Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

October 1st, 2004
Art, Book or exhibition catalogue, Essay

Published in the catalogue accompanying the short-lived exhibition “Terminal Five.” To read more about the exhibition, click here and here.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Every Anvil (detail), 2001

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Every Anvil (detail), 2001

From a billboard detergent advertisement to the weather forecast on the morning radio, from the menu at a favorite restaurant to snippets of conversation overheard in line at the DMV, we constantly process, sort, and decide how to store information. Archives are necessarily formed—all the weather forecasts in the past week, for example—and, in real time, we splice bits of them together to form private narratives that give shape to experience. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, collaborators since 1996 and based in Brooklyn, have for the past eight years often used digital technology as a proxy for this process, exploring concepts of narrative, repetition, archiving, the database, and the influence of media in our everyday lives. The technology they deploy—in obsessively edited videos, on websites, in live events, or in sculptural installations—with its underlying code of ones and zeros, is a metaphor for our mental systems of classification. Wisely the McCoys use it as a means rather than an end. Without becoming didactic or losing visual appeal, their art perceptively exposes the strict organization by which we cope with a glut of information.

Soft Rains (2003), exhibited at FACT, Liverpool, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao, and at Postmasters Gallery in New York, treads on our mental library of cinematic images by using digital technology to stitch together hackneyed narratives lifted from countless genre flicks. Seven tabletop sculptures on pedestals of varying height, each a miniature film set made by hand and populated with figures ordered from a German model railroad manufacturer, become settings we have little trouble recognizing: there’s the David Lynch chilller and James Bond thriller, a Fellini classic, a noirish lounge scene, and an artsy indie film featuring a warehouse loft-slash-studio. Our omniscient eye peers down at these lifeless scenes through a phalanx of small video cameras and lights on flexible metal arms, each precisely pointed to a specific part of the (non-)action. An earlier exhibition of some of this work had a working title of “Robot Films,” and indeed the McCoys cede the directorial “Action!” and “Cut!” to a computer, which in real-time feeds the cameras’ motionless views through a program that composes an endlessly reorganizing “film” made of roughly minute-long fragments, each containing six to ten shots. The slivers of would-be narrative, aided by a score partly taken from actual films and partly composed for the work, lose none of their cinematic magic from this concession. Instead, despite presenting the mechanics of creation (the sculptural film sets and their attendant cameras) and the product (the resultant “film”) in the same place, Soft Rains encourages a double suspension of disbelief that leaves the viewer to focus on either the deft craftsmanship of the former or the emotional tug of the latter.

The McCoys’ use of live video can be seen as a nod to the pervasive use of the medium by artists in the late 1960s, when it often was accompanied by a performative element. In Soft Rains, it is the viewer that engages in a kind of performance, willingly bridging (in both directions) the distance between the temporal, two-dimensional presentation of the filmic image on screen and the static, three-dimensional presentation of the tabletop sculptures. Another way to put it is that viewers can enjoy trying to pair the on-screen scenes with the cameras from which they come.

The construction of quasi-narrative in Soft Rains is a clever foil to the deconstruction of the artists’ “Every” series (2001-2002). Working with images from the 1970s TV show Starsky and Hutch, episodes of the original Star Trek series,1940s- and 1950s-era Warner Brothers Looney Tunes cartoons, movies set in Las Vegas, and 1970s East-meets-West style Kung Fu films, the McCoys create classification systems for narrative material. They reorganize the linear progression of already-produced narrative into the atemporal spread of databases. For example, Every Anvil (2001) creates a taxonomy of cartoon violence: the artists sorted through hours of early Looney Tunes footage and meticulously re-arranged it by type. The work takes the form of an open suitcase hanging on the wall with a small video monitor and a VideoCD player set inside. Nearby is a shelf loaded with CD’s containing the results of their effort, labeled “EVERY HAMMER AND HATCHET,” “EVERY MEAN DOG,” “EVERY POISONING,” and so on. The viewer is encouraged to play a CD at random, and each contains nothing more than a cascade of clips showing whatever the label describes.

Every Shot, Every Episode (2001), the first in the series and which takes the same physical form, slices the twenty episodes of Starsky and Hutch aired between 1975 and 1977 into over 10,000 individual shots spread across almost 300 CD’s. The categories are looser, ranging across visual cues, individual characters, or plot twists (“EVERY ZOOM IN,” “EVERY YELLOW VOLKSWAGEN,” “EVERY BLUE,” “EVERY MOAN OF PAIN”), but the result is the same: the predictable plot mechanisms (rising action, climax, denouement) are dismantled and the connections between events are made obscure. The process unveils the clichés and repetition inherent in their formulaic sources: Wile E. Coyote will never catch the Road Runner, Starsky and Hutch will always bust the bad guys. The artists write that the material they use “employ[s] formulas or archetypes of human behavior…and constitute many of our earliest experiences with narrative.” The heart of these works is their turning that narrative into list or database form.

