A little more about the above performance piece and the artist.
Written by Michelle Weinberg
The judges for this year’s Optic Nerve festival were Patrick de Bokay, new director of the Miami International Film Festival, Miami artist slash art critic Gean Moreno, and MOCA’s Director slash Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater. These three individuals bravely subjected themselves to viewing seventy short film and video submissions and then whittled them down to seventeen. The works ranged from pseudo-documentary to performance art, from slick animation to quirky lo-tech effects and hand-drawn efforts. The voices were accomplished, or neophyte, or somewhere in between. In fact, the inclusion of several student works from local artist factories, such as MIU, and recent grads from FIU, was truly welcome.
The judges for this year’s Optic Nerve festival were Patrick de Bokay, new director of the Miami International Film Festival, Miami artist slash art critic Gean Moreno, and MOCA’s Director slash Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater. These three individuals bravely subjected themselves to viewing seventy short film and video submissions and then whittled them down to seventeen. The works ranged from pseudo-documentary to performance art, from slick animation to quirky lo-tech effects and hand-drawn efforts. The voices were accomplished, or neophyte, or somewhere in between. In fact, the inclusion of several student works from local artist factories, such as MIU, and recent grads from FIU, was truly welcome.
It is the rare student film program that can avoid producing the familiar horror flick, filmed on campus, by “real” student actors. The conventions of this genre are so stable, that the only tension troubling the mind of the viewer is “when does the fake blood appear?” Footsteps, directed by Robert Dionne, did not leave us hanging. The Source, by Javier Gonzales, was so heavily influenced by highly visible South African artist William Kentridge’s signature stop-motion charcoal drawing technique that it was difficult to focus away from that fact. Even the content and imagery for The Source was so tainted by Kentridge, conjuring the ravages of industry on the environment and the water cycle, it has to be classified as homage. Gonzales’ other work, Trike, which manipulates a child’s tricycle through Dr.Caligari-like hallways only to be swallowed by a yawning doorway, was way more original. Hello my name is Bob, Kenneth Greenbaum, began like a sentimental documentary, with a twangy soundtrack and poignant mumbling from a forlorn character, then morphed into an utter mystery.
MOCA purchases a work at each Optic Nerve fest, financed agreeably by Starbucks, that purveyor of caffeine and communal, quasi-public space, both café and internet. This year, with a smidgeon siphoned off from their colossal coffee coffers, MOCA acquired Philip Estlund’s Crossing the Equator, a flick that kept me wondering whether or not the footage was lifted from an episode of mass torture visited on prisoners of war, or a gay male S&M picnic, or an elaborate fraternity/military hazing ritual. What with the gantlet of whipping, in and out of coffins, and baptismal dunkings, it whipped up emotion and left the mind reeling. Estlund otherwise makes photo collages which have a detached, precise quality. In his hands, the moving image can clearly cause greater psychic discomfort than the delicate two-dimensional surprise of a collage.
Discomfort leads us naturally to the entry from artist Susan Lee-Chun, Will You Tell Me All Your Ancient Chinese Secrets?, Which was as grueling as it was comical, and a fascinating turnaround from an artist known in the Miami art scene for her mute public manifestations swathed in camouflage. Will You Tell Me reversed that trend, exposing the artist’s vulnerability and individuality in a visceral way. While restrained and subjected to some sort of physical torture (off screen, but implying sadistic foot tickling) she is interrogated by a voice-over demanding her to confess to the most ridiculous, stereotypical “facts” based solely on her Asian features. The duration of this short work was timed to transfer the sensation of unbearable torture to the audience, and as such, it was clearly a success.
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Another short that featured vulnerability in a monologue was Richard Walker’s Successive Inconceivable Events. The
