Not of This World: Beauty and The OpenEnded Group

We just saw the Dance/Draw  exhibit at the ICA.  It closed yesterday.  You’re welcome – I am happy to tell you about exhibits after they close any time.  I’m afraid you’ve gotta kind of expect it from me.   Anyhow … serious post … Dance/Draw  is a collection of works by a number of artists along the theme of defining drawing as the traces left behind as our bodies move through space, understood and realized through every medium and in every way imaginable.  In Loving Care,  by Janine Antoni, a video shows the artist dragging her paint soaked hair along the floor.  In Trisha Brown’s Footwork #5  the artist has placed a pencil between the toes of her right foot and then used that foot to trace her left foot, and then placed the pencil between the toes of her left foot and traced an image of her right foot over it.  Some of the works are bizarre.  Most are incredibly creative in their approach to art making.  (The Phoenix’s review of the show, ‘Dance/Draw’ at the ICA – Museum And Gallery, includes a slide show of a number of the works in the show.)  But one particularly stood out.  People often have difficulty knowing how to judge contemporary art.  What makes it good?  Is something inherently good because the concept is original?  How do you judge the content?  This work is, without question, both extremely original and exquisitely, brilliantly beautiful.

After Ghostcatching, by The OpenEnded Group, is a 3D film with a run-time of about 13 minutes.  In it, dancer Bill T. Jones performs three dances.  (The show also included Tseng Kwong Chi’s 1983 photographs of  Bill T. Jones painted with body art by Keith Haring which apparently served as the original inspiration for Ghostcatching).  The artists (Marc Downie, Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser) have recorded the dances.  As The OpenEnded Group puts it:

“Though the work’s imagery comes entirely from a computer simulation, it bears an unmistakable human trace — that of dancer Bill T. Jones, abstracted from his physical body via a process of optical motion capture that preserves his movement but not his likeness.”

What you watch in the video is a sampling of his movements (through this optical motion capture) and his voice, which are worked into an exquisite light show inhabited by the ghost of a dancer.  I have reluctantly included a couple of film stills which IC Institute shared on their flickr because I think they are necessary to even begin to grasp what we’re talking about here.  But don’t be fooled, the stills really tell you very little about the experience of watching an installation of this video in 3D.

Each of the three dances constitutes something akin to  Act I, Act II and Act  III.  The rendering of the light and movement in each act is distinctly different.  They acts can be seen either as distinct parts of a whole, or a sequential progression.  I have no idea how the artists intended them, but the longer I sit and reflect back on this piece, the more I see the acts as a progression – from what is almost familiar and safe, to something from another world altogether.

In the first act (see the first still, above), the lines which map the bodies’ movements (although in “reality” there is only one dancer, in the final montage there appear to be a number of dancers) are almost reminiscent of an artists stick figure, or the lines an artist sketches when trying to map out the proportions and positions of a body.  The lines left in space where the dancer’s hand has been, forming spaces and connecting the bodies, are just that – lines.  In the second act, the bodies and the lines they draw have the qualities often of flames, at times of whips of gas. The images are almost spectral. As the title suggests, they evoke ghosts, but it is unclear whether these ghosts reside in heaven or in hell. It’s a little of both, and neither, since it is so beautiful and so profoundly not of this world.  The last act the bodies seem almost insect-like, at times like spiders, and at others their prey, caught in a web of light. But they also seem to evolve into fairies, angels, ephemeral traces.  The traces are only the faintest memory of the human form.  There is a kind of purity to the light.

When see in person, the 3D projections come impossibly close to you, threatening to engulf you.  The fact that you can’t feel them seems much less a product of your distance from them than of the inherent insubstantiality of the streams of light to begin with.  Like wisps of air, or specters that pass through you leaving only a chill, you don’t really expect them to feel like anything anyway.  Their movement is so graceful, and yet their proximity so unexpected, that they are at once threatening and welcoming.  Jones’s disembodied voice, the sounds, the grace of the movements, are slow and elegant, but definitely not quite comfortable.  After Ghostcatching  is a moving reminder that, no matter how jaded you think you have become, art still has the power to surprise you, to stir you, to make you redefine your understanding of the possibilities for beauty.

I strongly encourage you to visit the OpenEnded Group’s website, where they offer a video of excerpts from the piece.  Do go watch it.  You won’t be sorry.  It is still only a shadow of the 3D installation experience, but is worth seeing if only to tempt you to go and see the real thing when the opportunity presents itself.  In addition, After Ghostcatching  refers back to a 1999 work entitled simply Ghostcatching (which was not in 3D), and if you go to the discussion of the original piece, there is an explanation of the process by which they have created the imagery.  I kind of enjoy it more as a mystery, but even after reading the discussion, the video continues to seem unreal and indescribable.

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