Signal Excerpt.
Untitled (Eclipse) Excerpt
PRESS RELEASE: Mariah Garnett | Anton Lieberman: Common Era
September 4, 2012 - October 13, 2012
ltd los angeles is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring Los Angeles based artists, Mariah Garnett and Anton Lieberman. This exhibition will mark the first large-scale presentation of each artists’ work.
Mariah Garnett’s practice is rooted in re-interpreting found texts, using desire as an access point. For this exhibition, she turns to the internet as a source, and considers language, space and bodies through film, video and prints. Reading spam as a new form of automatic writing, Garnett uses unaltered texts from these anonymous missives to consider the relationship of the physical world to the metonymic space of the internet. While the word “found” implies an active positioning on the part of the artist, here she receives and sorts material.
The script for Signal, a 7-minute, 16mm film, attempts to narrativize a collection of spam emails gathered over a 3-year period, and is staged in or near “sacred spaces”. The landscape of Pyramid Lake, on the Paiute Indian reservation is populated by 10,000-year-old rock formations, many of which are off limits to the public. They loom in the background as characters banter in the sometimes awkward, sometimes solicitous, sometimes nonsensical dialog of spam. The Black Rock Desert Playa, while vacant most of the year, is home to close to 60,000 people annually during Burning Man. These locations were chosen because they act as both mirror and foil for the internet - at once wastelands and gathering sites for millions of people, while maintaining an ancient physicality that transcends any inhabiting group.
Untitled (Eclipse), an 11-minute long video, scrolls plaintive found text over the image of the 2012 annular solar eclipse. In Chalk, Banana, Renovated, and Hose, language is physically added to an image, while in Improved Spire and Presence, pieces of the images are subtracted, both in negative and in positive.
Anton Lieberman works under the precept that time, as far as humans are concerned, is irrelevant. What separates the caveman from the astronaut is roughly the same as what separates Coke from Pepsi: one small step for man, one unimpressed, slack-jawed stare from the universe. Past and future melt into a gooey heap, spoonfuls of which produce confused, time-traveling objects, the logic of which is at once confident and flawed. Tools of unknown origin and function pop into being. Plants grow as if governed by an entirely new set of rules. Bits of technology force themselves onto nature. Anachronisms abound.
If we skew a few historical events or laws of physics and allow them to snowball over time, our entire universe becomes alien. Even as it stands, the life
of a human and especially the existence of humans comes out of a string of near misses – celestial, political, genetic, or otherwise. Our relationship to this idea is a colossal intellectual struggle, marked by superstition and conjecture.
For this exhibition, Lieberman will present a group of sculptures, which supply humans with new superstitions and new relationships to their bodies and geometry. Rocky slabs smatter the walls with geometry that has been transposed from a computer program. A log, hollowed out and filled with neon tubes, emanates colored light like electronic sap. These are the points at which technology intersects forcibly with nature – a Frankenstein moment of sorts.
Destiny, Unmanifested; Mariah Garnettʼs Signal
Text by Karthik Pandian
Mariah Garnettʼs film Signal (2012) opens with what can be best described as a
series of “drifts.” The camera pans across the scarified, alien surfaces of
geological formations that ring a vast body of water, occasionally resting to
take in the hirsute face, dad glasses and gentle mien of a plump white middle
aged man as he delivers a monologue about settling into a hotel in a foreign
country. While he is indeed on foreign soil – the Paiute Indian Reservation in
western Nevada – the camera movements resist his ability to settle. They waver
in fixing the figure in this landscape. Unlike the iconic 19th century
photographs of explorers conquering (read: expropriating) the American West
under the banner of Manifest Destiny, Signal takes up the ethos of the drifter,
unsettling the subject and questioning in
what landscape, identity and body she belongs.
If the 20th centuryʼs answer to the hegemonic spirit of Manifest Destiny was
the minimal swagger of Land Art, Signal suggests that any contemporary
remapping of the West must be disoriented by the dematerialized terrain of the
Internet. She recruited her three nonprofessional actors on Craigslist, feeding
them lines edited from an archive of email SPAM she has collected over the last
three years. Populated by an anonymous ever-shifting community of the bored,
horny and enterprising, Craigslist is
a canny virtual foil to the craggy, textured landscape sensitively rendered by
Garnettʼs 16mm camera. As a countervailing force against the productivity of
the Internet, SPAM also assumes the figure of the drifter, contaminating the
flow of so many pertinent memos and missives with its wanderings. In Garnettʼs
composition of the text and her direction of the actors, SPAM becomes obscure,
abstract poetry uttered in disarmingly awkward and endearing spurts. Vague
untethered narratives weave in
and out of the soundtrack and are memorably punctuated by lines such as, “You
will drill her as good as Michael Phelps swims.”
While SPAM poses little imminent risk to us in the speech we encounter it as in the film, Garnett formalizes its threat to jam our sexual networks and render us unable to differentiate between the real and fake. She does this by mobilizing SPAMʼs chief tactic of impersonation, a strategy taken up to haunting effect in the first part of Garnettʼs film Encounters I May or May Not Have Had with Peter Berlin (2010-2012). In it, Garnett impersonates the eponymous 70s gay sex icon, producing a complicated self-portrait of cross-gender identification made all the more ecstatic by the whorls of color she paints directly onto the film. The actors in Signal do not impersonate; instead, they seem to negotiate the challenge of the script with their own voices, cadences and attitudes towards performance. Signalʼs most powerful instance of impersonation comes in the sudden appearance of the explosive figure of the Fly Geyser roughly half way through the film. Drift gives way to something more violent – a hard cut to a tribe of glommed together exploding cocks stained in an astonishing range of colors by its own ejaculate. Here, the landscape impersonates man. If the threat of SPAM is predicated on the possibility that some man somewhere would sacrifice his bank details to “impress his girlfriend tonight”, the eruption of the geyser is a hallucinatory vision of that desire. The geyser finds its sexual counterpart in the formations that enfold the actors as they deliver their lines. One shot in particular slowly explores an intricately variegated surface in close-up, pulling back to reveal the yawning circumference of its flower-like form. These substitutions are so thinly veiled that their effect is at once egregious and comic and to that extent, the landscape of Signal impersonates SPAM as well.
The decomposing snake quivering in its death throes (a cruel hangover from the
male enhancement pills), instructs us that the landscape in Signal is
(hopefully) a monument to a regime of sexual difference that is on its last
legs. Like the temporary communities that gather at Burning Man (whose empty
site makes an appearance in Signal) and the anonymous author of the text
featured in Untitled (Eclipse) (2012) seeking recruits for a drifting
“polyamorous” poker crew, she films remind us that it is
still possible to conjure beautiful, flawed, ridiculous, aggressive, utopian
visions in the American West.
