CINEPLEX at the CAMH: Part 2 -- The Presentation

by Brian Piana

Having already looked at selected works in Part 1 of my report on Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, I want to discuss the exhibition's layout and presentation. Sounds exciting, right? The truth is, I can't remember seeing a show that left me pondering the presentation of the work as much as CINEPLEX. It's a video show, but it's unlike any video show I can recall. This is my attempt in understanding its unique setup.

Typically, video pieces require more from their presentation than other kinds of art. They change over time and aften make noise. To adequately present such works while being respectful to the works around them, they are usually isolated in some fashion. They may be placed in a separate room, for example, or tucked away in a darkened corner, or (shudder) presented with accompanying headphones to muzzle the audio component from the rest of the gallery.

CINEPLEX shows signs of this traditional approach by placing the four works in the common space on separate walls and the fifth piece in a custom-built, 46-seat theater.


Installation view of Martin Arnold's Passage à l´acte, 1993, 16mm film, at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, from the exhibition Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX, 2012. Photo: Rick Gardner. (The theater is very cool.)

However, CINEPLEX also flies in the face of that tradition by making Les LeVeque's stroboscopic white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston – the most difficult piece to actually look at  – the largest in the exhibition and placing it directly opposite the gallery's entrance. It is a bold, aggressive act by curator Peter Lucas that clearly signals a departure from the norm.

Installation view of Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012. Photo: Rick Gardner. (Left: Fittingly, the show's title and statement are projected onto the wall as opposed to printed. Right: Les LeVeque's white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston.)


As described in Part 1, LeVeque's work is constructed from a sequence using two frames from a Charlton Heston movie followed immediately by two frames of white, and so on. For reference, you can see a clip of the film here. Being as large as it is in the space, the strobing light emitted from the work reflects on pretty much everything, including the walls displaying works by Gustaf Mantel, Frederick Brodbeck, and Christian Marclay. The piece also has an audio component. So even when you're not looking at white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston, its presence is seen and heard while viewing the other works.  I asked a gallery attendant if there was a break between cycles of the 15-minute piece (perhaps hoping for some familiar stillness), but there was no such reprieve.

A few days after my second visit to the gallery, I emailed the CAMH asking for images to use in these posts. I also sent along a question about white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston for CINEPLEX curator Peter Lucas. I was now very curious about the scale and placement of the work. I mentioned that I, personally, found it hard to "escape" the strobe effect when viewing the other pieces on display outside the theater. Was this an intentional effect, and if so, why?

Mr. Lucas kindly responded the very next day:

"Les LeVeque’s video was intentionally placed and sized to be prominent upon entering because its rapid collage of multiple movie frames and white frames immediately says something about the nature of cinema and our perception.

It was my intention for the main gallery space to include a variety of approaches to movie manipulation; for the quartet of works in that space to contrast, overlap, and interact; and for the experience of the gallery space to be strikingly different than inside the central cinema space. The gallery is meant as a more aggressive, flickering, kinetic, and de-centered environment, while the theater space has the comforts of traditional cinema presentation environment (black curtains, seats, soft or no light, and one central screen)."

I appreciate having an understanding of the story or design decisions behind an exhibition, particularly when the exhibition concept is as challenging as this. Wanting to have the works in CINEPLEX's common area interact and overlap is a very meta approach to an exhibition about repurposing, manipulating, and remixing. It's a bold idea, but the execution is holding back.

For starters, LeVeque's work owns the space. While its reflected strobing light and audio score interact with the other three works, none of them can really reciprocate. Brodbeck's Cinemetrics and Mantel's animated movie GIFs are less than 1/4 the size of white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston, and neither has its own audio component. LeVeque's score steps in, however, providing an unofficial audio track while viewing these smaller pieces. While it sort of works with Brodbeck's pulsating cinemetric, I don't find it to enhance the quiet nature of Mantel's pieces in any way.

Marclay's Telephones is the smallest piece in the set, presented cleverly inside an old Trinitron television. It does have audio (mostly talking and telephone ringing) which occasionally cuts through the LeVeque score. When it does, this is probably the best moment for pieces in the common area to truly interact on level footing. Yet LeVeque's and Marclay's pieces are on opposite walls and pushed down from one another (as you can see in the photo below), making it impossible to view the pieces simultaneously.

Installation view of Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012. Photo: Rick Gardner. (From left to right, works by Les LeVeque, Frederick Brodbeck, Christian Marclay, and Gustaf Mantel.)


CINEPLEX seems to be trying to walk a fine line between creating a larger multimedia environment made from a collection of disparate works and showing the four works as individual pieces. It's a difficult task. LeVeque's wall sized work is the independent variable here, as removing it (as a conceptual exercise) would immediately break this tension and create a more traditional video exhibition. Conversely, another large piece could help balance out white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston and keep it from overpowering the other works. (Easier said than done, of course.)

