SOMETHING BETTER (Aleesa Cohene, Canada) [v/m/p]
At least as far back as New Criticism, and possibly even earlier, it has been a
commonplace in the theory of the arts that certain works are somehow inevitable.
The surrounding language made their organization likely, since the works in question
exemplify a particular style or approach that others have been hovering around,
to greater or lesser degrees of success. SOMETHING BETTER, a three-monitor video
work by Aleesa Cohene, is an axiomatic work in this regard.
As you watch it unfurl, it's impossible not to see it as a part of a genre or type
within post-appropriation media art. It consists of an assemblage of clips from
banal soap operas and made-for-TV movies, all of which center in some way
on relations within the nuclear family and inside a highly conventional post-1970s
ranch-house suburbia. Cohene makes no attempt to disguise the provenance
of the source material, and in fact its origin forms a fundamental aspect of the
piece's reception. That is, we realize right off the bat that we're seeing an artist
combing through loads of detritus in order to distill an essence perceived within
something hopelessly trivial and degraded. There have been umpteen-thousand
creative works in this mold, from high-art installations to feature films, but
SOMETHING BETTER lives up to its title in unexpected ways.
Cohene renews these basic ideas through the application of forms which seem
conventional enough but, over time, impress upon the viewer just how advanced they are.
Cohene's three monitors are placed side by side. They contain archetypes:
the father on the left, a child in the center, and the mother on the right.
But within this simple arrangement Cohene generates a consistent mise-en-scène,
meticulously matching and/or slowly mutating the interchangeable domestic interiors
to create a shifting yet coherent widescreen field of play. The result is that the trappings
of suburban ideology -- the shape and decor of these outdated "homes of the future" --
attains a spatial continuity, while each of the actants are trapped inside their own private
sphere of influence. The fathers come and go, continually struggling to gain readmittance
to the family unit, or retain their tenuous positions therein. Mothers seem to dote and
strive on the children's behalf, but are more often than not projecting their own thwarted
desires onto their tele-offspring. And, in the middle, the kids are almost always lonely,
isolated, ridden with anxiety about family dynamics they can perceive as tremors in the
foundation but are physically barred from witnessing. Kids aren't just outside the
traditional frameline; they are sealed within their own monitor, little John Travoltas in
bubbles of isolation.
As I describe it, SOMETHING BETTER immediately sounds like a kind of work you know,
perhaps all too well. In fact, it takes a festival like Images to highlight a work like Cohene's,
precisely because on the face of it, its moves and rhetorics are all too familiar.
We know that suburbia is stifling, and that a certain stripe of televised pabulum
promotes false nostalgia for idyllic bonhomie. For the main throughline of experimental
film/video criticism and practice, Cohene's effort will seem overly discursive and
inadequately attentive to the material properties of images. But this is incorrect in the
extreme; what makes SOMETHING BETTER so exceptionally powerful is Cohene's formalist
chops, her way of linking images based not so much on their place in a recipe but on
their tone, their lighting schemes, their articulation of televisual space. And, as far as
using multiple clips and performers to synthesize her three symbolic meta-subjects,
Cohene manages to afford each module in the collage its own integrity which successfully
cultivating an arc, not just of character but of bodily type and similarity in comportment.
The best point of comparison is Craig Baldwin's Mock Up on Mu, which splices
iconic actors and performances into an external diegesis with utmost skill. But Cohene's
meta-narrative is one of grand operatic ebbs and flows, reliant less on moment-to-
monent storytelling than overarching motivic structures. (And music and sound design do
play a key role in the broad graft of the thing.) Since it is so well-constructed throughout,
Cohene's outsized intent -- one so often attempted but usually unable to lift itself out of
the mire of irony -- hits its every emotional mark. Like certain proto-emo vocalists
(Scott Walker, Nick Cave, and especially Jeff Buckley come to mind here), the rigor, the
control over the instrument, puts the pathos across, sincerely and with aching precision.
This emotional range can best be understood with two examples of excerpted dialogue,
stuff that would be risible in its made-for-TV context but here becomes almost
shattering. A mother at the end of her rope (divorce? special needs children? encroaching
poverty?) explains, "It is my job to do everything I can to make my children part of the
normal world." But of course, it's the normal world that is crushing these children where
they stand. These tightly permed Jill St. Johns and Jaclyn Smiths bear up, bite their lips,
drink in private. A raging father, meanwhile, defends his abandonment of the family unit:
"She prefers the senseless pain we inflict on each other to the pain we would otherwise
inflict on ourselves. But I am not afraid of that solitary pain." All of Cohene's fathers
struggle at the threshold, like Ethan Edwards in The Searchers, bland Tom
Courtenays and Gabriel Byrnes alone in the rain. I don't want to oversell
SOMETHING BETTER, although I do think it's a fabulous piece. But it's possible that
part of Cohene's success comes from the fact that she's mining something that we've
rehearsed, again and again, like community theatre. We know the script and are inclined
to expect very little. Cohene takes something routine, like an old Broadway number, and
belts it out for all she's worth. And it hits.
This review was written by
Michael Sicinski (Academic Hack) for the 2009
Images Festival.
|
