"Anthony, come to dinner".

ANTHONY BURDIN

CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

APRIL 7-MAY 14, 2005

Anthony Burdin's latest exhibition, at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, was not a show of discrete video works, but a four-room installation that used video in both TV monitor and wall sizes, and allowed the audio and visual to carry different messages, constituting interventions specific to the space itself. The warren of the Logan Galleries was transformed by Burdin's consistent treatment into a single whole. Arguably, he created a single, multi-roomed environmental piece. Caverns, organic in origin, appeared to have replaced the Wattis' contemporary "white box" facility. They were sparsely dressed with ambient lighting, props and two-dimensional artwork. Video occupied prosceniums large and small throughout, shrinking to a tiny monitor splashing on a full 30 X 20-foot wall, providing captivating scenes-within-scenes.

Burdin's video art is like 1960s Environment Art with Kenneth Anger's id. Its ambiguous self-consciousness (in the feel of Bruce Nauman) masquerades as art brut. (Reportedly, Burdin has lived in a 1973 Chevy Nova for most of the last 10 years.) Burdin creates a narrative resembling the bare essentials of a horror film, which is accompanied by rhythmic, whimpering sound and a high-level of chiaroscuro. He seamlessly uses the first-person handheld video camera, having nicely exploited its potential as personal companion. The use of remixes of popular music is intrinsic to his medium, as if he's fully deconstructed his attraction to 1970s culture, and is authentically living it out anew. The show is one of the freshest things I've seen recently because the work doesn't point at '70s culture or co-opt it for a superficial style boost, but exists in a magical place where personal reverie is palpable and intoxicates the audience. It seemed totally possible that dancers would emerge at any moment; and more than once I distinctly felt that the artist was in the room.

The show's jesting humility belied sophisticated concerns about installation and performativity. The stacked boxes and prop-like paintings and drawings in some rooms raised questions as old as minimalist interventions or the "theatricality" they arguably engender. Burdin caught handmadeness in a smooth net. The muffled sound, his stagey singing voice, and the documentated scenes in a car as he presses buttons on his boom box and makes a mixed tape are presented with dead seriousness. Somehow the dark, amorphous installation holds these rough creative moments and elevates them. The cumulative effect is a metaphor and an intervention that interrupts gallery viewing per se, and becomes, instead, participation. Because Burdin shrinks and explodes scale, our own relation to the work changes; because he uses the camera as both documentarian and diarist, we take on his point of view eventually. Burdin seemed to be advocating, inviting us to a live art experience, rather than displaying something containable by video art.

The progression through his haunted house begins with DESERT MIX (subtitled "Charcasum," 34 minutes) over the sound of murmuring and the labored breath of the hiker who holds the camera, and whose long hair blows across its lens. This desert has petrified trees and is fairly featureless, revealing only old car parts and dust. The lurching progress of the point of view simply reiterates a simple "man against nature" theme that seems primary to storytelling generically and may be a precursor to the more personal installments of the rock hero's journey.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Progressing through the doorway from DESERT we are caught up in a remix of the song Bela Lugosi's Dead (1979), originally recorded by the band Bauhaus, to which Burdin sings along in a feigned cry accompanied by pulsing distortions resembling monster noises. This makes an interesting segue into a mix of the lounge classic It Was A Very Good Year (1961). The visuals in this room are 10-minute loops entitled Voodoo Vox Drive, Valley II and VooDoo Vox, Drive, 101N, so these are the locations, or freeways, he wants us to know. His shaky camera makes the night drive a little worrisome. But a flashlight illuminating part of the car for a brief moment and views of the city at night are beautiful and we want to trust the driver, though he is a stranger. There were two paintings on the wall as props: quick ink drawings referencing lyrics from rock songs.

Next, the projection booth--a narrow shaft of a room--turned the audience into co-conspirators. There was a 13-minute video on a small monitor, and boxes stacked suggesting a garage. We stood cramped, looking down to watch a video in the handheld style of someone making a mixed tape. As before, the drawings supported a rock persona writ large. They were off-hand, sincere but postured; a bit like grafitti, coming from an artistic alter ego. In this room, we feel as off-balance as the handheld footage that shakes on the video monitor. This crouching and disequilibrium unites the audience and Burdin in a bit of secrecy and a fun-house mood, rather than the passive video viewing that, ironically, has come to typify audiences' gallery experiences. It is a strange legacy for a medium that was seized to democratize point of view.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the similarly tiny back room, Burdin's leitmotif crescendoed in another piece as he drummed on the dashboard with one hand (presumably) while simultaneously fiddling with, sorting and playing cassette tapes on an enormous boom box that sat anachronistically on the passenger seat, its two speakers staring like bug eyes, an animate companion. Here he set in motion two great synchronic traditions: music and driving and recording one's heroic life. The car becomes the final stage within the stage of the show, a place where Burdin conducts a soundtrack--to his life and to his "art."

The show gives one hope; as if personal liberty may be a ballast to or a source of political might against a culture of greed and deadly politics. Burdin makes the gesture of an auteur, and leaves little residue, so that others may dance in the space he created.

EMILY KUENSTLER was raised in New York City and received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2004.