Swathed in expensive clothes of varying age- and decade-appropriateness, the women on the projector resemble “Dynasty” characters matured about 20 years. Obviously wealthy and occupying some liminal space between middle-aged and elderly, they strut around a backyard pool, occasionally stopping to perch on the diving board or to drape themselves along the lawn furniture. These women are featured in the piece titled “Forever,” part of artist Julika Rudelius’s show “Projections” (which consists of two video installations), showing in the Zilkha gallery until Feb. 28.
For all their resemblance to characters in an over-the-top eighties soap, the subjects of “Forever” are really more like contestants on a reality show. While they appear to be spontaneously holding forth on various subjects, they are, in fact, responding to more or less leading, off-camera questions. What is real? What is scripted or staged? How much does this difference matter in the way we process film or television as a medium? These are some of the more obvious questions that Rudelius asks the viewer to ponder.
Like contestants on pretty much any reality show ever, the women are studies in delusional narcissism, fair targets because it is after all their own exhibitionism that brought them here in the first place. When one of the women—a sixty-year-old with the body of a teenager and the taut, feline face of a cosmetic surgery fiend—says, in her lilting European accent, “I know some women who are really addicted to plastic surgery,” the viewer is in on the joke in the best (or worst, as the case may be) tradition of exploitive prime-time programming.
Yet, while some viewers might leave the gallery with a decidedly bad taste in their mouths after being subjected to a looped 15 minutes of these women enacting their own stereotype, it is hard not to feel some sort of affinity for the blissfully unaware ladies, even as they spout inanities such as, “Sometimes people are asked to parties just because they’re good looking.” When one of the women, the fiercest of the group, poses in profile for the camera, you look first at her garish fuchsia suit and the excessive gold jewelry and aggressively slicked back platinum hair, and if you are still paying attention after all that, you might just make out a small flesh-colored hearing aid nestled in her ear, which is a strangely endearing little detail. The question is whether the viewer will have the patience or desire to extract something more than a caricature from the installation.
Adjunct Lecturer in art history Nina Felshin, curator of the exhibit, says that this indeterminacy is precisely the point.
“You have to bring more to [the videos] than what you see, and that becomes the poetry of the work,” she said. “It’s almost as if the context in which you view art is a trigger…it forces you to think critically about it.”
The exhibit’s other video, “Your Blood is as Red as Mine,” appears to be a self-reflexive documentary or perhaps a critique of the genre. This time Rudelius, a willowy, white Dutch woman, is physically present on the screen for a good part of the video. The project, according to Felshin, evolved when Rudelius was taking portraits of members of an immigrant community in Amsterdam. She started talking with her subjects about the way their dark skin tone photographed, prompting her investigation of perceived racial difference.
Unless you are familiar with the racial dynamic of Holland, however, it’s hard to know if cloddish questions like “What’s it like being black?” are genuine inquiries or just parodies of fumbling attempts to get to know “the other.” Mostly, the interactions in the video are pleasant, even comfortable, but occasionally they veer into the confrontational, or perhaps a better term would be postmodern. One man, presumably a religious leader, turns the tables on Rudelius during his interview, “You’re here to study me, I’m here to study you.” he said. “You have the general mentality of the average white European.”
This exchange has a slight air of faux-profundity, but the other incident of confrontation has real power. During a long tracking shot of some kids hanging out against a wall, you hear an adult voice. The man is irate that Rudelius is filming the schoolchildren without permission from their parents, though he seems just as upset that a white woman is infiltrating his neighborhood and obtaining its image for her own inscrutable purposes.
“Who are these kids?” the unknown man yells. “What’s one of these kids’ names? Tell me the names of one of these kids!” The sequence offers the exhibit’s most striking and concise examinations of the concept of exploitation. It is up to the viewer, of course, to decide what exactly it all means.