These videos embrace the absurd
LINCOLN - Why are the names of law firms often so funny? "Sly, Daley and Weasel," "Crouch, Cole, Russell and Slaw" . . . OK, I'm making them up. But I mention it because I found myself smiling even before I saw the 2007 video piece "Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg and Moore": Just reading the title was enough.
Happily, the video itself - the first work in a survey of recent performance video by Boston-based duo Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom at the DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park - more than lived up to the comedic promise of its title.
In it, four lawyers - the aforementioned Sloss, Kerr, Rosenberg, and Moore - perform a choreographed routine of gestures and spoken words in an office hallway flanked by elevators.
The routine, inspired by everyday office behavior, was choreographed by Carlson and first performed by the lawyers on a stage in New York in 1989. Almost two decades later, in 2007, it was reenacted in the office setting by the lawyers and filmed by Strom.
The point of "Sloss, Kerr" is never quite clear, which may be its saving grace. The four works that succeed it in this smartly installed show are all encumbered by a sense that heavy sociopolitical points lie buried beneath their witty surfaces. (The points are not the problem: It's the digging one is expected to do.)
Here, the performance carries its own meaning, which is not fixed or laboriously footnoted, but unfolds naturally as you look. Carlson's choreography is acute, and the relationship between the men's bodies and the confining, real-world space of the corridor adds something authentic to the exercise. The men stand with their backs to one another. They stretch, bend, point, and shout or throw their fists up as if proclaiming victory. At times, they could be on a football field or basking in glory after a victorious 100-meter sprint. But of course, these are just everyday gestures that competitive men in suits like to make.
Carlson's choreography, punctuated by various shouts and mantras ("I didn't say no I know I know . . . I didn't say no . . . I didn't know"), creates a combination of recognition and strangeness, apprehended through parody, that illuminates the lives of white-collar workers in unexpected ways.
Based in Jamaica Plain, Carlson and Strom have been partners in life for 20 years. Working out of a studio in the South End, they have carved out a national reputation as artistic collaborators who mesh politically minded subject matter with playful treatments.
It's a combination that works some, but not all of the time. On the evidence of their show at the DeCordova, their more ambitious ideas have a tendency to unspool into incoherence.
Still, their short, sharp video installations are never a drag, thanks to their delightfully absurdist touch.
During my visit, "Sloss, Kerr" was by far the most popular piece screening. But the runner-up was an amusing triple-screen video called "Madame 710." In it, Carlson, wearing a transparent plastic raincoat partially stuffed with bank notes, spends time with a milking cow. To the strains of Mozart, she dances around the unimpressed beast, at one point even pressing her head against its nose. Just as the cow's udders are on display, so, conspicuously, are Carlson's breasts, and the reminder - that we are all mere animals - carries a certain comic pathos.
In truth, the whole thing is deeply frivolous - exactly the sort of thing that gives contemporary art, and especially performance video, a bad name. But if you're in the mood, it's rather wonderful.
The piece riffs, in an upbeat register, on Joseph Beuys's famous performance "Coyote: I Like America and America Likes Me," in which the German artist locked himself in a New York gallery for three days with a coyote for company. Beuys's performance was an attempt to stage a kind of symbolic healing of what he called "spiritual America," which he felt to be threatened by the destructive forces of capitalism.
Carlson and Strom bring a feminist perspective to bear on similar concerns. Instead of the wild coyote, Carlson hangs out with a Holstein cow from a dairy farm in Carlisle. America's animal spirit, embodied for Beuys by the wild coyote, has become a domesticated creature ruthlessly exploited for profit. Somewhere, the phrase "cash cow" floats over the proceedings, looking for a place to alight.
Is it to be taken seriously, this work, as a meaningful critique of a society hellbent on exploiting and culling animals on an industrial scale?
There's no reason a thing can't be silly and serious at the same time. But here, it seemed to me, silliness trumps all.
Two less extravagantly conceived videos see Carlson and Strom collaborating with Guatemalan day laborers living in California. These works, like "Sloss, Kerr," belong to a series sententiously called "Real People." They combine the use of voice and movement with aspects of the laborers' own biographies to arrive at performances that are like collages of remembered experience and poetic expression. They're well-meaning, but nothing like as successful as "Sloss, Kerr."
The other major work in the show is a recent multichannel video called "Meadowlark." Like "Madame 710," it is a restaging of another work of art - in this case, a 1908 painting by Frederic Remington called "Indians Simulating Buffalo."
Remington's paintings did much to promote the myth of the Wild West and the face-off between "cowboys and Indians." With a few simple scenes shot on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, Carlson and Strom try to tap this mythology and animate it for their own purposes.
The piece shakes up such a cocktail of issues - from imperialism and social Darwinism to the landscape tradition in a context of global warming and rapacious mining practices - that it is difficult to summarize. For me, stunning as Strom's visuals were, it fell flat. The allusions were too many, and too vaguely indicated, to hit home. 