We Interrupt
Your Program
Mills College Art Museum
Oakland, California, USA
January 16 March 16, 2008
Reviewed by Meredith Tromble
If, as some linguists say, men interrupt
women as a way of asserting their power,
then the 14 artists in We Interrupt
Your Program turn the tables. Curator
Marcia Tanner has assembled an international
cadre of artists who, she writes, use
media to "appropriate, intervene in, reconfigure
and recontextualize dominant narratives
of politics, war, power, science, technology,
and gender."
That quote from Tanner's catalog text
casts the project in rather formal terms,
but the works on view butt in, cut short,
disturb, heckle, hinder, impede, inject,
and intrude on the patriarchal values
of mainstream media with satisfying irreverence.
The works also have satisfying formal
variety, including a reverse-Pandora's
box (Julianne Swartz), pigment prints
on Hahnemule rag stock (Anne Walsh) a
computer-key textile (Jean Shin) and video-in-giant-microscope
(Gail Wight) as well as videos and projections,
There are plenty of headphones and black
boxes to be seen, but the show is a lively
presence in the gallery as well as on
the monitors.
taH pagh taHbe (To Be or Not to Be)
(2006), a video projection by Maria
Antelman, and Afflicted Powers (2007),
an installation by Gail Wight with other
members of Retort, are installed at opposite
ends of the gallery and mark the extremes
of mood in the exhibition. The soundtrack
of taH pagh taHbe is Hamlet's "to
be or not to be" soliloquy delivered
in Klingon, the language of the warrior
aliens in Star Trek. Like all things
Star Trek, Klingon (which was created
by the linguist Marc Okrand and partially
based on an extinct Native American language)
has escaped the screen to propagate in
the "real" world. This circumstance might
prompt a viewer to reflect on mediated
realities -- if that viewer could tear
her consciousness away from the gorgeous
sights on the screen, a flow of still
photographs taken in a decommissioned
NASA hangar.
Antelman found that hangar a thing of
beauty. Her camera wanders through it
with awe and without judgment, as if
like a Klingon she were seeing
a temple on a strange world for the first
time. The images dissolve one into the
other, just quickly enough that the eye
can't quite grasp their details. The palette
is metallic burnished golds, silvers,
and blues--and the compositions are bardic,
suggesting the epic ambitions that created
the space. As the last words of Shakespeare's
famous meditation on suicide roll by,
familiar in cadence if not in consonants,
the stream of images settles in a cockpit.
The pilot's seat is vacant and fraying
at the edges. The dream of space is beautiful,
but is it, like that seat, empty?
Where Antelman creates a space of reflection,
Wight and the other members of Retort*
create a space of protest. Broadsides
paper the side walls of Afflicted Powers.
In the center of the room stand two waist-high
stacks of the same leaflets, positioned
like twin towers. They front a video projection
of Pablo Picasso's Guernica; portions
of the painting have been cut away to
reveal filmed footage of bombings. Over
and over again, planes appear, discharge
their explosives, and smoke boils up from
the bottom of the painting. The formal
unification of still and moving image
is remarkably effective, The painted figures
speak, as they always have, of suffering,
while the recurrent bombings makes one
feel that history is repeating.
Wight's fresh reworking of Guernica
redeems the militant tone of the broadsides,
which teeter on the edge of righteousness.
Credited to Michael Watt, the twin texts
use phrases like "crisis of hegemony"
and "dogs [who] will all want their share
of the spoils." If the language seems
a bit reminiscent of Mao, in the context
of the installation its heat works. In
its certainty it mirrors the attitudes
it decries, but it also performs an impassioned
"NO!" to bombing in Iraq, Gaza, and Lebanon
while tying it to larger political themes.
While not all the works in the exhibition
can be discussed in detail here, it is
worth noting that Anne Walsh's Sound
FX Library, p. 426 Space (2004) and
Claudia X. Valdes's In the Dream of
the Planet (2002) can be read along
the same axis as Antelman and Wight's
works. Like Antelman, Walsh uses formal
beauty to get her point across. The work
is, as advertised, a reproduction of a
page from a sound effects catalog. By
enlarging it and printing it with sensual
attention to materials, Walsh makes from
the flimsy page an object of wonder. Among
its pleasures is a list of "whooshes,"
including a "quick, ripping whoosh" and
a "processed whoosh, useful as moving
light or laser beams." In a most economical
way, Walsh draws the curtain on which
fantasies of space are projected, revealing
the mechanics of their construction.
Valdes's single channel video, like Wight
with Retort's work, recuts a well-known
work about bombing, in this case the 1983
made-for-television movie The Day After.
The screenplay dramatizes the aftermath
of a massive nuclear attack on the United
States. Valdes condensed the movie into
six 56-second variations. At that pace,
the scenes fly by too quickly to comprehend.
In just a few places the editing slows
long enough for the viewer to take in
a phrase or an action. These pauses fall
on different scenes from version to version,
picking out story threads such as medical,
military, or civilian responses to the
event. By making manifest various perspectives
within the story, she provokes political
concern without commanding an answer.
"We Interrupt Your Program" is rich with
interpenetrating themes and subthemes,
fielding enough ideas to fill several
essays. For more than a decade Tanner,
who also curated "Brides of Frankenstein"
(San Jose Museum of Art, 2006), "Lineaments
of Gratified Desire" and "Aural Sex" (Catharine
Clark Gallery, San Francisco, 2004 and
2000 respectively) and "Bad Girls West"
(UCLA Wight Gallery, 1994), has been putting
together superb, feminist-inflected exhibitions.
At times it must have seemed as if she
was barely holding off a mainstream view
of feminism as humorless, single-minded,
and dogmatic. But in the wake of two major
exhibitions, WACK! and Global
Feminisms, that let viewers see for
themselves the heterogenous, varied forms
of feminist art, Tanner's insights into
the contemporary moment will convince
all kinds of viewers that in dismissing
feminism, they miss out.
Also included in the exhibition are works
by Maja Bajevic, Maria Friberg, Nina Katchadourian,
Marisa Olson, Julia Page, Shannon Plumb,
Renetta Sitoy, and Stephanie Syjuco.
* According to the exhibition catalog,
Retort is a "gathering of antagonists
to capital and empire, based for two decades
in the San Francisco Bay Area." In addition
to Wight, members include Ian Boal, T.J.
Clark, Joe Matthews, and Michael Watts.