Thirteen huge screens
Thirteen different novellas across 13 different screens.
Video work is not my favourite thing. Rarely can I sum up even the enthusiasm to watch a video installation through to the end, if end is even the right word, with many video works having a seamless loop where you feel somewhat terrified that you might never get away.
But this, ‘‘Manifesto’’, by German Julian Rosefeldt at the Auckland Art Gallery, is a different beast altogether. You can’t even call it ‘‘video’’.
Noticeably, it’s advertised as ‘‘film’’, for the quality of the photography is stunning as well as being carefully staged, costumed, rehearsed and directed to produce what could only be termed ‘‘high end’’. There is nothing off the cuff or amateur about this, these are ‘‘productions’’.
There are 13 huge screens and they present 13 novellas. Cate Blanchett is playing, by intention, an eclectic group of characters. Elaborate makeup and masterful acting creates utterly divergent personalities.
These are Cindy Sherman-like transformations, presenting Blanchett as teacher, homeless man, conservative mother to three sons, scientist, grieving widow, newsreader, choreographer, puppeteer, punk anarchist. In each, she still makes the roles into specifics, each a particular someone, not merely overstated caricature.
The script, which Blanchett performs, for she is the only character talking, is a monologue, taken from artist writings and manifestos stitched together to make up the text.
Artist writings and manifestos can be strange things. They are often strident assertions of a new practice artists are attempting to defend, more than describe. Thus, they have the character of an assertion, particularly when dug up from a historical period past, no longer ‘‘new’’ ground to us looking on.
When dovetailed on to these entirely new scenes Rosefeldt has invented, they can be heard in a different way – our conservative mother before cutting up the roast to dish out to the family chants a grace that comes from Claes Oldenburg statements on Pop Art; the Dadaist manifestos of anti-art become a eulogy at a funeral among a gathering of serious black-clad viewers; conceptual art and minimalism are delivered straightfaced by a reporter.
If it sounds tedious, it isn’t, due to the delivery by Blanchett and the lushness of the production, making it captivating viewing.
Touches like the puppet of Blanchett’s character mimicking the puppeteer, the troupe of dancers like a small silver sea of space aliens, the strange grouping of stuffed animals with a live crow in our suburban home, give it an unexpected quirky depth.
You become mesmerised. Each tract is about 20 minutes long, but it isn’t necessary to watch everything to the end. The set up encourages sampling and moving. It is more about visual delight than slavishly following a narrative.
The screens are set up in one giant blackened room. There is a seating bench in front of each, so other screens can catch your eye, and sometimes you just walk through and hear several at a time.
It becomes a sort of background noise – the bleat and tenor of people, all Cate Blanchett actually, trying to be heard – like a biblical Tower of Babble, where they speak in voices no-one can understand.
As an installation, as complex as it may have been to put together, with a labyrinth of movie-making and crews, it evokes a simple idea. But it leads us to evaluate what constitutes art – ideas that at one time seemed so important and new, but like others before them become part of an established fabric.
Although they once may have been thought of as apart from history, with urgency and passion, these too become status quo, as fresh and radical as they may have once been.
In each scene, for a short slot Blanchett goes into a sort of coma where she drops character and recites a part of the script robotlike. This is presumably for contrast. The text was heard like this. Manifestos are all the other things that Blanchett characters take on – prayers, instructions, lectures, reports, or, with the homeless man who delivers the words of some of the abstract painters, complete rants.
The international exhibition ‘‘Manifesto’’ opened during the Auckland Arts Festival in March and runs until June at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o
Ta¯ maki.
Elaborate makeup and masterful acting creates utterly divergent personalities.