TV Honey

Larry Rinder is the Dean of the College at the California College of
the Arts in San Francisco. Previously he was the Anne and Joel
Ehrenkranz Curator of Contemporary Art at the Whitney Museum. TV Honey,
a group exhibition curated by Rinder, was recently on view at Jessica
Silverman Gallery.

Desirée Holman, Masks (Conduits of Fantasy) 2, 2007; color pencil on archival paper.

I haven’t been doing many exhibitions lately. But every now and then I see art that I just have to put in a show. That’s how I felt about Desirée Holman’s Magic Window video installation. It seemed so smart and tight, fresh and fun. It’s an amazing accomplishment for a young artist with no dealer and virtually no visibility outside of the local San Francisco scene. So when Jessica Silverman asked me if I’d like to curate a show for her gallery I right away thought of showing Desirée’s work. Magic Window is a three-channel video projection. It juxtaposes two tightly choreographed living room scenes using characters based on the Connors from Roseanne and the Huxtables from The Cosby Show. Holman made masks for the actors, which they wear like poorly fitting hand-me-downs. They do domestic things, like clean and toss around a ball and, most of all, sit around watching TV. The piece is all about the intoxicating power of television. Rather than let the piece sink into a morose indictment of the media spectacle, Holman conjures an interstitial scene in which the families join in a psychedelic Bollywood-style dance number incorporating music by Soft Pink Truth.

In addition to the video piece, Desirée made a group of related pencil drawings that focus on the television set and masks, both used as props in the video. Isolated from the narrative, the fetish-like nature of these objects—their role as “conduits of fantasy”—becomes even more apparent. Jessica Silverman has been doing a series of shows called Original Version, in which an emerging artist is presented along with one or more artists whose work creates a provocative or informative context. I thought that Magic Window would lend itself well to this format because of the fascinating connections between Holman’s work and an earlier generation of experimental video artists. I was particularly interested in earlier works that similarly possessed a DIY sensibility, addressed the hypnotic allure of the media, and explored the relationship between narrative and experimental form. The two works that quickly came to mind were Lynda Benglis’ The Amazing Bow Wow (1976) and Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll (1972).

The Amazing Bow Wow—an exceedingly eccentric piece of 70s video art—relates the story of a human-sized hermaphroditic dog that becomes the centerpiece of a traveling freak show. The alluring spectacle of the dog’s peculiar sexuality attracts customers but its owners come into conflict when they discover that the creature is also extremely intelligent. When one of the owners, Rexina (played by Benglis herself), becomes more and more drawn to the dog, her partner and lover, Babu, becomes jealously enraged. Babu’s anger culminates in a horrific scene where, believing he is castrating the dog, he mistakenly cuts off its tongue. Benglis’ video humorously twists the Oedipal narrative while metaphorically challenging our gawking absorption in the spectacle of art itself.    

Joan Jonas’ Vertical Roll is simultaneously absorbing and disturbing. Jonas herself appears as a masked woman and belly dancer, whose presence is compromised by the constant and unnerving “vertical roll” of the video frame. The repetitive stuttering of the video image has a hypnotic effect, echoed by the image and sound of a swinging spoon striking a hard surface. Her character’s sexuality is also harnessed to maintain the viewers’ attention; however the fragmented form of the video medium ultimately functions like the masks in Desirée’s work, distancing us from the object of our projected desire.

Jessica and I decided to play on the relationship between video art and the domestic experience of television. The single-channel works of Benglis and Jonas are presented on period TVs with couches for seating, while, Desirée’s work—which itself depicts couch-slouching TV watchers—is projected across an entire gallery wall.