What that reveals, in the case of Every Anvil, was succinctly outlined by the writer Jim Supanick: “The dogged persistence in facing falling safes, every stick of dynamite, every anvil…the slapstick quality that kids tap into shows itself as Sisyphean repetition to the adult viewers who make the mistake of looking too closely…[reminding] us of the masochism ingrained in our own everyday lives.” Every Shot, Every Episode may be a bit more benign, given our distanced, ironic appreciation of the source material, but the conceptual (and literal) shake-up is a potent way of reimagining the overly familiar. As Jennifer puts it: “It’s a strategy for looking at narrative in a different way. Maybe more from the point of view of the maker or the production process rather than the spectator.”

The McCoys’ extensive involvement with reorganizing available footage led naturally to a desire for more active re-creation. For The Kiss and Horror Chase (both 2002), the artists, instead of working with the original material, completely restaged scenes from Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead 2, respectively. The artists leave their place as editors to temporarily become both spectators—Body Heat and Evil Dead 2 are among their favorite films—and directors. Horror Chase, filmed on a Brooklyn soundstage inside a 1,000 square foot set constructed by the artists, is a one-shot horror picture. The camera stalks actor Adrian Latourelle (playing the Bruce Campbell role in the original film), who runs in fear down a hallway and into a bedroom, crashes through a door into a living room, runs past the kitchen into a bathroom and then a closet, dashes down a mist-filled hallway, and finally ends up back in the kitchen. The camera winds up exactly where it began, making for a forty-five second seamless loop that, in the final artwork, is manipulated to run fast, slow, and backwards according to a computer algorithm that randomizes its playback. Rather than working with the entire film, the McCoys show the chase scene—in this case the actor is trying to avoid an evil force that eventually possesses him—as the essence of the horror genre. The Kiss is an endless prolongation of the climactic moment in every romance film (though specifically taken from Body Heat), seen again through a computer program from random angles and at random speeds. Both films expand the issues raised by the “Every” works: as Timothy Druckrey writes, “In differentiating the original and its perverse double, the production takes the flash-back into the realm of the fetishistic…[it] is a kind of classic in limbo—part re-creation, part parody, part hijack, part homage.”

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from Horror Chase, 2002

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, still from Horror Chase, 2002

The same descriptors can be applied to Soft Rains and especially Our Second Date (2004), which again adds a personal variation to the proceedings. The work is another tabletop sculpture attended to by robotic cameras, but this time it recreates on one platform both the set (taken from Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend) and the screen (the Parisian movie theater the artists visited to watch that film on their second date.) Soft Rains collapses the space of film—its creation and reception—into one room; Our Second Date reduces it even further. Like the steel suitcases that contain Every Anvil or Every Shot, Every Episode, the interplay of creation, transmission, and reception in Our Second Date reveals a world every bit as rich and complex as our own.

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short takes

“Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph”

While in Chicago last week, I visited the exhibition “Light Years: Conceptual Art and the Photograph, 1964-77” at the Art Institute. It’s a remarkable show. Although its argument about the role of Conceptual Art in bringing the photography “definitively into the mainstream of contemporary art” is debatable, it succeeds in several other arenas: first, as an exhibition of conceptually oriented objects that is neither dry nor didactic; second, as a sketch of the precedents available to the artists included in Douglas Eklund’s 2009 exhibition “The Pictures Generation”; third, as an eloquent testimonial to the importance of southern and eastern European art to the histories of Conceptualism (a reclamation project spurred on a decade ago by Jane Farer’s wonderful “Global Conceptualism” exhibition). “Light Years,” curated by Matthew S. Witkovsky, is on view in Chicago until March 11, and I highly recommend it. The catalogue, too, is well done, and available for more than forty percent off at Amazon. For those who can’t visit, Witkovsky published a reconsideration of photographic abstraction in the March 2010 Artforum, the text of which is available here.

