Javier Tellez, S-T-E-R-E-O-V-I-E-W
Melinda Welch
Creating art in collaboration with patients at mental health facilities is not at all out of the ordinary when considering the work of Javier Tellez. S-T-E-R-E-O-V-I-E-W is unique in that it is Tellez’s first work in conjunction with patients within the United States. Appropriately, the work is displayed in the same borough where it was created at the Bronx Museum.
S-T-E-R-E-O-V-I-E-W is part of The Bronx Museum’s "Conversations with the Permanent Collection" series, where artists work not only in response to the museum’s collection, but also incorporating the pieces. Tellez chose to incorporate stereoscope cards from the Museum’s Stanley Burns Collection of 19th century photographic representations of African-Americans. Stereographs consist of a single image displayed twice on a card that when viewed through a stereoscope, produces the image in 3-D. The first stereoscopic photographs were developed in Germany in 1844 and gained great fame at the Crystal Palace Exposition in England in 1851. Their popularity increased until most middle and upper class families in the United States and England owned Stereoscope sets with 3-D photos of foreign landscapes and important events. Tellez worked with the patients of the BPC to animate copies of the Bronx Museum’s stereographs by using speech bubbles to weave narratives.
The exhibit is isolated from the main gallery by a set of glass double doors. Upon entering, one walks into a small alcove. Music from the right side of the entryway assails the viewer and insult is added to injury when one identifies the tune as an off-key, rhythmically challenged rendition of James Brown’s "I Feel Good." Said music emanates from a television monitor mounted on a pedestal. The video begins with a shot of a sterile white hallway receding into the distance. A figure is visible at the end of the hallway and begins to move towards the camera, flailing his arms and making awkward motions almost in sync with the music. As the figure nears the camera, the viewer may discern that the singer is an African-American male with a graying short afro dressed in slacks and a black undershirt singing soulfully into a microphone.
One then passes through another set of glass double doors into the exhibition space. It is evident that the previous piece was meant to serve as an introduction to the concepts explored in the installation. Within the darkened room, a human-scaled double-roosting birdhouse nearly fills the space. The birdhouse is closed except for two doorways in the rear and two circular cutouts on the front face of the structure. On the exterior, oversized perching poles extend outwards from beneath each cutout just as is found on real birdhouses.
Once within the structure, a closer examination reveals the ceiling to be embellished with numerous white spheres, similar to miniature Wiffle balls. The ceiling is densely covered in the spheres, which are nailed in small clusters at random. A simple bench on the back wall invites the viewer to sit down. From this vantage, video footage is visible through the two circular cutouts. The video incorporates not only the stereographs, but also footage shot at the BPC and testimonials from the patients themselves arranged in vignettes.
Each vignette begins with an exterior shot of the BPC that slowly zooms in to focus on an individual window on the façade of the structure. We are then brought inside the room where a figure peers out the window using binoculars with red lenses. Often the footage from the left circular cutout reveals a profile view of the individual while a back view is screened simultaneously on the right. The individuals then began to speak on everything from their views of mental illness to incoherent musings. The narration carries on as voice-over while the visuals switch to the animated stereographs.
In the first vignette, an African-American male in his late twenties describes the benefits and downfalls of hospitalization. Before his time at the BPC, he neglected his own hygiene and failed to sufficiently care for himself. Although living at the BPC has corrected these issues, he now feels disrespected by the nurses. After admitting he feels safer in the facility, he describes how hospitalization and the medications prescribed have caused him to stop hearing voices. He then claims that anyone can be mentally ill–even the doctors and nurses have problems. The man concludes his testimony by explaining "poshing," the breathing technique he invented to remove hot air from the immune system.
While he speaks, the stereographs "play." The first stereograph displays an older African-American man reaching for a chicken. The bubbles in each of the two series do not synchronize and each appears to tell different narratives, both relating to the man wanting eggs. The next card features an African-American male with a watermelon under each arm and a chicken pecking the ground by his feet followed by a card showing a mother spanking her young child. The subsequent card portrays more tenderness with a mother proudly smiling into the camera while nursing her baby. One voice bubble reads, " First bid – $20." The last stereograph shows a young man standing on a large rock in front of a lake in a forest. The bubbles tell the story of how the boy looks white, but it actually black. They say that his parents cannot marry (due to their different ethnicities) and that he is therefore a bastard son.
Vignette after vignette, the viewer is left with a lot to consider. By including both external and internal views of life with mental illness, we become both the observer and the observed. Sitting in the confined space, reading the absurd stereoscopic conversations accompanying the racially stereotyped photographs and being bombarded with images of surveillance, control and helplessness congeal to produce a truly subjective portrayal of mental illness.
