Matthew Buckingham.

Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington | Seattle, Washington

Play the Story" (through September 21, 2008) is New York-based artist Matthew Buckingham's first major traveling exhibition. Curated by Mark Godfrey and organized for the Henry by associate curator Sara Krajewski, it features three video installations with sound--Everything I Need, The Spirit and the Letter, and False Future (all 2007)--that test the collective weight of human history by means of three pivotal figures: Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication on the Rights of Women (1792); Charlotte Wolff, renowned psychologist, author and lesbian activist; and Louis Le Prince, little-known inventor of the motion picture projector. These installations are accompanied by photographs and other related documents.

Credited as being the first films ever made, Le Prince's Roundhay Garden Scene and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge were shot in October 1888. Le Prince, who grew up in the company of his father's friend, Louis Daguerre, mysteriously vanished from a train between Dijon and Paris in September 1890, some weeks prior to a planned public demonstration in the U.S. Still unsolved to this day, his disappearance cheated Le Prince out of the recognition that eventually went to the Lumiere brothers' 1895 exhibit at the Salon Indien du Grand Cafe. Speculating on the "faux futur" of this extraordinary missed opportunity, Buckingham's ten-minute False Future (2007)--a static shot of street and foot traffic along Leeds Bridge in West Yorkshire--isn't intended as a literal homage, but as a false start eternally stuck in the yet-to-happen. But even if the video stays close to Le Prince's original concept, such as filming the bridge from a similar angle and using a white sheet as a screen, it's more a back projection upon the present than a simple flash-forward.

The same reasoning dominates The Spirit and the Letter, though this time it occurs through spatial and technological inversions. Pitting real-time space against its historical echoes, a floor-bound chandelier and upside-down mirror are duplicated in "correct" orientation in a side video projection, in which an actor dressed as Wollstonecraft appears to move about and spout her feminist ideals, until she exits and reappears standing on the ceiling. In Everything I Need, a dual video projection--one panning through the empty cabin of a 1970s airplane interior, the other scanning lines of text--represents the return journey of 81-year-old Wolff to Berlin for the first time since her arrest by the Gestapo in 1933 for being dressed as a man, and thus "spying." Linked to an invitation by Berlin lesbian activists in 1978, Buckingham's installation recounts how Wolff inadvertently came to write her later studies in sexual behavior because of her expulsion from Germany in 1933 and subsequent inability to practice medicine elsewhere. Modeled on the divided attention span of a passenger in transit, Everything I Need suggests that Wolff's "hindsight" (the title of her ensuing autobiography), far from connecting the person she used to be to the one who returned, actually made them irreversible.

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In Buckingham's "Play the Story," the center--of history, accomplishment, identity--never holds, its images constantly skipping before and after, beyond the present instant of the frame (as with those less than ideal portraits of Wollstonecraft accompanying The Spirit and the Letter). In another sidebar, The Six Grandfathers, Paha Sapa, in the Year 502,002 C.E. (2002), a black-and-white C-print with wall text, blows the lid on one of America's most famous icons. The attached timeline details Mount Rushmore's varied history, beginning with its theft from the Lakata Sioux (to whom it was known as Six Grandfathers), to Gutzon Borglum's "shrine to democracy" (perhaps funded in part by the KKK, of which the sculptor was an active member), to its inevitable erosion and disappearance. It's a worthy emblem of this entire show, reminding us of Borges's "silky vade mecum" in The Library of Babel: an infinitely diaphanous pocket reference in which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.

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