40 Watt Sun

Brandon Stosuy’s roundup of the best metal albums of 2011 alerted me to the London-based band 40 Watt Sun, now also one of my favorite discoveries of this year. Other reviewers were sharply divided on the record’s merits, something Stosuy acknowledges when he notes that the “sweeping hooks, painful, introspective lyrics, and [Patrick] Walker’s clear, soaring voice” are “elements that could be cheesy if not handled with such delicacy or well-earned confidence.” Four of the album’s five tracks stretch over nine minutes each, and their consistency means you’ll know very quickly know whether you’ll like the whole record. Imagine a British Eddie Vedder singing over the top of Jesu, or Isis covering Red House Painters, or a 45 RPM record by mid-1990s emo band Mineral played at 33 RPM. The songs are crunchy, drawn out, and so sluggish as to seem static—perfect for late-night cross-country drives, as I discovered last night. Find out more and listen to samples here.

Arizona Politics, Considered Twice

By coincidence I’ve just read two sharp analyses of Arizona politics in separate publications. At The New Inquiry, Alex Aums and James Broulard discuss the #OccupyWallStreet-influenced protests in Phoenix, and meditate in the process upon geography, demography, and “symbolic politics.” Meanwhile, in a recent issue of the London Review of Books, Jeremy Harding reports on the state’s transformation into a “militarized desert principality.” His thoughtful presentation of first-person accounts from both sides of the border is well worth the time it takes to read his 11,000-word essay.

Simon Kuper’s Soccer Men

In a recent interview with the New York Times, journalist Simon Kuper, coauthor of the acclaimed 2009 book Soccernomics, claims that he thinks “people are almost as interesting as numbers.” His new collection of soccer profiles, titled Soccer Men, gave me a chance to test that claim; having done so, I think the emphasis in his statement should be placed on the word almost. To read my review of the book, head to Bookforum.com. “Kuper’s admiring portraits of an earlier generation of great talkers—from Johann Cruijff to Lothar Matthaüs to Jorge Valdano—reveal that his irritation with today’s players is due as much to broader developments in the game as it is to their individual traits.”

Ferguson and Faust

Last week, during the friendly match between Manchester United and the New England Revolution, the ESPN commentators said that United’s coach, Sir Alex Ferguson, is a Civil War buff, and that during last summer’s tour of the United States he made a pilgrimage to  Gettysburg. Today the Telegraph presents a slide show of the English club’s “extra-curricular” activities on this year’s tour, including a visit to Harvard University. Does Ferguson know that Harvard’s President, Drew Gilpin Faust, who is standing next to him in this photo, is a world-renowned Civil War scholar? Has he read her most recent book, This Republic of Suffering? This could be a Missed Connection of epic proportions.

Foner and McGirr, eds, American History Now

Today I received a copy of American History Now, a brand-new collection of historiographical essays edited by Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr. Published for the American Historical Association by Temple University Press, the book supplants The New American History, which came out in 1990 and was revised in 1997. The new volume is an imaginative overhauling of the invaluable sourcebook of essays on recent developments in American history, increasing the total number of texts and dividing them roughly evenly between accounts ordered chronologically and those ordered thematically. If you have the earlier edition—I do, and it was very useful for my comprehensive exam—you’ll want this one, too, as the editors have invited a new generation of scholars to weigh in with fresh surveys of their particular fields of expertise. A few examples will suffice: Alan Taylor on the colonial era; Kim Phillips-Fein on the last four decades; Erez Manela on “The United States in the World”; Sven Beckert on the history of American capitalism; Mae Ngai on immigration and ethnic history.

The Los Angeles Review of Books

I’d like to point you to the Los Angeles Review of Books, a new and ambitious book-review publication. A temporary site was launched last spring, and despite its interim nature it boasts some wonderful review-essays. I’ve been reading it since April, and scanning its Table of Contents reminds me of some thoughtful and sharply written pieces, including Kathryn Schulz on Sarah Bakewell’s life of Montaigne; Barbara Ehrenreich on human-animal relationships; Chris Kraus on Simone Weil; and Mark McGurl’s controversial response to Elif Batuman’s controversial review of his book on MFA fiction-writing programs. I eagerly await the unveiling of the full LARB site, and hope its funding (from UC Riverside and other places) creates a sustainable platform for such writing for a long time to come.

The 1970s

For those whose thirst for commentary on the 1970s wasn’t quenched by Rick Perlstein’s recent summary of a dozen or so books on the topic, the December/January issue of Bookforum features another such round-up, this time by historian Kim Phillips-Fein. For assessment of another side of life during that decade, consider the discussion taking place at the US Intellectual History blog concerning Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen’s paper, delivered at the group’s recent conference, on Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Lastly there the recently published anthology The Shock of the Global, edited by four eminent historians, which I mentioned in passing here.

