- Immediate Response
I’m really not sure what to make of this video. The first thing I thought was that it felt like a really over-extended dream/nightmare/hallucinatory scene from a movie. None of it made any sense to me or left me with a clear idea of what it could possibly have been about. I feel as though I am missing something important, and I don’t know if that’s intentional. It was not an enjoyable video at all, with off-putting characters, costumes, scenes, and grating music. At about a half hour, I struggled to focus my attention on the video the whole time, as I constantly felt it was without purpose. The title of the video only offers more confusion.
Objective Description
The video begins with a pool full of nearly nude women bathing in a bubble bath as what sound like wind chimes clanging in the background. They then exit the bath to meet a group of line dancers dressed like lambs twirl around. The bath girls introduce us to several of the video’s characters that they spin around on a blue stage while confusing texts pop up on the screen. The final character is a man in pink wearing a skirt and biting on a bloody rag. The pink man runs to the walls of the building they are in and begins to climb. The building is circular and mostly white, and it is made up of several levels. The pink man climbs these levels, meeting different characters such as group of punks, a janitor-looking guy who is shoveling a gross white goo at a black plate, and throws around abstract white sculptures. He does this all seemingly without much direction, and eventually kills a cheetah woman. At the end we see a woman in a white dress with her eyes covered holding a strip of cloth around a few lambs.
Technical Decisions
The most interesting thing to me technically about this video is the set up of space. The white circular building, which at my first thought reminded me of the Guggenheim Museum, is divided into levels by floor. This seems very significant, as the levels separate the different sets of characters, and our protagonist, if we can call him that, the pink man, traverses between floors the entire video like a parkour athlete. There seem to be hook and handles installed on the walls to assist in his ascent and descent. There is even a floor, where the cheetah woman sleeps, that has bars on the ceiling for the pink man to shimmy along. It showed an impressive amount of athleticism and the set-up reminded me of a jungle gym.
The Work in the World
As far as relating this video to the world as a whole, I’m a bit at a loss. It reminds of why I am not a fan of video installation art. Often times they feel like they are trying way too hard to just be super wacky and bizarre. They violate your senses in a less ignorable way than, say, a painting, because videos operate in more dimensions. They bring in the aspects of sound (which was offensively grating here) and time (a half hour at the least to view to the end, and I still have no clue what it means). I was just thinking about how much I dislike most video installations when I visited the Chelsea Galleries recently. I saw one called “You the Better” by Ericka Beckman that was beyond irritating. Through this medium, I find myself unable to think much about greater concepts and more about how annoyed I am at their randomness and sloppily spliced together sounds and scenes. I will say that I saw a really great video installation exhibition in the Hirschorn Museum in Washington DC last month that was very enjoyable to walk through. It used sound in a much more conservative way, which may have had a big effect on my experience.
The Story It Tells
If I had to make a leap and put a story to this bizarre video, I’d say it has something to do with how we construct our world in a way that resembles video games. We place things on different levels, depending on importance, and we traverse these levels as we would progress through a video game. In video games, there is usually a motivating factor or someone needing to be saved: the Princess Peach to Mario, the Princess Zelda to Link. That is what I think the woman in white with the lambs at the end represents. The pink man is traversing the levels to find her. It seems the cheetah woman acts as a final boss, an antagonist on his quest, and it is why he ultimately must kill her. He must go through her to get to his reward. It is highly likely I’m missing something major here, perhaps some context or previous videos (this is Cremaster 3, after all) but I’ve resisted the urge to research it further. I took this for what it was, a standalone video, and quite frankly, I think there are much more effective way to convey the message, whatever it may be.