Mr. Lucas's response to my question also made me think about artist Rafaël Rozendaal's BYOB series. The last "B" is for beamers, as in projectors. These one-day only events either feature a curated collection of artists or an open call, and participating artists are responsible for bringing their own video or animated works – and their own gear – to the space.

Aj Fusco, Alix Ross, Jack Ramunni, Elijah Funk (via www.byobworldwide.com)

I have never been to a BYOB event, but I imagine them to be very much like the new cinema space Mr. Lucas describes: aggressive, flickering,  kinetic, and de-centered, full of contrast, overlap, and interaction. If the CAMH ever wants to up the ante set forth by this exhibition, I can't imagine a better venue for Houston's first BYOB event. Perhaps hosting one in between shows in the large space? They've already had one at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA Los Angeles:




One of my favorite aspects of the CAMH is that it often takes risks with its programming, and I find that to be the case with the unusual presentation of CINEPLEX. It's a great show, worthy of repeat visits. (I've been four times now.) Clearly, it's prompted a lot of thought from me on the work and how such work could be displayed. I don't think there's anything more that one can ask for from an exhibition.

CINEPLEX at the CAMH: Part 1 -- The Work

By Brian Piana

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston currently has two offerings in its galleries: It Is What It Is. Or Is It? (with some works discussed here by Virginia Billeaud Anderson) and Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX. There's an interesting contrast between the concepts of the two shows, which both involve the use of found materials. Upstairs (It Is What It Is) deals with the readymade, while downstairs (CINEPLEX) ventures strongly into manipulation. The latter is a captivating and sometimes challenging exhibition of video work, to be precise, and I have been thinking about it for a couple of weeks now.

Installation view of Perspectives 178: CINEPLEX at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 2012. Photo: Rick Gardner


After I decided to write about it, I realized there are two aspects of the show I wanted to discuss: the work, and the overall presentation of the exhibition. So in true cinema fashion, this post will have a sequel. First up: the work.

As you start down the stairway from the CAMH entrance, you begin seeing a flickering of light splashing across the downstairs space. It's an unexpected greeting to the exhibition, and I jokingly wondered if I was walking into a slasher flick. Indeed, cutting through the darkened gallery is a continuous and inescapable strobing light pattern, courtesy of Les LeVeque's white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston, which is projected floor-to-ceiling along the back wall.

Still from white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston, Les LeVeque, USA, video. Image courtesy of the artist.


The image above, however, hardly does the work any justice. (This is the case with most promotional stills form a video, of course, but it's even more applicable here.) The time you've spent glancing at that image as you jumped from the previous paragraph to this one is longer than the time you would have seen it in the actual video. You see, white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is an experimental stroboscopic video work in which there are two frames of imagery followed by two frames of white. For this piece, LeVeque has reduced 15 different Charlton Heston movies down to thirty seconds each, and then spliced them together chronologically, adding the aforementioned white frames after every two frames of Heston film stills. To get a proper sense of the work, go here and watch a 30 second clip.

I'll wait. Make it full screen.

Now, imagine that continuously looping floor-to-ceiling on a wall in the gallery. I was a bit scared to even look at it at first. I asked a CAMH gallery attendant what he thought of the piece, and he replied that he "[doesn't] look at it."

CINEPLEX's presentation of white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston is a bold punch in the gut, er ... eyes. It announces very loudly that this isn't your daddy's video exhibition. (Note: I will be to writing about the overall presentation of the works in CINEPLEX and curator Peter Lucas's reasoning in featuring a large stroboscopic piece in Part 2 of my report.)


For those looking to avert their eyes away from LeVeque's work, there was Gustaf Mantel's IWDRM (If We Don't, Remember Me) projected on a wall near the stairwell. While I didn't recognize his name, I instantly recognized the series from the Internet, which made me feel hip. Mantel takes very short sequences from popular films and presents them as looping animated GIFs.

“Because I want to fit in.”, from IWDRM (If We Don't, Remember Me), Gustaf Mantel, Germany, animated GIF.


You can view all of his "living movie stills" on his Tumblr  dedicated to the series. It was interesting seeing work inherently created for the Internet presented away from its natural environment. Then again, Mantel's GIFs come from video, so it's no surprise they function well as video once again.


When I first saw Frederick Brodbeck's circular visualization of a movie (during my visits, it was of The Birds), I immediately thought of Jason Salavon's Emblem works from 2004. Both series present abstract representations of entire movies in a circular motif. Having bonded with Salavon's visualization work while in grad school, I wanted to dismiss this as a variation of Salavon's concept from 8 years prior. Additionally, I've seen a few other visual ideas passed around the Internet lately that Salavon himself worked through 5-10 years ago, so I'm a bit leery of seeing work that so immediately makes me think of his. That attitude is unjustified and unfair to Brodbeck of course, but that's the baggage I brought to the party.

Still from Cinemetrics, Frederick Brodbeck, The Netherlands, 2012, video. Image courtesy of the artist.