Luc Sante on “The Last Newspaper”

Several years ago, when Robert Silvers spoke at 192 Books, the New York Review of Books editor was asked what subject he felt was the most difficult to write about. “Contemporary art” was his answer, and he said that he was hoping to cover more recent art in the pages of his journal. While I haven’t seen much that qualifies as discussion of contemporary art from the likes of Sanford Schwartz, Luc Sante visits the New Museum exhibition “The Last Newspaper” and reports back for the NYRBlog. He doesn’t like what he finds: “For all that numerous artists and curators genuinely believe themselves to be engaged, the art world is too rich, too hermetic, and too pleased with itself to have any more rapport with what is happening ‘on the street’ than did the art establishment Hans Haacke and cohorts were trying to overturn circa 1968. But then, in taking on the lame-duck medium that is the newspaper, the show is even further insulated from actuality.”

Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind

In recent weeks I’ve found myself thinking frequently about Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind, an experimental 2008 documentary by filmmaker John Gianvito. I saw it that summer at Anthology Film Archives, and was happy to learn that this hour-long plaintive meditation on radical American history—and how it has been encoded in the country’s landscape—is available as a free online stream at SnagFilms. As A.O. Scott noted in the New York Times, “The calling of birds and the rustle of trees provide most of the commentary, and the effect is somehow to make history more mysteriously distant and more concrete—a matter of stone and weathered plaques inscribed with the records of half-forgotten deeds.” Here is a longer meditation on two of Gianvito’s films by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who compares the film to those by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Rosenbaum says, “Gianvito’s various ways of approaching the graves, memorials, and shrines through the surrounding landscapes that nestle and sometimes hide these largely unremarked sites is every bit as important as their inscriptions.” I highly recommend the film.

Blogging the Civil War

Huge fanfare surrounded the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth in February 2009—and occasioned a flood of books on our sixteenth president. (Here is Sean Wilentz’s controversial take on seven of them.) The ruckus has hardly died down, yet historians of nineteenth-century America are once again being tapped by newspaper opinion pages, this time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. The Washington Post has already launched Civil War 150, a site that has incorporated A House Divided, a blog about the war run for two years about Linda Wheeler. In recent weeks it has featured posts from the eminent historians Joan Waugh, David W. Blight, Kate Masur, and others. The New York Times is getting in on the act, too, with Disunion, a subset of its Opinionator blog mostly written by Adam Goodheart (though already featuring a few guest posts by Ted Widmer). The torrent of writing will only increase in the coming weeks: South Carolina seceded on December 24.

Stanley Greenberg

Urban Omnibus has published an interview with Stanley Greenberg, whose “photography explores hidden systems, infrastructures and technologies, both state-of-the-art and antiquated. New York City’s unseen workings, the region’s complex water systems, architecture mid-construction, physics labs, telescopes and a decommissioned dam have all been the subject of Greenberg’s careful eye.” A slideshow of Greenberg’s photographs accompanies the text; to see more, click here for a page on the Gitterman Gallery website and here for a selection published at the site of the Architect’s Newspaper.

The Original Tea Party

Why not spend this election day, in which the modern Tea Party figures so largely, reading Benjamin L. Carp’s Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party & the Making of America (Yale University Press)? The well-timed book is not only a lucid, detailed explanation of what took place in Boston from the mid-1760s to that fateful December night in 1773. It also sets those events into a global context, with a chapter on the East India Company and “Great Britain’s struggle to manage its expanding empire”; highlights women’s roles in the related boycotts and non-importation agreements; and builds on the nexus between the urban environment and political mobilization that Carp laid out so clearly in Rebels Rising, his first book. Carp offered a brief summary of “the real history of the Tea Party” in the Wall Street Journal, and spoke about the book in this podcast.

Pied La Biche

This summer I caught World Cup fever, which has morphed into an obsession with European soccer. I’ve been watching a game or two a week, as well as watching highlights from dozens of others and reading blogs and newspapers’ sports sections. There are a handful of intersections between the sport and contemporary art—another of my interests—most notably Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s 2006 film Zidane: A 21st-century Portrait. Now I’ve come across Pied La Biche, an artists’ collective that has riffed on soccer several times. Their video Refait re-creates, on the streets of Villeurbanne, France, the final fifteen minutes of the 1982 World Cup match between France and Spain. The group has also realized artist Asger Jorn’s 1964 proposal for a three-sided football match, which was played in Vénissieux, France, in October 2009 during the Lyon Biennale. Learn more about the group at their French-language website. (Via soccer blog From a Left Wing. Also, if you’re wondering, I’m rooting for Arsenal.)

