Hirsch Perlman
Abstract and narrative film- and video makers alike have long tried to synchronize music and image, as in Disney’s Fantasia or Oskar Fischinger’s abstract films. But such amalgams are arguably artificial, because a projected moving image and music are too fundamentally different to blend. Ernie Kovacs deliciously parodied the absurdity of such combines, even–or especially–when the synchrony is perfect, in a “city symphony” video of streets coming to life at dawn, unexpectedly and hilariously matched with Bartok’s complex Concerto for Orchestra. Hirsch Perlman’s four videos at Donald Young are in such a tradition.
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The first video in Two More Affect Studies is quite strong, a mix of belief and self-parody. (The second, rapidly cut stills of road imagery set to Miles Davis’s “Pinocchio,” might have benefited from an awareness of such avant-garde filmmakers as Robert Breer and Pat O’Neill, whose densely layered films are also beautifully structured.) Three narrow horizontal bands of images literalize Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” written in 1956 when he was newly married: “I keep a close watch on this heart of mine….Because you’re mine, I walk the line.” The top band shows a train traveling across a landscape, the middle a strip of desert moving in the opposite direction, and the bottom flickering images of a road’s white centerline. But the video is pointedly artificial: the desert landscape is clearly a digitized still image that Perlman repeatedly scrolls past, and the train is from another part of the same still. Even the white centerline is a human construction. And yet there’s a kind of sincerity behind these three visions of linearity, which go so well with Cash’s sonorous voice; monogamy seems both admirable and absurd. This blend of sincerity and parody is key to the exhibit.
The photos suggest an artist who walls himself off from others in order to play. Yet is the artist in control? The mounds of junk surrounding the figures–corrugated cardboard, Styrofoam peanuts, bubble wrap, zip ties, clothesline, wire, temporary fencing–make it seem this stuff has congealed on its own into disturbingly humanlike shapes, inanimate matter coming to life as monsters. The figures are sometimes posed as if walking or facing each other in conversation, and at other times sit passively or, more disturbingly, hang from the ceiling. Many are in stages of partial completion–or dissolution. Even though the photos are not installed in chronological order, you can see the evolution of the project from the numbers–inferring, for example, that Perlman pulled his initial cardboard figures apart and reused the materials to create a giant head, at once scary and funny, that appears and reappears.
Six conceptual works at the Smart Museum show how four Chinese photographers have entered into the international art dialogue. Three of the four repeat current photography’s biggest cliche: the artist’s self-portrait in an unusual role or setting. As is often true of such pictures, there’s a curious tone of pathos, which here perhaps has to do with the position of artists in modern China, westernizing fast after decades of isolation but still far from encouraging free expression.
