Compound coupling.

Mathew Buckingham: Play the Story

July 12-September 21,2008

The Violet Hour

June 21-October 19,2008

Henry Art Gallery

Seattle

The curators at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle always manage to put together provocative exhibitions that utilize the space creatively. Two recent exhibitions that worked of one another, despite being separated by two floors, were no exception. Matthew Buckingham filled the main level with "Play the Story," an exhibition featuring three major video installations. On the lower level. "The Violet Hour" spread through the galleries, as a playful shout-out from three younger artists compared to the more refined offerings from Buckingham.

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Mark Godfrey of Camden Arts Centre in London curated Buckingham's exhibit and Associate Curator Sara Krajewski organized the exhibit for the Henry. The video installations inhabit three of the four main gallery spaces, with ancillary projects filling the other space. Borrowing heavily from history, art, and licrature, Buckingham makes it easy to get drawn into his own fascinations. It is not necessary to have a background in the subjects he takes interest in, although deeper knowledge increases the pleasure of looking. His work provides meditation on interpretations of history, combining speculation with historicity. The three installations investigate three innovative thinkers who often fall beneath the radar of canonical thought-Louis Le Prince, Charlotte Wolff, and Mary Wollstonecraft.

The most successful of Buckingham's installations, "The Sprit and the Letter" (2007), featured a video of an actress performing the work of Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The recitation is given in a room at an historical boys' school in London where Wollstonecraft paces upside down, sometimes speaking to herself and at other times addressing the spectator. She wanders near or around a chandelier physically replicated in the installation space-not hanging down, but fitted upright in the room as a glowing projectile from the floor. This put the audience in a similar position to Wolstonecraft, while a mirror opposite the video projection offered an opportunity for self-reflection. Buckingham attempted to bring Wollstonecraft and the urgency of her words into the twenty-first century, but because it was difficult to hear what she was saying-as Buckingham had placed two localized speakers at key points in a gallery space the real message reflected the consistent difficulty in hearing feminism.

Buckingham's pieces are loaded with symbolic elements. Wollstonecraft haunts the ceiling of the room she paces, treading not on a glass ceiling, but heavy wooden rafters. The chandelier, erect and glowing to the viewer, not only connects the physical space to the video chamber, but provides the only other light in the installation room, indicating the conflict presented the glowing phallus of intellect versus the decorative position of women. Wollstonecraft drifts in and out of the room, occasionally entering right side up, voiceless and surveying the room like an animal walking the boundaries of a cage, reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own (1929). This may be a safe space, but it is also a prison for her sex.

Buckingham, like the filmmaker Chris Maker, uses text with imagery to evoke tension within his narratives. He creates presence through the tense of language and consistently evokes confusion with his imagery. Are we looking at the past, present, or somewhere in between? With the second installation. "False Future" (2007), Buckingham dealt with the issue of time through the mysterious story of Le Prince, an early motion picture experimenter. Buckingham created the mythical through something as simple as the description of twenty frames of film in meticulous detail.

With "Everything I Need" (2007), he forgoes a soundtrack for a written narrative. On the right video screen were projections of the ruminations of Wolff, a writer and psychologist on homosexuality. On the left was a video load of photographs he made in a vintage airplane similar to the one on which Wolff traveled to make a speaking trip to Berlin-from where she was exiled. Buckingham uses the suspension of airplane travel to reflect Wolff's dislocation. His unremarkable photographs of the grounded airplane are studies in detail and light. As a result, it is the text that grabs all the attention language made visible for a person who has been made invisible through cultural stereotypes and assumptions.

Two floors down from Buckingham's exhibition, "The Violet Hour," curated; by Krajewski, offered a different approach to history deconstructing and rearranging it as a comment on an uncertain future. At times cynical and at others playful and full of hope, this work felt visceral rather than intellectual compared to Buckingham's projects. Groatian artist David Maljkovic's videos, These Days (2005) and Lost Memories from These Days (2006-08) were the most somber works presented, although the comatose recitation of phrases from language learning programs in These Days has a subterranean humor. In using international pavilions from the Zagreb Fair, Maljkovic plays off of the utopian sensibilities of these sites. Cars are grounded by structures put over the tires in Lost Memories, disabling any usefulness or pleasure the vehicles might possess. Young women in slightly fancy dress linger around them, as if escaped from steel cages a play on the American dream of beauty and freedom. Here, neither appears to be available.

Matthew Day Jackson's work is also heavily symbolic and draws on history, but his choices at times seem a little too obvious. Missing Link (X-ray) (2008), a group of eleven photogravures, is a handsome piece, yet too complete, lacking the visceral quality of Rauschenberg's Booster from 1967 (displayed on the mezzanine level) or the restlessness of the other two artists. His work is like a hopeful Frankenstein monster constructions made of repositioned refuse with his strongest piece being a solar-powered car reclaimed from an accident.

Jen Lui commanded the most attention with her large wall mural and loud two-channel videos. It is her watercolors, colorful and wacky, that form the background for Lui's obsession in the "Brethren of the Stone" (2006), a fourteenth-century futuristic back-to-nature cult. Impeccably researched, or maybe not, she lightened the mood of the entire exhibition, presenting two over-the-top music videos of the brethren performing Latin translations of Pink Floyd and Black Sabbath. Her use of space rock versus heavy metal explores the conflict between natural and industrial worlds. Lui is not concerned with finesse or authenticity, even though her production and collaboration appears painstaking. Like Michel Gondry's work, there is a fast and cheap playfulness to the videos, yet none of that filmmaker's sentiment. At times the imagery is devastatingly beautiful and seductive the sweaty chin of the young monk versus the gilded lips of the Iron Princess and at other times the absurdity is reminiscent of a Monty Python skit.

Lui does not appear to be interested in making a feminist statement. Her heroes are male out of convenience, her antagonist female to denote difference and temptation. It is still an uncomfortable opposition, upended only by the apparent shift in gender representation male for nature, female for industrial although it reiterates the imprint of the female automation from Metropolis (1927) onward. Difference still reads as "other" here, and it is clear who the "good guys" are.

All three artists were asked to make work specifically for the exhibition, and Lui's contribution, her large wall mural Testament of 1368. Light burst of the End (2008), created a bridge across all three bodies of work. The piece blatantly stitches together digital pieces of industrial architecture into an abstract cathedral collapsed with a flattened chandelier/mandala of partially melted wax candles. This piece held the show together, emphasizing the missteps in earlier utopian, machine-age thinking.

Krajewski and the Henry took a risk putting such disparate artists together and it is refreshing. Together they filled the space, compounding each other's work. If Buckingham is a descendant of Marker with his mediations on time and the ever-changing nature of truth, here Constructivism and Actionism have left their marks-atopianism fallen into cynicism revitalized with new technologies. Buckminster Fuller has met the Omega man-an interesting coupling for the new age.

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Frame grab from the Brethren of the Stone. Comfortably Numb (2006) by Jen Lui photograph courtesy of the artist

SUZANNE E. SZUCS is an artist and writer who leaches at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York.