Interview with Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture)

My friend Alan Gilbert recently conducted a lengthy and fascinating interview with Jace Clayton (aka DJ/Rupture) for Bomb Magazine. Clayton is behind the consistently great blog mudd up!; is the creator of stunning DJ mixes that incorporate music from around the globe; is the author of insightful articles (one, two) on changes in music culture; and lives, I think, down the block from me. Clayton’s Gold Teeth Thief Mix, released in 2001, opened up my ears to musical cultures with which I was unfamiliar, and was a large part of the reason why, when his 2008 album Uproot was released, I was not surprised to discover I was familiar with many of the “obscure” musicians it samples, including Ekkehard Ehlers, whose 12″s under the collective title Plays (later released as a CD on Staubgold) remain favorites of mine. In the interview, Clayton discusses “friction as a process,” the computer as the “folk instrument of composition,” and the economics of DJing. And really—if you haven’t yet heard Gold Teeth Thief, go download it. It’s free.

Michael Greenberg

For several months I have read, in a fugitive manner, Michael Greenberg’s essay collection Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life. A compilation of roughly thousand-word essays he has published in the Times Literary Supplement, the book, so far as I can tell, amounts to a haphazard index of New York, a careful and sympathetic accounting of its odd places and characters. I peruse it standing up. I read in a West Village bookstore about a longtime fixer in the Brooklyn neighborhood where Greenberg grew up, and in an Upper West Side indie about Hart Island, a potter’s field where thousands of New York’s anonymous dead lie buried. Now I’m pleased to discover that Greenberg has inaugurated a new column, “The Accidentalist,” in the new issue of Bookforum. Read his first entry, about a “strange fever,” here.

Reconsidering Christopher Lasch

One of my summer goals is to read (or re-read) several of Christopher Lasch’s books, from The New Radicalism in America 1889-1963 (1965) to The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy (1994), as a prelude to reading Eric Miller’s new biography of Lasch, Hope in a Scattering Time. Reviews of Miller’s study have begun coming in over the transom. Andrew Bacevich warmly welcomes the book in the new issue of World Affairs, and Alan Wolfe reviewed it in a recent issue of The New Republic. Rochelle Gurstein, once a student of Lasch’s, takes issue with Wolfe’s piece, recommending Bacevich and Jackson Lears as better guides to Lasch’s thinking. (Lears’s 1995 consideration is not yet available online.) I would add two enjoyable, deeply thoughtful essays to Gurstein’s recommendations. One is the reminiscence Lasch’s University of Rochester colleague Robert Westbrook published in Reviews in American History in 1995, and the other is Louis Menand’s 1991 NYRB essay. Unfortunately both require subscriptions to read online, though Menand’s piece was reprinted in his 2002 collection American Studies (it begins on page 198). Also useful is the Christopher Lasch bibliography-in-progress, maintained until 2003 by Robert Cummings. UPDATE, 5/25: Former Lasch student Chris Lehmann reviews the biography in the summer issue of Bookforum.

Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes”

For several years I have enjoyed Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” column in the New York Times. This morning, looking online, I discovered Gray has been writing about buildings and blocks in New York for over two decades. These pieces comprise a huge and diverting archive, from which I learned, for example, that until the early 1990s my block housed an Episcopal church constructed in 1838 on land donated by Clement Clark Moore. Moore is the author of “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” (more commonly known as “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas”), and his family estate, Chelsea, is the source of my neighborhood’s name. Click here for the archive with a brief introduction to the column by Gray. Two books, Changing New York (1992) and New York Streetscapes (2003), also contain materials from the column.

The Voice Literary Supplement

I’ve just surfaced from a particularly pleasant internet-as-black-hole experience. After reading Craig Fehrman’s entertaining article on Mark Twain’s house, I wandered over to his website. There I found a link to Rick Perlstein’s 2002 essay on plagiarism and writing history, published in the Voice Literary Supplement. From there I found a page with links to the contents of more than a dozen issues of the VLS. Good reads abound: Mike Davis on Jane Jacobs (April/May 2000); Luc Sante on street vendors (December 1999); Benjamin Kunkel on W.G. Sebald (June 2000); Michael Eric Dyson on Stanley Aronowitz (September 1998); and much, much more. For those wanting to learn more, Joy Press compiled a brief oral history of the VLS on the occasion of its twentieth anniversary.

John Gray on The Shock of the Global

John Gray has written the first review I’ve seen of The Shock of the Global (Harvard), an anthology of historians’ writings about the 1970s edited by a super-group of three Harvard-based historians and a colleague from Berkeley. His assessment: “While what one contributor calls ‘the declining autonomy of the United States in international affairs’ is occasionally acknowledged, the idea that globalization might be undermining America’s position in the world is nowhere systematically examined.” Read more in The New Statesman.

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