Today is the official opening for the six-month run of the 8th edition of Site Santa Fe's International Biennial. Organized over a six-year period by two young and extremely talented curators, Sarah Lewis, a graduate student from Yale, and Daniel Belasco, an assistant curator at The Jewish Museum in New York, The Dissolve is a landmark exhibition in the history of modern and contemporary art, one that will be closely studied by art historians for years. Rarely has a group show devoted to work in any medium demonstrated such uniform excellence in the quality of its selections, the legibility of its thematic concerns and the beauty and innovation of its physical presentation. That all this has been achieved in regard to a survey of contemporary video renders the accomplishment all the more astounding. The central theme is the return of hand-made image-making in the creation of moving images (i.e. video art), a trend that began in earnest in the middle 1990s when the work of William Kentridge burst upon the international art world. As I have previously noted elsewhere, Kentridge's use of relatively primitive techniques allied to "animation", including his vivid incorporation of drawings and extensive use of pentimenti to inscribe the process of his art-making on film (later transferred to laser discs and DVDs) recuperated tactility as a sensory component of moving pictures comparable to its importance and effectiveness in painting. There are neurons in the brain's sensory/association cortex that respond to both sight and touch, and there are mirror neurons in the forebrain that copy the movements of other sentient beings, perhaps allowing the muscle memory of a viewer to rehearse the same processes that the painter used in creating the shifting field of painterly cuisine or impasto in the painting under view. The physical flatness of photographs, videos and the glass surface of monitor screens, has heretofore diminished the sensory experience of the viewer when compared to painting, drawing and sculpture. Kentridge broke through the glass barrier with the implied tactility of his Drawings for Projection and combined their look and feel with the power of extraordinary sound and music, not to mention his subtle handling of disturbing political issues. All of this served to detonate a new freedom in artistic film-making. The show contains four older works to demonstrate the historical roots of this approach, including the astounding Enchanted Drawing (1900) from the laboratories of Thomas Edison in which an artist draws a wine bottle and a glass on a sketchpad and then magically pulls them off his easel and into the real world. In this marvelous artifact, live action and animation are combined with stop-motion technique to create a kind of close-up magic; one wonders if Kentridge ever had the opportunity to view this film in the early stages of his development. The Dissolve also contains the oldest surviving feature-length film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), by Lotte Reiniger (1899-1981), in which silhouette puppets (later used by both Kentridge and Kara Walker) are employed. 

 

Highlights of the 26 works by 30 contemporary artists would have to include the videos by the aforementioned Kara Walker (b.1969), internationally famous for her use of 19th century style paper cutouts (silhouettes) applied to the wall for exploration of the sexual, physical and cultural violence of racism. In her videos, her silhouetted figures have been turned into puppets with surprising similarities to those of Reiniger. More abstract and equally accomplished is the video by Thomas Demand (b.1973), already famous for his constructed photographs in which paper models of architectural environments appear to be the real thing (an artistic mode taken from James Casabere's table-top photography); he gives us a short film of rain drops splattering on the ground in which the splats are actually candy wrappers and the lines of falling rain scratches etched into the film, another illusion of reality. Very much in the manner of The Enchanted Drawing, the South African Robin Rhode (b.1976) appears in live action and draws a candle on a wall which apparently lights with real flame. Paul Chan (b.1973) is represented by the 4th film (2006) in his series called Real Light, an almost abstract meditation in black and white on how the notion of the painting's rectangle as a window in the wall through which to view reality can be reversed with a projected window that lets a manufactured reality enter the space of the viewer. This approach is literalized in the remarkable 3-D film of a Bill T. Jones dance performance, After Ghostcatching, in which his movements are projected into the room when the film is viewed with special glasses. Motion-capture technology is used here to fuse dance and a kind of drawing. "Big Chief" Ko-Ko (1924), an example from the Fleischer Cartoon Studio is here to remind us of how long ago Max Fleischer used rotoscoping to trace human movement and turn it into animation; artists have been creating similar kinds of magic with very different technologies throughout the modern era.

 

Following the example of Kentridge's charcoal drawings, several artists have gone on to use colorful paintings and watercolors as the basis of moving images. Outstanding in this group would be Jacco Olivier (b.1972) whose camera moves in and out of representational nature scenes in such a way as to turn them almost abstract and Raymond Pettibon (b.1957), whose internationally famous watercolors achieve a new power and scale when set in motion on a large screen. Ezra Johnson (b.1975) uses lush paintings to create a movie about an art heist. These works are seen in the context of History of the Main Complaint (1996), the sixth and perhaps most famous of the nine Drawings for Projection by William Kentridge, a brief stop-action film made from 21 sheets of paper on which lines are continuously added and erased in a powerful exploration of capitalism and cruelty in apartheid South Africa. The graphic novel and the comic book as a fifteen screen video game is brilliantly evoked in the dystopian vision of Douche Bag City by Federico Solmi (b.1973). At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum, Re/trato by Oscar Munoz (b.1951) tenderly examines the ephemerality of life by filming the portraits he draws on rocks or concrete with water; as each face is completed, the initial portion of the drawing evaporates and disappears. He has also used this technique to document the faces of the "disappeared" in Cali, Colombia. The only stop-action film made by Cindy Sherman (b.1954), the prominent post-modernist photographer, Doll Clothes (1975), explores construction of female identity through filmic collage.

 

Three works in the show combine multiple artistic strategies with great success. These include Joshua Mosley's (b.1974) A Vue in which mixed media methods portray a park ranger climbing up an enormous bronze statue (the maquette of which is present next to the screen) and Jennifer and Kevin McCoy's (b.1968/1967) sweet portrayal of their first date by projecting live-camera shots from a series of miniature table-top sculptures. Perhaps most extreme and most intense is the specially commissioned film You Make Me Iliad by the youngest artist in the show, Mary Reid Kelley (b.1973) who combines her own live performance in a black and white German Expressionist-style movie set in a World War I brothel with stop action animation to bring to life her recitation of a punning and spooky poem brilliantly written by Kelley (the conversion of poetry into video!) in the pseudo-heroic manner of Alexander Pope. Only time and space forbids the mention of essentially every remaining work and artist in the exhibition.

 

Something needs to be said, however, about the brilliant installation designed by the architect David Adjaye; this too will be the subject of numerous critical studies. Except for two central black boxes devoted in homage to the Kentridge video and the Bill T. Jones performance, the usual presentation of video in dark enclosed spaces has been banished from this and, perhaps, all other museums forever. Instead of walls we get permeable scrims through which the different films can be related to one another while the sounds are confined to where the viewer stands by newly developed down-pouring focused speakers. The scrims allow just enough ambient light into the rooms that viewers can see where they are going and can watch the bodily reactions (performance) of other visitors to the videos and objects. Different types of viewing experiences have been given enclosures of different color and shape though I was not convinced by the architect's explanation of how this related to the variety of social experiences occasioned by different types of films viewed in different types of formats. Not all of the films benefitted from the down-pouring speakers and the crowds at the first preview on June 18th made it almost impossible to hear the impassioned use of sound in the Kentridge. I am sure that this aspect of the presentation will be fine-tuned during the coming weeks and months as the installation itself is an experiment of the greatest importance. All-in-all The Dissolve is an experience not to be missed and given its six-month sojourn you have only yourself to blame if you don't see this once-in-a-lifetime event; it will change your understanding of contemporary video forever. The poly-sensory nature of the brain as a metaphor-making machine has never been illustrated to greater effect.