“BECAUSE I WANT YOU TO FEEL THIS RIGHT NOW”
From WHAT WE BELIEVE IN, by @elleglasseart, at @base.camp.studios 2—a multi-sensory exhibit that functions as full-body immersion into a space of ritual and propaganda, in their widest sense: the things to be observed and propagated.
This video loop evokes classical propagation in its mesmerizing insistence: “To be effective, propaganda must constantly short-circuit all thought and decision. It must operate on the individual at the level of the unconscious. He [sic] must not know that he is being shaped by outside forces…but some central core in him must be reached in order to release the mechanism in the unconscious which will provide the appropriate – and expected – action.“ (Jacques Ellul)
But there’s also something hopelessly human about its exhortation; in its naked honesty, it speaks to a universal longing for connection.
Feel this, this “this,” right now. Feel this “now” now.
The first word that came out of my mouth as I walked out of @elleglasseart’s exhibit on Sunday was “generous,” which I realized later was an odd choice—beautiful, moving, thought-provoking would have also worked. But “generosity” is what I experienced before I found the words to put to the experience: words like gesamtkunstwerk or horror vacui, both of which would grasp at aspects of what I felt but seem colder than the actual feeling.
This was indeed a total artwork—painting, poetry, video, sound, sculpture—but the sense I’m getting at is that it was “all-embracing” of the viewer too. Maybe it was the choice of lighting (pink and womb-like), but despite the overtures to totalitarian thought and the urgency of the strokes and prose, the space did not feel threatening; it felt good to be here.
As a lover of the written word, its ubiquity across all canvases was generous too; what a privilege it is to peer into someone’s mind like that. But the texts resist full assimilation. I hunted for a meaning I could definitively pin down, but was successfully evaded in a way that felt appropriate; this was true feminist strategy. This work does not consent to fixity. That sense was heightened by the lack of any organizing artist statement; words are everywhere in this exhibit, but there is no punctuation, and certainly no closing remarks. “Propaganda ceases where simple dialogue begins.” (Jacques Ellul)
I was most excited to see BETWEEN THE PAGES, an impressive installation of religious texts that I feel a visceral connection to; those books had sat in my office for only a couple of weeks before Elle liberated boxes and boxes of them one Sunday. My workplace was in the process of getting rid of a whole library of religious texts and I will not shy away from evoking providence when thinking of how improbable this confluence was; these books had lost their purpose long ago. I’m glad they’ve found a new reason to exist.
“BETWEEN THE PAGES” by @elleglasseart
This piece that Elle tells me is everyone’s favorite part of the exhibit is hypnotic and reminds me of that famous scene in The Color of Pomegranates—which, btw, has a subterranean connection to the anti-communist propaganda playing elsewhere in the exhibit (the film was released in Soviet Armenia).
I had the idea of recording it in slo-mo, but someone with a better grasp of high-speed video in under-lit spaces may want to do it better, because the image ended up a little noisier than I’d have liked. And yet, as a militant proponent of the happy accident, I do enjoy the unexpectedly filmic quality of that digital “grain.”