Unnerving, but in a good way
Phantom Limbs bridges the disconnect between our minds and the guts of things
Scrap Metal’s new exhibition is called Phantom Limbs, and rightly so. There’s some serious bodily engagement to be found in the show’s three video pieces, but the extremities are the least of its concerns.
To that point: a step into the dark space brings you face-on with a pair of naked, quivering buttocks, which pulse in subtle rhythm, or swing wildly on the small screen, seeming almost to pound at the frame that contains them.
The piece, a work by Toronto’s Chris Curreri, takes its cue from an art world bona fide, Yoko Ono’s 1967 film No. 4, in which she unspooled 51⁄ minutes of 365 bare bottoms
2 walking on a treadmill, in close-up. Back then, it caused a stir, leaving it banned in Britain — and no doubt generating whatever fame it might have.
While Curreri’s work is confrontational, provocative, absurd and more than a little cheeky (sorry, I had to), it’s not aimed at titillation — because surely we’re beyond that — so much as a plain-spoken declaration of simple physicality. Even so, he creates distance; the image is bluntly physical, but it’s also an image: the product of a camera and performer, alternately in sync and at odds.
Phantom Limbs is about that — the body, its function and the uncomfortable disconnect between the mind and the guts of things — but also the struggle to reconcile that rift. Such is the terrain of the annual Images Festival, a venerable experimental film and video affair that’s been running for more than 30 years here, and of which Phantom Limbs is part.
As the form has evolved, so has its presentation and the installation at Scrap Metal, a privately run minimuseum, is polished and professional. It creates its own world, which should always be the goal; you wouldn’t want to live in it, but a visit should give you a few things to take back to the world in which you do.
Curreri’s subject, a dancer, builds movements like an attack on the frame itself, a physical embodiment of that struggle, and that sets you up nicely for what comes next. Just beyond, two huge screens face each other, each glowing with a milkywhite paste that fills the frame.
Taking turns, a pair of robotic voices intone observations about everyday city life — “the built environment is not there for you personally,” as an example — from a bizarre remove, as though they were alien probes sent on an anthropological expedition to record human life. As each does, the fluid — thick and ectoplasmic, a kind of primordial soup — lurches to life, producing indistinct, glistening biomorphic forms.
The piece is called Without Persons, by Luis Jacob, and it’s discomfiting and creepy, and not unintentionally visceral; if Curreri’s film captures uncomfortable bodily form, then this is what lies beneath the skin: the entropy that our outer hide contains, but barely.
Jacob first showed it at Nuit Blanche in 2008, at Maple Leaf Gardens, and through much of the night, the audience was kept hypnotically in its grasp. Its relentless pulsing is unabashedly biological, but the mechanical drone — like a machine learning how to be human — produces a riveting tension, like something straining to emerge from the soup.
If that struggle remains a little abstract, step around the final corner to find a harrowing video on a small screen of a disembodied mouth sputtering a flood of near-gibberish at top speed. A little reading tells you it’s Billie Whitelaw’s performance of Samuel Beckett’s Not I, in which a mute girl finally finds her voice in old age and makes up for lost time, chattering non-stop.
After the intense physicality of Curreri’s and Jacob’s works, a reconnection with the mind, where language lives, offers no relief. In one end and out the other, Phantom Limbs unnerves in the best possible way and leaves you looking inside yourself. Phantom Limbs continues until April 25 at Scrap Metal Gallery, 11 Dublin St., Unit E.