In Which We Expect To Find Some Kind Of Horror At Its Core

Precious Objects

by RYAN LINKOF

Entering the neatly hung gallery at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, which features the most recent series of photographer Catherine Opie, I felt a bit as if I were Dorothy entering Mombi’s cabinet of curiosities. Granted, Opie’s subjects did not appear to have been decapitated before they were frozen behind a plane of glass, but the subterranean presence of strange and unspeakable acts was heavy in the room.

Every subject is given the attention of a precious and singular object with mystical significance – each figure embedded in an inscrutable allegory, or engaged in an esoteric ritual. What is it that Kate and Laura are whispering about in the near-life-size portrait of the same name, one dressed in a flowing white dress, the other in the process of stitching what appears to be a smear of blood? I hate to be excluded from gossip, especially when it is taking place on so monumental a scale. Opie’s work has always engaged with notions of community and belonging, but never have the terms that define that community seemed to perplexingly obscure.

Opie’s aloof subjects are accompanied by even more aloof landscapes – mere smudges of synthetic pigment that only vaguely reference real physical spaces. The contrast is stark: the tautly wrought portraits, with faces and bodies conjured in unflinching detail are quite distinct from the hazy, unfocused landscapes, intentionally blurred so as to leave only the impression (and a faint one at that) of real Southern California parks and recreational spaces. This blurring accentuates the painterly qualities of the prints, placing an emphasis on visual sensation and response. This is not a clearly defined and knowable “Nature,” but a sublime and aestheticized world charged with symbolic meaning.

All of this opacity – this deliberate distancing from her subjects – is a departure from Opie’s documentary approach. The matter-of-fact deadpan of her earlier images of transgender men and women, mini-malls, and freeways has been replaced with a more mannered focus on psychology. Whereas much of her early work emphasizes external appearances and outward manifestations of identity, these works are much more about aspects of the self that lie below the surface. As viewers, we are confronted with a series of downcast eyes, or glazed-over stares. I had gotten used to seeing Opie’s subjects staring defiantly back at the camera, but at Regen, a mere four of the twenty portraits feature subjects who return the viewer’s gaze – the rest seem to be caught in trancelike thought.

The blankness of the subjects’ stares is mirrored in the blankness that defines them in space. The portraits are notable for the inky background that functions as a kind of void, eliminating perspective and spatial depth. The stark, chiaroscuro lighting heightens attention on the bodies caught in the frame and makes them seem both naturalistically rendered and insistently artificial. This cavernous black expanse is in sharp contrast to the bright candy-colored backdrops so characteristic of her previous portraiture, and hints at Opie’s attempt to explore the recess of her subjects’ inner lives.

The works up at Regen offer plenty to make the studious art history geek smugly content. The baroque color palette of the prints – with their heavy blacks and dramatic, stagey lighting – evokes seventeenth century painting, in the mode of Caravaggio. Dramatic oval frames and to-scale full length portraits resemble the weighty portraiture of Holbein and Van Dyck, relying on conventions of representation and display that have long been out of vogue. Even the choice to exhibit landscapes and portraits together – the favored genres of early modern and nineteenth century bourgeois interiors – looks backward to earlier modes of representation and exhibition. The thick sense of history only accentuates the feeling that one has entered a foreign, and perhaps even forboding, world. 

One of the qualities that makes Opie’s work so exciting is the element of violence and danger that awaits us as we make our way through her photographs. This series is no different. Evidence of physical violence – experienced as fetish ritual, as in the visceral work Friends, which shows a woman having her mouth sewn shut, or an act of nature, as in the jelly fish stings seared into Diana Nyad’s flesh – obtrude into otherwise exquisitely pleasing imagery. Still feeling a bit like Dorothy, I advanced through the gallery expecting to find some sort of horror at its core.

It is this ability to introduce incongruous and jarring moments of bodily pain that makes Opie’s work powerfully subversive, despite its seemingly conventional stylistic mode. She shares much with Robert Mapplethorpe, an artist that influenced Opie when she was an art student, as she harnesses photography’s allure in the service of a politics of the body. She has the rare ability, in her words, to “seduce the viewer into considering work that they might not normally want to look at…to draw the viewer in through the perfection of the image.” Many of these works are very near perfected images. Consider me seduced.

Ryan Linkof is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Los Angeles. He is the Ralph M. Parsons Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at LACMA. He has published in a number of online and print publications, including Photography and Culture, Media History, the New York Times and LACMA's Unframed blog. You can find his tumblr here.

catherine opie

"Dandelion" - Dorena (mp3)

"A Late Farewell" - Dorena (mp3)

 

In Which We Judge The Maturation of Gregg Araki

Youth Doom Fantasies

by RYAN LINKOF

Kaboom

dir. Gregg Araki

86 minutes

The lead characters in Kaboom drive a Nissan Cube. No element of the film sums up where the director Gregg Araki went wrong more than that. Like those singularly-offensive automobiles – hideously overdesigned and strangely proportioned – the film is all flash and polish, lacking any basic structural integrity. The choice of automobile also speaks to how far Araki has come in the evolution of his filmmaking. Whereas the doomed teenagers of his earlier films drove barely-operative vintage cars, with skulls dangling from the rearview mirror and Thrill Kill Cult stickers pasted on the bumper, his new breed of supposedly-troubled teens are driving their slick cars off the dealer’s lot.

