In the Beginning: Media Art and History

Camille Henrot
French, b. Paris, 1978
Grosse Fatigue
2013
Single-channel video; color; sound; 13:46 min.
Gift of Kamel Mennour and Camille Henrot, 2013 (13.9)

“In the beginning there was no earth, no water—nothing. There was a single hill called Nunne Chaha. In the beginning everything was dead. In the beginning there was nothing; nothing at all. No light, no life, no movement, no breath. In the beginning there was an immense unit of energy. In the beginning there was nothing but shadow and only darkness and water and the great god Bumba. In the beginning were quantum fluctuations.”

During a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution in 2012, Camille Henrot set out to understand the systems humans have created to organize our knowledge about the world and its origins. The resulting video, Grosse Fatigue, critiques the human ambition to represent the totality of the world, an aspiration that underpins many museum collections. Windows rapidly multiply on a computer desktop, crowding the screen with glimpses of the Smithsonian’s holdings—including scenes filmed at the National Museum of Natural History—and the frenetic results of Google Images searches. The accompanying soundtrack, composed by Joakim Bouaziz, written by Henrot and poet Jacob Bromberg and voiced by artist Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh, melds creation myths from Navajo, Jewish, Dogon, and Hindu cultures, among others. Assembling an alluring yet overwhelming cascade of images, Henrot questions the possibility that we can ever synthesize vast, ever-increasing amounts of human knowledge into a totalizing whole.

Jennie C. Jones works at the intersection of art history, music history, and Black history. In her visual and sound work, she connects the Minimalist language used by artists in the 1960s to the conceptual strategies employed by Black musicians in the same period, drawing attention to the unsung affinities between these two traditions. To create Higher Resonance, Jones mined archival recordings of African American avant-garde jazz and experimental music, including the work of composers and performers Alice Coltrane, Olly Wilson, Alvin Singleton, Wendell Logan, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Jones reworked them through a digital editing technique called micro-sampling, in which she extracts and manipulates single notes or phrases. The result is a rich audio collage that highlights moments of confluence and conversation among her disparate sources.

In Dream English Kid, 1964–1999 AD, the British artist Mark Leckey crafts a self-portrait from found video footage. The work originated when Leckey stumbled upon a grainy YouTube video of a 1979 Joy Division concert in Liverpool that he had attended as a teenager. The chance discovery prompted the artist to imagine the possibility of writing his autobiography from material that already existed online. Dream English Kid is a collage of what Leckey calls “found memories” from sources such as advertisements, television programs, and news reports, as well as reconstructions using props and models. Conceptual and personal in equal measure, Dream English Kid offers glimpses into Leckey’s episodic recollections of his youth and asks how we connect our individual lives to shared memory in the age of the Internet.

The Pruitt-Igoe public housing projects in St. Louis were demolished in 1972, not even two decades after their construction. Gaillard’s video reflects on this infamous historical event, which has become synonymous with the failure of Modernist architecture’s progressive aspirations. (More precisely, city authorities neglected to maintain the projects or to build sufficient connections with the communities living there.) Where archival documentation of the incident itself might be expected, however, Gaillard instead records the destruction of another building—this one belonging to the Sighthill housing project in Glasgow, Scotland, razed in 2008. As the building collapses and a cloud of dust rises, Gaillard cuts to the rushing waters of Niagara Falls, illuminated by colored lights. The video links these two kinds of “falls”—connecting the visual marvel of the waterfall to the spectacle of architectural ruin. Gaillard’s linkage of Pruitt-Igoe and Sighthill suggests that history repeats itself and points to the ongoing failure of governments to fulfill their social promises.

In this work, Williams creates a live-action portrait of America that viscerally conveys the nation’s history of violence against Black bodies and land. Williams draws a map of the United States by flinging and smearing soil onto a wall-mounted canvas, occasionally pausing to gather handfuls of the material from a coffin-like sculpture containing an earthen face. After a few minutes, a second performer joins and throws soil at Williams as they stand and kneel against the wall. As the soil in the box is slowly exhausted, the artist paints a picture of extraction—of labor from enslaved people on the one hand, and of the earth’s natural resources on the other. The soil in the performance was gathered from plantation ruins in St. Croix, where Williams’s ancestors were enslaved, and from the grounds of the house that one of their ancestors owned after she was emancipated.