Working past the Salavon comparison, however, it's clear to see these visualizations are more complex. Most noticeably, Brodbeck's movie "fingerprint" (his term) is moving, unlike any of Salavon's static Emblem prints. I could make pretty solid guesses at to the purpose of the colors and segments resulting from the film's deconstruction, but the moving components were a new addition for me.  What could have been left as a static image was now a pulsating mandala, (floating atop a white void, nonetheless, thanks to a soft drop shadow). The varying speeds at which some slices moved back and forth had me stumped. Enter Google.

Turns out, Brodbeck has an amazing website dedicated to this project. There's an animated cinemetric at the top, which would give you a better sense of what's on display at the CMAH. The site is really worth a look, as are the two videos embedded there. He explains his objectives with the Cinemetrics series and all the variables through which he can filter a film's data. Having seen the website and explanatory videos, I wonder if the CMAH gave thought to presenting multiple cinemetrics simultaneously, as opposed to only one at a time. I find that seeing two or three side-by-side (as in the videos) really drives home what you're actually looking at. Against the other pieces in CINEPLEX – which are all narrative-based –  I wonder how much of an audience the lone cinemetric can capture.

(As critical as that all may sound, I find myself wanting to see a cinemetric of my own favorite movie. Brodbeck even takes requests on his website!)


Opposite the cinemetric was a video encapsulated in a television atop a pedestal. The video was comprised of several cuts of people from films interacting with telephones. The piece was by Christian Marclay, the only artist in the exhibition that I knew by name. He somewhat dominated national art headlines for a while last summer thanks to his epic 24-hour long piece, The Clock. His piece in CINEPLEX, appropriately titled Telephones, is cited as his first movie collage and dates back to 1995(!). That number is a bit surprising to me, because I was a wee sophomore in college that year, learning about the Internet and email and wondering if Laserdisc was the heir apparent to VHS. I can only imagine the effort put forth by Marclay to collect and compile 7 minutes of footage in the earliest days of digital editing. (Note: While this was the oldest piece I saw on my visits, it was not the oldest in the exhibition; there were some Bruce Connor works previously displayed that dated to the late 70's/early 80's.)

I've embedded Telephones in its entirety below, but it's a nice experience – and nod to its own place in time – seeing it on the Sony Trinitron at the CAMH.

Telephones, Christian Marclay, 1995, video.

While these four works were on display in various regions of the common space, there was also an entirely separate theater constructed for CINEPLEX. It has the charms of a traditional movie theater: a dark space, larger screen, and elevated rows of cushioned chairs (46, to be exact). It was built to hold special Thursday night screenings of additional works, by filmmakers such as Thom Anderson, Sophie Fiennes, and Craig Baldwin. I enjoyed this space because, quite honestly, (1) I was able to sit down, and (2) my eyes could relax. That is, I could watch the work on display without the strobing light from white and fifteen movies starring Charlton Heston creeping into my field of vision as it does outside the theater.

During my first two visits, the theater hosted the deconstructed animations of Austrian artist Martin Arnold, and these works became my favorite of the entire exhibition. Simply put, they were unlike anything I had ever seen.

Still from Shadow Cuts, Martin Arnold, Austria, 2010, video. Image courtesy of Stadkino Filmverleih.


Martin's three works – Soft Palate, Haunted House, and Shadow Cuts – featured clips from cartoons that had been deconstructed and spliced back together into new narratives. For instance, Haunted House features what I believe is a cat running out and screaming onto a porch. The original animated sequence is probably only a few seconds, but here Arnold has broken apart visual fragments from within those few seconds and stitched them back together into a four-minute sequence. When I say fragments, think of eyes, ears, tongue, skin, wood boards, window frames, etc. all appearing and disappearing independently atop a black background in a highly choreographed presentation.

I was transfixed. It became a game of waiting to see how the image would reveal itself next. Moreover, it was interesting to see just how Arnold would use the various image fragments, and how the addition of new components would greatly affect the perceived narrative. Unlike the other two pieces, which presented mostly figurative elements, Haunted House used fragments from both the figure (the cat) as well as the background setting to great effect.

(Thinking back, it's probably a good thing Martin's pieces were isolated from LeVeque's outside the theater, There is quite a bit of flashing and flickering in these works too, and presenting them in the same space could create a stroboscopic apocalypse only ravers could enjoy.)

The sad news is that Martin's works have now been rotated out of the exhibition. Moreover, they're not readily accessible on the Internet (as crazy as that is.) So it pains me to tell you about something I find incredibly awesome but you can't readily see, and for that I am sorry. But they are really awesome.

I've been to see CINEPLEX three times already and am planning on returning at least once more before the show wraps up July 8th. I have found it to be a really engaging survey of recent and current approaches to video manipulation, and I fell it's worth your time to check out in person.  It's also presented in a manner unlike any video exhibition I have ever seen, and I will dive into that in Part 2 next week.