Romanian historian, Lucian Boia, put it well when he described history as not one but two things: what happened and how we talk about what happened. These days it seems like everyone is talking about how we talk about what happened. Take the current show at the Henry Art Gallery. New York based artist Matthew Buckingham, whose exhibition “Play the Story” can be seen through September 21st, uses film, photography and projected texts to reflect on the relationship between history and narrative. It includes some of Buckingham’s earlier works, such as The Six Grandfathers, Paha Saha, in the Year 502, 002 c.e. (2002) and Image of Absalon to be Projected Until It Vanishes (2001) but the heart of the show is three recent film installations centered around Mary Wollstonecraft, Louis Le Prince and Charlotte Wolff.
The first piece, The Spirit and the Letter focuses on the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. When you enter the gallery you are greeted by the soft glow of a chandelier in the center of the room. It is planted right side up on the floor like a blooming bouquet of crystal beads and tiny bulbs. Projected on the wall to the left of the entrance is an eighteen-minute film loop. The image is ghostly. A dark-haired woman in eighteenth-century dress paces first across the floor and then across the ceiling of a small room. Her mouth moves. Words come out in murmurs. Everything but her hair, from her light blue dress to the chalk white walls and ceilings around her, is pale on pale. Who is this woman? What is she saying? And why is she walking on the ceiling?
The woman is an actress playing Mary Wollstonecraft. Speaking in the present tense, she recites from Wollstonecraft’s writings about the status of women in the late-eighteenth century. Her upside down position, and that of the inverted lamp, is presumably intended to help the viewer appreciate Wollstonecraft’s radicalism, her attempt to overturn the deeply entrenched values of her times. Her use of the present tense is an invitation for viewers to reflect on the changes, or lack thereof, since Wollstonecraft’s time. While the image of Wollstonecraft walking on the ceiling is enchanting on its own, the overall tone of the piece and the simplicity of the upside metaphor feel overtly pedagogical and too obvious. They do not truly stimulate thought or transport the viewer to another time and place. The situation is not helped by the poor acoustics in the gallery. It is hard to make out what the actress is saying, much less to ponder the meaning of her words.
Much better is False Future, in which Buckingham fast forwards a century to examine an obscure footnote in the history of motion pictures. For False Future Buckingham shot ten minutes of a section of Leeds Bridge in England, where the French-born Louis Le Prince shot an eight-second sequence shortly before he disappeared on a train bound for Paris on September 5, 1890. Because Le Prince developed the technology for capturing motion on film alone in his laboratory, when he disappeared he took with him an alternate path of history. It was another five years before motion picture technology reemerged. What historical moments might have been captured had Le Prince not disappeared? This is one of the many questions posed by the French-speaking narrator (subtitles are in English) as he recounts Le Prince’s story. Unlike The Spirit and the Letter the past and the present feel appropriately linked through something more than the conceit of turning an actor upside down and changing the verb tense of a historical record. Buckingham is actually an eloquent writer and the narrator’s sober, reflective commentary matches the image of pedestrians and autos streaming past in endless succession. In one of the more poignant passages of the piece, the narrator describes in detail the four-second scene that Le Prince captured on the Leeds Bridge. The scene that took Le Prince only seconds to capture with film, takes minutes for the narrator to paint with words. The fact that the viewer is listening to the story while simultaneously viewing a bustle of activity on the same bridge, heightens Buckingham’s intriguing juxtaposition of past and present. Here the medium and the message beautifully merge.
The third film installation, Everything I Need is marred by problems unique to its staging: it is divided onto two screens, with images on one screen and text on the other. On one screen is projected a passage from the memoirs of Charlotte Wolff, a psychologist and gay rights activist of Jewish-German origin. Wolff recalls her first love — a female schoolgirl — her Berlin childhood, her flight from Nazi Germany, and her thoughts on returning to Berlin as a person deprived of a true home or state. On the second screen is a film loop featuring images of an airplane that was put out of commission in 1978, the same year that Wolff visited Berlin for the first time since fleeing the Nazi capital in 1933. The film consists primarily of long shots of the plane’s interior, including one lovely shot in which sunlight shifts across the plane’s burnt orange interior, suggesting a plane beginning its gradual ascent. Details like the presence of an ashtray in the chair’s arm remind us that this was from an earlier era in flight history. Wolff’s story is fascinating and some of the footage of the plane is very pretty if not quite haunting. Yet instead of complementing each other, the way that the words and film do in False Future, here the visual and the textual are in competition with each other. Like a poorly behaved couple at a cocktail party, each shouts out for the viewer’s attention, with the result that the listener cannot follow the narrative in either account.
All of this raises the question: What is the relationship between the written word and the visual in Buckingham’s work? Often the texts, spoken or projected, not only compete with but actually outdo the visual elements. In The Spirit and the Letter, for instance, one would probably be better served by simply reading the Vindication of the Rights of Woman than experiencing Buckingham’s video installation. Or, take another example, The Six-Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 c.e. which again consists of two elements: historical text and a visual element. Here the text is several passages, affixed to the wall of the gallery, that recount the history of the construction of Mount Rushmore and the struggle of the Lakota Sioux against it. At the end of the successive, lengthy passages, is a depiction of what Mount Rushmore might look like with the passage of time. The picture, on its own — without the accompanying history lesson — is a moving reminder of the impermanence of the American empire. Like the nation they represent, the faces of the four U.S. presidents will eventually crumble, adding merely one more layer of sediment to the long geological history of the earth. The text does not add power to the image and if anything actually detracts from it.
Will Someone Please Explain it to Me, I’ve Just Become a Radical (2008) is Buckingham at his best. The piece consists of twelve recent photographs of the interior of The Commerce Building at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where a bloody protest against the campus recruitment activities of the manufacturers of napalm, Dow Chemical, took place on October 18, 1967. The building has a new name and now includes programs devoted to such progressive fields of study as African, American Indian and Women’s Studies. However, the building itself has changed very little in the years since that fleeting moment of radicalism.
At first glance the photographs are deceptively simple compositions: empty hallways lined with cork boards and flyers, walls made of cream-colored concrete blocks, scoured bathrooms with slate-gray marble dividers and white tiled walls, a beige elevator framed by a dull brown border. Yet viewed as a group, these images have a cumulative power. They set a mood. Together they bring to light a historical palette that speaks to the present day. Traces of mid-twentieth century institutional power emerge in color: shades of gray, cream, burnt toast and mushroom. White washed concrete, speckled tiles and polished metal reveal their significance. They are the mortar that holds together the institution, metaphoric and real. Finally, the pictures remind the viewer of the insidious nature of power. The words “No Smoking” and “Please Do Not Sit On Handrails” loom on the wall above a heater, serving as not-so-gentle reminders of how students are trained to behave like “civilized” citizens. How do institutions reproduce themselves? Why do students resist resistance? It would be oversimplified to blame it on the shades of power that Buckingham so eloquently captures here. Still it might not be a bad place to start a conversation, to begin looking for answers. I’ve Just Become a Radical does what many of Buckingham’s other pieces fail to do. Stripped down to only the shortest of accompanying text, the photographs transport the viewer’s imagination to another time and place, inspiring reflection on the relationship between what happened and how we talk about — or don’t talk about — what happened.
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