In 2013, Rainer Ganahl staged a musical performance in El Mundo, a discount store in New York’s East Harlem that had recently fallen victim to rising rents. Ganahl, who had lived in the neighborhood for sixteen years, had become interested in the store’s history: it replaced the former Eagle Theater, where luminaries including Tito Puente and Celia Cruz had played. The artist rented the space for an evening and brought in musicians to stage a classical music performance. Some of the works performed addressed the struggles of working-class people during Europe’s Industrial Revolution, suggesting parallels with the turmoil wrought by gentrification in contemporary New York. Ganahl wove footage of the performance—captured by a professional on film and by audience members with handheld cameras—into a two-channel video. El Mundo both draws attention to the site’s complex history and warns of the potential for such histories to be obscured by the forces of unchecked growth.

Werner Herzog’s film Fitzcarraldo (1982) follows an Irish rubber baron who dreams of building an opera house in the Peruvian Amazon. In 2015, C.T. Jasper and Joanna Malinowska revisited this story with the aim of critiquing its colonialist underpinnings. They decided to stage Stanisław Moniuszko’s Halka, a tragic love story considered one of Poland’s national operas, in the town of Cazale, Haiti. The pairing of the opera and the location drew on Cazale’s unique history: in 1802, Napoleon had sent Polish soldiers to put down the Haitian Revolution, but many switched sides, seeing their own hopes for an independent Poland reflected in the Haitians’ revolt against enslavement and colonial domination. Many remained in Cazale, and their descendants still live there, calling themselves Poloné. Jasper and Malinowska’s video—normally shown in panoramic format—records the performance of the opera, staged in collaboration with a Polish opera group and Haitian musicians and dancers, and attests to the capaciousness of both Haitian and Polish identity.

Palestinian–Saudi Arabian artist Dana Awartani roots her work in traditional Islamic art forms, incorporating ritual, sacred geometry, and historic techniques as a means of connecting to the past and preserving traditional practices. This video records the destruction of a sand installation that Awartani created in an abandoned home in an older neighborhood of Jeddah. Using colored sand, she transformed the drab flooring into a brightly colored geometric pattern characteristic of traditional Islamic tilework. After painstakingly completing the sand installation, Awartani methodically sweeps it away. Her actions allude to the impact of urban development in Jeddah, and what the artist views as an obsession with progress over cultural preservation. The work also speaks to the complex layering of old and new in the spaces we create and inhabit.

In 2014, Héctor Zamora was invited to organize a public event in São Paulo’s Hospital Matarazzo, an abandoned building slated for redevelopment. Zamora instructed performers to toss potted plants through the building’s windows into the courtyard; the video shows the plants as they sail through the air and crash in a staccato rhythm. The performance critiques what Zamora perceives as the art world’s “abuse of history”: the unspoken imperative that artworks must be anchored by historical references in order to have value. By refusing to engage with the site’s context, Zamora’s absurd act embodied pure creative freedom—and suggested that an excessive focus on the past can be limiting. (The work was also an act of liberation for the plants, allowing them to escape their broken pots and grow freely.) Zamora often quotes the philosopher Michel Foucault’s dictum that “liberty is a practice”: individuals must constantly enact their freedom, rather than relying on laws and institutions alone.

Kota Ezawa looks to the news, popular culture, art history, and cinema to source material for his work. He distills this found imagery into flat, pared-down animations, which explore how recording technologies mediate our understanding of history. Paint Unpaint is an animation based on a scene from Hans Namuth’s famous film Jackson Pollock 51, which records Pollock through a pane of glass onto which he drips paint. Ezawa reproduces Pollock’s apparently spontaneous gestures in careful detail. In his breakthrough work, The Simpson Verdict, Ezawa animates courtroom footage of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal; the stylized flattening draws attention to the protagonists’ facial expressions and subtle gestures. Finally, The Unbearable Lightness of Being addresses two presidential assassinations: that of John F. Kennedy, captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, and that of Abraham Lincoln, as portrayed in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Ezawa’s animation creates a kind of leveling between these two images of death, one recorded live and one already a highly mediated reenactment.

