A group of men chat on the street corner. Behind them, a hamburger rotates slowly, to serene music. An astronaut tumbles through space. Prisoners of war get anti-communist propaganda tattooed on their chests and backs. A White man muses on the fear White people have of retribution from Black people about slavery.
It’s a quiet summer night on Crown Street, but something is disrupting the flow — and in its disruption, is reminding us of the flow that we’re in almost all the time and usually don’t pay much attention to.
The disruption makes us aware of how we’re subtly being disrupted all the time, without us being entirely conscious of it. What would happen if we were to wake all the way up to that fact?
Those questions lie at the heart of “Completely Familiar, Entirely Free,” running now at Artspace on the corner of Orange and Crown through Sept. 10. The exhibit, curated by Philadelphia-based artists Saskia Globig and Michael Ipsen, “is both television and public art, public access and window shopping, online shopping and post-Internet shopping,” as an accompanying note states. In addition to a video from Globig and Ipsen, it features video pieces from a mix of New Haven- and Philadelphia-based artists: Lani Asunción, Amira Brown, Kyuri Jeon, Micah Lat, Matt Lavine, Anna Lindemann, Shelby Meier, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Jessica Smolinski, and Sonnie Wooden.
“Drawing on the Artspace gallery’s history as a furniture salesroom,” the note continues, the show deploys “the tactics of outdoor video advertising decoupled from any commercial utility. The street-facing video loops take advantage of the assumption that our eyes are always drawn to moving images in our peripheral vision. The curators use this video-advertising strategy to present passing viewers with a program of contemporary video work where they might have expected an ad. This intervention highlights the affective valences of the imagined lives that viewer/consumers buy, making note that much of what we are being sold is not physical and not entirely free.”
The exhibit, the note argues, “accentuates the unique role art institutions can play in creating spaces for noncommercial contemplation within the contemporary urban fabric. But the aesthetics of the installed work actively acknowledges that art never actually lives outside transactional relationships or the circulation of capital. Instead, it asks us to consider the obfuscated structures of exchange and commercialization that underpin many of the ostensibly free things that we consume. The presentation of the work is art-as-camouflage, meant to mimic urban video advertisements to stage a perceptual intervention in the increasingly commercialized landscape of the everyday. ‘Completely Familiar, Entirely Free’ presents an open window that invites viewers into more twisted, expansive, and unexpected speculations and dreams that can exist beyond the realms of buying and selling.”
The prose of the official description of the show involves some hyperventilation, as it seems most contemporary gallery descriptions of art shows must. But the show itself hits the targets it aims for, with effectively disorienting, thought-provoking results.
Each of the artists may have created their videos independently, but because the screens cycle through the videos out of phase with one another, the experience of the show isn’t of watching each of the videos in succession so much as it’s of seeing a collage of several of the videos at once. Some of them are pleasantly surreal, such as the footage of a woman in a tropical-print dress donning boxing gloves to then hit panels that create sounds in time with some prerecorded music.
At the same time, while I was there, another video dove headfirst into the thorniest sides of race relations in the U.S. Clips of a man with a Southern accent explaining that the roots of racism lay in White fear of Black retribution for slavery served as a backbone for other, more prodding clips. One was of a White woman explaining how much and why she loved have sex with Black men. Another was of two Black boys all too ready to physically fight each other over how a sandwich should be prepared. Another video featured footage from prisoner of war camps in Korea in the 1950s, detailing a program that captured Chinese POWs took part in, in which they were tattooed with anti-Communist propaganda to prove their loyalty and allow them to be repatriated to Taiwan rather than be sent to mainland China. These videos took seriously the question of what hanging out on the street could be like if storefronts delivered challenging ideas instead of messages designed simply to part you from your cash.
The aforementioned video of the rotating hamburger, meanwhile, undermined the idea of a hamburger ad altogether through the simple trick of just going on for far too long. Every TV commercial for burgers features a slowly rotating burger, but the longer version in Artspace’s window showed why the typical ads cut away after a couple seconds. It turned out that a couple full revolutions around the burger was enough time to have second thoughts about eating it. Was that meat OK? Were the bun and vegetables really fresh? There was plenty of time to wonder.
Other times, the glass between the videos and the street outside began to melt. The music from some of the vidoes blended with the music from passing cars. Voices from the videos and passersby mingled. At one point, a very slo-mo film of a dog running across a beach was given a soundtrack by a passing Crown Street seagull, calling out from somewhere in the air above the streetlights.
Driving home from the exhibit, my eyes and mind were refreshed to what was usually in storefront windows and on billboards, and I could see all over again how, in some ways, the urban landscape can be a visually docile place: a lot of simple geometric shapes piled on top of each other, punctuated by photographs of smiling people, friendly colors, big letters, all lined up toward the goal of convincing you to stop asking questions and spend money. What if, for an entire month, instead every billboard, every storefront, got us to think about something a little differently, confront difficult truths, ask pointed questions? How might that change the way we move through the city — and talk to one another, not just on one street corner, but all of them?
“Completely Familiar, Entirely Free” runs at Artspace through Sept. 10. Visit the gallery’s website for more information, or just visit its storefront after the sun goes down.
How much consciousness is in the window?????
You can walk down Crown Street any night, pass the twirling digital burger, then immediately walk past homeless folks sleeping in the Artspace Vestibule...
I was particulary struck by the cognitive dissonance..... file under 'unintended messaging'....