| Re-animator Brent Green's digital video world flickers like the rapidly blinking eye of an early movie camera. Ghost-ridden winds seem to leak through the cracks in shadowy handmade props as the artist tells gothic tales of family life in rural Pennsylvania. Shorts like Hadacol Christmas, Paulina Hollers, Carlin, Lincoln and Louisville/Gravity are sketches for a grotesque autobiography, poked onto the screen as if with the nib of a spider's foot, dipped in black humor and the ink of American history. Paulina Hollers (2006), for example, is the tale of an obnoxious boyhood friend who shoots birds with a BB gun and presently suffers a well-deserved, too-close encounter with a moving school bus. The boy's grieving mother, Paulina, goes mad and commits suicide. Green imagines her as a demented Demeter scrabbling through the shallow earth of her garden to discover the sallow skies of hell just inches beneath the surface. The stop-motion props Green uses to tell the story - a handmade school bus, a crooked house with furniture and individually carved floorboards - give way to an animated world of remarkable graphic presence, at once awkward and weirdly graceful. Green's drawing style, featuring hat-like trees and comic droopy birds flapping solemnly across the screen, has been compared to Dr. Seuss. But this is a Dr. Seuss who has, as the old American phrase goes, "seen the elephant" - and it wasn't Horton. Beneath a light layer of whimsy, Green manages to deliver the authentic texture and ambivalence of dream, shading in and out of nightmare. Green's low-fi techniques involve sheets of acetate, scotch tape and Sharpie pens. He uses digital programs to animate the individual cels he creates, but the rustic, very homemade look of the finished product couldn't be any more raw or expressive if it were scratched directly onto celluloid. The animated portions are, in fact, reminiscent of a variety of printmaking techniques. Layers of semi-transparent cels are like chine colle, the line quality runs from harsh intaglio to softer focus, lithograph-like smudging. In fact the allusiveness of Green's work is very broad. At various points his images recall Belgian artist James Ensor's grotesque impasto mask paintings, or outsider-ish demons when he represents a monstrous engine/animal, glaring at us from its stall in the bowels of hell. A skeletal figure shovels coal into the creature's belly as it pumps up and down on its haunches - taking the image in yet another, incongruous direction as it calls to mind Mickey Mouse in Walt Disney's classic cartoon Steamboat Willy. As an incidental effect of the drawing on acetate process, both Paulina and her son appear to be transported in hell in semi-transparent boxes, something like Francis Bacon's hellish lines of force in his iconic 1953 painting based on Velasquez's portrait of Pope Innocent X. The show at the Sculpture Center consists of a moody display of Green's props set up in the main gallery off E. 123rd, plus screenings of the films in the old David E. Davis studio located directly in front of the Sculpture Center building on Euclid Avenue. Although the objects Green made over the past several years are often works of art in their own right, they're hard to decipher or appreciate properly if you haven't seen the films first. All the same, dim lighting and floor-to-ceiling drawings and stories scrawled on huge sheets of brown paper covering two large walls, make for an unnerving experience. The little house on display is hewn from wood Green found around his farm in Cressona, Pennsylvania. Two of its thick exterior walls have been cut away and rest a little to one side, exposing the interior. A third wall in the back peels down from the top. This hoodoo doll house, like all Green's props, is a numinous object steeped in some flavor of backwoods shamanism, conjuring whatever powers there may be to join the strange human dance of joy and pain. In the center of the gallery a flaxen-haired, hollowed-eyed, nearly life-sized wooden figure represents his aunt, the subject of the film Carlin (2006). During Green's boyhood his Aunt Carlin moved into the family home, proceeding to die by stages from diabetes and the effects of multiple amputations. Here she sits in a homemade wheelchair, hooked up to taxidermy chickens. Mounted on wires, their wings outspread as if in flight, they seem as if they're about to pull her up and away to a brighter world, but also like intravenous devices, pumping the plasma of American folklore into her wooden bones. If Green's hell looks not so much like Dr. Seuss per se as a Dr. Seuss rendering of a Matthew Brady photo of the aftermath of the Battle of Bull Run, it's due to the artist's abiding interest in the darkness and power of American history. His recent three-minute short Walt Whitman's Brain tells the fate of that great poet's organ at the hands of 19th century scientists. The even briefer, oddly touching Abe Lincoln (2006) is mostly a simple meditation showing the president in profile, wearing his stovepipe hat. The sea monkey-ish forms twirling and floating like paisley ghosts inside the hat are, the handwritten text informs us, "the Civil War dead." A born storyteller, Green's narrative and musical soundtracks are distinguished by offhand poetic gems and images of surprising power: Carlin is "long hollowed of health." In Hadacol Christmas (2005), the main character is a Santa Claus addicted to cough elixir. He has no wife, explains Green, just a scarecrow in the yard. "The scarecrow would come into the house late at night/And hand Claus the crows she had found. Some were wrapped up and strangled in her skirt." Green narrates in a breathless, rapid voice, sometimes ranting, sometimes mumbling or lost behind music, matching the all-over trembling and deep ambiguity of his production values. Green is also a musician, working with the Chicago-based experimental band Califone and his own group the Magik Markers to make several of the soundtracks here. Banjo, fiddle, saw and drum generate a deeply textured backdrop for his holy roller-style narrative crescendos. Green, who is 28 years old, is self-taught. Obviously he did a good job: Paulina Hollers was funded by the Creative Capital Foundation and aired at the Sundance Festival early this year. His films have been seen at the Getty Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum and the Rotterdam International Film Festival, among other notable venues over the course of the past two years. Reviews have appeared in most major art publications, including Bomb, Art Forum, Art in America and the New York Times. Sculpture Center Director Ann Albano is to be congratulated for spotting this rising star during a recent visit to New York and bringing him here. [Free Times Volume 15, Issue 33 Published December 19th, 2007 ] |
