September 19, 2004
Quick take: Annika Larsson at Andrea Rosen
In "New Gravity," her second solo at Andrea Rosen Gallery, Annika Larsson uses her signature filming technique—markedly deliberate close-ups that border on the fetishistic—to examine two subjects that finally elude her: a nightclub concert and an ice hockey scrimmage. Her art, at its best, allows the viewer to see details—especially subtle power relationships signified by dress and demeanor—that otherwise flash by unnoticed, and the videos have, to date, been slow-mo affairs that seem to suspend time by the sheer fascination of their subjects. She speeds things up this time (again accompanied by a club-ready soundtrack by Tobias Bernstrup), but not enough, and the videos are stuck in a middle ground: New Gravity's obvious staging removes whatever emotional tug might come from recognizing yourself in the faces of the enthralled teenage boys in the concert's audience, and the activity in Hockey feels similarly insincere. The latter video only soars when Larsson zooms in on the sweat-drenched face of an older man watching the game or spies the intense concentration in the unblinking eyes of a center waiting for a face-off; in these scenes, she effectively reenters the uncomfortable zone—literally placing the audience too close for comfort—that made her earlier videos such compelling vieweing.
But those moments are few and far between. Jordan Kantor made several observations in a review of Larsson’s last New York show in the May 2002 issue of Artforum that bear repeating. Regarding the video Poliisi: “While this irony drains the violence of its menace, it also keeps the viewer at arm's length. Other than the sheer visual seductiveness, there is no real 'hook' here, and after a while, the video drags. Though this may be part of Larsson's critical strategy—a comment on the banality of power, perhaps—ultimately Poliisi's meanings remain ambiguous.” Regarding Dog: “Larsson's cinematography is incontestably dazzling—Dog's cool light recalls Stanley Kubrick as much as Poliisi's dark palette does Ridley Scott—and again, it's clear that surface and theatricality are her central concerns. Here too, however, the relative weakness of the authorial voice persists.” Kantor concludes: “The mere fact that it's unclear whether Larsson's videos offer a viable counterpoint to the eroticization of fascism or rather revel in it is in itself somewhat discomforting. So though irony is clearly Larsson's vehicle, here it seems to he spinning its wheels.”