I have been (and part of me still wants to be) a fanatical devotee of Araki’s films. Watching The Doom Generation on VHS in my grandparents’ guestroom – terrified that they would walk in – is still one of the most memorable cinematic experiences I have ever had. I love his early films, and I know that they have informed much of my humor and aesthetic sensibility. Rose McGowan’s preposterously bitchy speed-freak was an ideal typical representation of disaffected young adulthood when I was a teenager: I wanted so badly to be her. The dark eroticism, pop nihilism, and bizarre crudities of his films defined a moment in queer cinema history, and for that I will also give Araki the benefit of the doubt.

This film is kind of like a hybrid of Nowhere and a Top Shop window display. I am not one who demands that my indie films eschew commodity culture, but I guess I didn’t expect, or really want, the film to be so overly-processed and glossy. For those who have seen or will see the film, to call it “commercial” might seem a bit ridiculous. Kaboom does many things that one would never see in a mainstream film. But I had heard several people describe the film as Araki’s “return to form,” which I interpreted to mean an exercise in what had made him so appealing in the early and mid-90s.

I am not one who admired Mysterious Skin as some kind of proof of the maturation of Araki’s filmmaking. 2007’s Smiley Face, which was ostensibly much more sophomoric, was ultimately more intelligent and satisfying to watch than anything that Araki had made in a decade. Kaboom, unfortunately, has too much of Mysterious Skin’s “grown up” seriousness to provide the kind of raw and exhilarating experience of his earlier films.

On the surface, Kaboom has the basic elements that I love about Araki’s early films. The story follows Smith (Thomas Dekker), a young, sexually adventurous, and predictably angsty film student in search of a profound romantic connection that seems constantly to elude him. Dekker is, I think, charming and vulnerable and subtle enough to make the heartfelt earnestness of the character not ring entirely false.

He is joined by a random assortment of friends in garish outfits, each with their own variety of piercingly vivid eye color. His best friend Stella (Haley Bennett) is a dry and droll lesbian, though Bennett is perhaps a bit too cute to pull of that role with any amount of believability. The star of the film, as far as I am concerned, is the wild-haired London (Juno Temple), who seduces Smith into a strange and (ultimately unsettling) sexual affair.

The film works best when it has no plot – the candy-colored scenes of sex, drugs, and high-caloric diner foods are fun enough to watch on their own. There is much nudity and homoerotic titillation, though the real sexual action is of a decidedly heterosexual or lesbian variety. Oddly, given Araki’s identification with queer cinema, gay men get the short end of the stick when it comes to on-camera sex.

The set design is far less clever and imaginative in this film than in Araki’s earlier films. The flamboyant color arrangements, odd wall patterns, and jarring, bold lettering announcing various authoritarian commands that typified The Doom Generation and Nowhere are altogether absent in Kaboom. Even Smith’s dorm room is an unimaginative mix of Ikea furnishings.

The actual plot is cringe-worthy, bound together by an outlandish storyline that affords the main characters as many opportunities as possible to constantly blurt out derivatives of “Something very weird is happening here!” Like Nowhere (the film in Araki’s oeuvre that Kaboom most resembles), sex and violence are mixed with creepy supernatural themes, but whereas that earlier film left much to the imagination, this one hammers the audience over the head with plot revelations that end up eliminating any traces of mystery. Kaboom might have worked better simply as a sex romp, and could have done without the pseudo-profound social commentary and overly elaborate narrative developments.

Any opportunity for good-looking people to get nude, especially if that nudity is mixed with unnecessary and cartoonish violence, is typically okay by me. But for some reason, even for a fan of all that, sex and violence just wasn’t enough to make this movie work. Maybe I am just an aging curmudgeon, looking back to a time when films were somehow more "real." The films Araki produced in the 90s were, I am convinced, quite special and unique, but perhaps it is unfair to use them as standard to which every subsequent film must be held. In the end, I guess I just expect so much more from Araki. His big attempt at reigniting the explosive energy of his early films seems only to have resulted in a disappointing fizzle.

Ryan Linkof is a contributor to This Recording. He is a writer living in Los Angeles, and a PhD candidate in History and Visual Culture at the University of Southern California. This is his first appearance in these pages. He tumbls here.

"Copenhagen" - Lucinda Williams (mp3)

"Born to Be Loved" - Lucinda Williams (mp3)

"Seeing Black" - Lucinda Williams (mp3)