Kota Ezawa looks to the news, popular culture, art history, and cinema to source material for his work. He distills this found imagery into flat, pared-down animations, which explore how recording technologies mediate our understanding of history. Paint Unpaint is an animation based on a scene from Hans Namuth’s famous film Jackson Pollock 51, which records Pollock through a pane of glass onto which he drips paint. Ezawa reproduces Pollock’s apparently spontaneous gestures in careful detail. In his breakthrough work, The Simpson Verdict, Ezawa animates courtroom footage of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal; the stylized flattening draws attention to the protagonists’ facial expressions and subtle gestures. Finally, The Unbearable Lightness of Being addresses two presidential assassinations: that of John F. Kennedy, captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, and that of Abraham Lincoln, as portrayed in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Ezawa’s animation creates a kind of leveling between these two images of death, one recorded live and one already a highly mediated reenactment.

Kota Ezawa looks to the news, popular culture, art history, and cinema to source material for his work. He distills this found imagery into flat, pared-down animations, which explore how recording technologies mediate our understanding of history. Paint Unpaint is an animation based on a scene from Hans Namuth’s famous film Jackson Pollock 51, which records Pollock through a pane of glass onto which he drips paint. Ezawa reproduces Pollock’s apparently spontaneous gestures in careful detail. In his breakthrough work, The Simpson Verdict, Ezawa animates courtroom footage of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal; the stylized flattening draws attention to the protagonists’ facial expressions and subtle gestures. Finally, The Unbearable Lightness of Being addresses two presidential assassinations: that of John F. Kennedy, captured on film by Abraham Zapruder, and that of Abraham Lincoln, as portrayed in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. Ezawa’s animation creates a kind of leveling between these two images of death, one recorded live and one already a highly mediated reenactment.

William Kentridge, the child of two lawyers who actively fought the apartheid system, makes hand-drawn animated films that reflect on his country’s recent past. To create each sequential frame, he draws, erases, and reworks charcoal sketches, leaving traces that linger in ghostly fashion. Stereoscope is the eighth episode in his series about Soho Eckstein, a fictional white businessman in Johannesburg. Structured partly around a split screen whose initially identical halves gradually diverge, the film charts Eckstein’s inability to come to terms with events unfolding around him. As he sits in his office, immersed in accounting books, a web of blue lines spreads outward into the city, connecting protesting crowds, police beatings, a body in the street, and an exploding bomb. In the final scene, Eckstein weeps as blue rivulets flow from his pockets, flooding the room where he stands. Like a palimpsest, Kentridge’s incomplete erasures mark the continued effects of history on the present.

In the 1950s, Joseph Hirshhorn planned to build a utopian “city of culture” in the wilderness of western Ontario, the site of his lucrative mining business. He hired Modernist architect Philip Johnson to design the town, which would be centered around an art museum that would house Hirshhorn’s growing collection. In 2007, the artist Terence Gower became interested in this little-known history during a fellowship at the Smithsonian. After delving into the archives, he created an animated tour of Hirshhorn, Ontario—which, like most utopias, never materialized. (The search for an alternative site ultimately led to the establishment of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden on the National Mall.) Wilderness Utopia takes the form of a promotional video for the imagined town, describing it as a “sophisticated cultural center” and lingering on the abstract masterpieces in its museum. Gower uses computer-generated animation as a language for imagining an alternative history in copious detail.

This video includes strong language.

Sondra Perry’s work examines how technology mediates familial and cultural histories. In this video, an avatar modeled after Perry delivers a monologue. She first discusses the limitations of the software used to render her image and its inability to reproduce Perry’s body type. The avatar then discusses a study examining the “just world” belief—the idea that the world is a fair place where people get what they deserve—and its harmful effects on Black people, who are led to believe that negative outcomes stem from personal failings rather than systemic racism. The avatar hovers between speaking as a Black subject in the real world and as a digital being in the virtual realm. “What’s still familiar is our incredible exhaustion: looping, running, daily,” she says. Perry’s video is normally shown on monitors mounted to an exercise bike intended for office settings; viewers who turn the bike’s pedals find that their own strenuous, but unproductive, physical labor resonates with the avatar’s ruminations. Perry splices the central monologue with footage of exorcisms and animated skin that ripples in digital waves.