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In retrospect, I assume that entering Bellwether Gallery to see Brent Green’s debut solo exhibition, “Paulina Hollers,” is as close as I will ever come to entering another person’s mind. At the very least, the show transformed the space of the gallery into another world—one filled with captivating videos, engrossing soundtracks and a strange, magical, Tim Burton-esque grandfather clock. I felt transported, so much so that the abrupt turning off of the videos and sounds of people talking disoriented me (to the gallery’s credit, it was closing time). The opportunity rarely arises for me to enter the space of a person’s head and crawl around in it—notable exceptions being the early 90s TV show “Herman’s Head” and Spike Jonze’s 1999 film Being John Malkovich—and I was far from eager to surrender my all-access pass. |
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Brent Green: Paulina Hollers – Jillian Steinhauer
In retrospect, I assume that entering Bellwether Gallery to see Brent Green’s debut solo exhibition, “Paulina Hollers,” is as close as I will ever come to entering another person’s mind. At the very least, the show transformed the space of the gallery into another world—one filled with captivating videos, engrossing soundtracks and a strange, magical, Tim Burton-esque grandfather clock. I felt transported, so much so that the abrupt turning off of the videos and sounds of people talking disoriented me (to the gallery’s credit, it was closing time). The opportunity rarely arises for me to enter the space of a person’s head and crawl around in it—notable exceptions being the early 90s TV show “Herman’s Head” and Spike Jonze’s 1999 film Being John Malkovich—and I was far from eager to surrender my all-access pass. Especially since what I discovered inside fascinated me to no end.
Brent Green is obsessed with death, beauty and birds—in no particular order. In no conventional sense, either, since the artist presents death as something to be embraced as a fact of life, rather than something to fear; beauty, as hidden beneath the literal and emotional debris of life, manifesting itself in the form of imperfections; and birds…well, birds as creatures that surround us, with the power to taunt us in hell or bring us on to quasi-religious fits of ecstasy. The uncanny tales told by Green’s films have their roots in reality, but they consistently refuse to be constrained by it. When Santa Claus becomes a cough syrup-addicted alcoholic (Hadacol Christmas) and a religious woman forces herself down to hell in an attempt to rescue her dead asshole son (Paulina Hollers), we can be sure that reality is nothing more than a starting point—at best a tool—for this artist and his visions.
Part of Green’s strength lies in his ability to treat his medium in much the same way that he treats his subjects. This is to say that traces of the process of filmmaking appear within these movies, and yet somehow, rather than grounding us in reality, they only lead us further into Green’s world. Pieces of Scotch tape and numbers written in black Sharpie show up on the screen, but the films subsume them because the films represent a world and a body of work without any pretensions to perfection. If anything, this evidence of reality reinforces our sense of authenticity by reminding us that these are, in fact, the artist’s creations.
In many ways, in accordance with its namesake status, Paulina Hollers served as the highlight of the exhibition. Green’s longest film to date, it is also the most visually sophisticated, playing out in two worlds: earth, populated by figures fashioned from wood and re-appropriated detritus, and the colorful, delightfully animated, hell. The film’s attempt to balance and contrast these two worlds culminates in a single moment, when Paulina’s son dies. Run over by a school bus, his wooden skeleton lies on the ground, and in the next instant, his soul—a hand-drawn, animated version of the boy—leaps up from his body. The transition utterly thrills in its juxtaposition of the two media, both of which the artist seems to have approached acutely and carefully.
Paulina Hollers lags, however, with regards to its soundtrack. Lacking the beat-come-performance poetry narrative style of the other two films, it failed to draw me in, even after multiple viewings. Because of their emotional voiceovers, the quaking of every word told in their stories, Hadacol Christmas and especially Carlin (the story of the artist’s aunt who deteriorates from diabetes) had me transfixed. The poetical, chant-like quality of their narrations invoked a sense of importance and often, urgency—thereby connecting me to worlds and ideas that otherwise might have felt a little too foreign. When Green sang, in a desperate, reaching voice, the word “Hallelujah” in Carlin, and when I watched three birds pull his dying aunt around in circles in her wheelchair, I couldn’t not be convinced, for some reason, that these were things I needed to care about. Even if I didn’t know why.
Ultimately, despite the discrepancy that makes Paulina Hollers the most technically impressive, but the least captivating of the exhibition’s primary three films, Green shows an incredible ability to marry form and content. All the parts—from the stories, to the visuals, to the soundtracks—feel cohesively unfinished and rough around the edges, creating the paradox of movies that feel polished in their use of DIY techniques. Perhaps, this is the paradox of Brent Green. As the artist said himself, in a 2006 ARTnews interview, “Everyone thinks the things I do are different-looking…but it just looks like the farm.” This remark, off-handed and seemingly (though not so) simple, encapsulates the quality that pervaded the entire show.
For instance, as I settled in to watch Carlin, a sentence followed the title on the screen: “A little story about birds, entropy and urgency.” I told myself that this had to be either one of the most pretentious, or one of the most casually genius sentences I had ever read. After watching the film, I knew it was the latter. Carlin really is a little story about birds, entropy and urgency. Those truly are the most accurate descriptors for the movie. But, I’m sure I could never have written that line, even if I tried, because I’m not Brent Green.
