing, and then gradually appear a natural part of her. The visual effect is jarring and claustrophobic, but eventually seeps into the background as the chanting takes hold. Her thoughts are chaotic and tormenting though her voice and rhythm is measured even and calm. She looks to have found some sort of catharsis from this ritual, yet the details are gruesome and raw. Mitchell’s Death shows that even a slight solace provided by a ritual can be a tremendous relief.
Paul Kos (American, b. 1942) performs the most literal transformation imaginable in his work Ice/Fire (video, 2004.) The artist ingeniously fashions a block of ice into a magnifying glass and uses it to ignite a fire. Watching Kos trying to get the fire started is both frustrating and exciting. The artist struggles and stumbles with his crude set up as the viewer anxiously roots for him to succeed. There is a complete sense of pleasure and glee in the cleverness and crudeness of his operation. There is no pretense. The video consists of a straightforward stationary shot of Kos and his setup on the snowy ground. Perhaps it is over reaching to think of Ice/Fire as a holy rite and it is almost certainly not a reaction to heartache, but there is something immensely powerful about this simple transformation he creates. Watching Kos, one begins to believe that if through struggle and good faith ice can create fire, then there is hope that our heartaches can be healed.
David Oresick