Doug Henry & Joe Potts
Still Life with Dancer: New Video Work
August 2 - August 30, 2008
Reception: Saturday August 2, 2008 6-8

Celebrate the birth of Cubism with Doug Henry and Joe Potts at Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art. The new video installation, “Still Life With Dancer” by Henry and Potts commemorates the centennial of the birth of Cubism, widely viewed as the first systematic attempt to break down traditional modes of representation.

Just over 100 years ago, Cubism arrived in the form of the painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” by Pablo Picasso. Though the consensus opinon is that this painting was the first salvo in an all out assault on traditional modes of representation, another significance was recognized by the writers of thebook: Art Since 1900. In their book, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh identified this painting as an attack on the heterosexual male collector, essentially calling him to account for centuries of stolen pleasure gleaned by voyeuristically gazing at the naked bodies of women who were trapped within flat surfaces (behind a one-way mirror so to speak) end and unable to gaze back. This was the first painting to ‘gaze back’ depriving the collector of his privileged position as the one who does the gazing, instead nailing his feet to the floor and turning the spotlight on him, making the viewer in effect the subject.

In addition to the masterworks of Cubism, Doug Henry and Joe Potts took as material inspiration the 1966 film: “Breakaway” by Bruce Conner featuring the choreographer singer/song writer and (in the movie) risque dancer, Antonia Basilotta (a.k.a. Toni Basil of ‘ oh Mickey you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind hey Mickey ‘ fame). And so it was that Henry and Potts hired several dancers to be the subjects of their video work. By happenstance, only the women were able to make it to the shoot. Also by happenstance, the camera crew (five people with cameras) was composed entirely of men. Unintentionally, they had bypassed Picasso’s achievement by establishing a two-way relationship where men gaze at women and women gaze back at the men, each from the position they have voluntarily selected in relationship to the one-way mirror (in this case the camera). It’s just as uncomfortable but there are no victims.

Rather more intentionally, the Henry/Potts videos use the formal conventions of cubism to produce a sensory overload; not a violent, numbing, barrage (though Potts frequently does that in his audio performances and recordings) but rather just enough to constitute the feeling of “too much”. Samples are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form. Instead of presenting samples in their original context, the artists present samples from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the sample in a larger matrix. Often the samples intersect at seemingly random points, removing a coherent sense of conventional space and altering the perception of the flow of time. The planes of content and context collide, interpenetrating one another to create a disorienting ambiguity.

The implied first person narrative which is the convention of mainstream film and video (”the screen image is equivalent to my eyes”) is abandoned here. Instead, the viewer is cast adrift in a dense forest of disconnected images, left to grope for directional signs as images fly past; (”the screen image is equivalent to my brain.”) The illusion of a forward progression through time and all that it implies disappears and is replaced by the absolute and ever changing present. The viewer is not passive but neither are they free as they co-create the work in an interactive electronic fascism. This time the spotlight is literally turned on the viewers, as they unwittingly become dancers in a video still life.

Common to all Henry/Potts collaborations, and integral to “Still Life With Dancer”, is a density of imagery achieved by layering or adding together past the point of ‘enough’ to ‘too much’, as determined by the threshold of intelligibility of the discreet elements being added or stacked. The signal to noise ratio is tilted toward noise and the communicative or expressive potential of the work to convey any kind of linear sequence of discreet particulars is overridden by an enduring kind of overallness that is just present. The work remains ‘over, or out, there’ in a way that resists any attempts to be ‘brought in’ or internalized as any kind of description, summary or story. It cannot be ‘read’ so continues to exist outside any conventional sense of ‘meaning’ since none can be extracted from it.

Just as century ago Cubism served as a harbinger of the effects of technology on culture, Video Cubism today points towards information technology and its effects on the individual within culture. The daily bombardment of video images we undergo has become an old story, so much so that we no longer even notice the screens at the supermarket checkout, gas station, department store, post office, bank . It is possible that, in our increasingly post-literate society, scanning media for meaningful content sharpens and enhances our ability to cope with the increasing complexity of the greater world at large. However, as we become more and more active participants in a matrix of information, it may be equally possible that this barrage taxes and finally surpasses our ability to process information at all, resulting in a collapse or implosion of our capacity to make meaningful discriminations and ultimately leaving us in a mental state that parallels constant, looping, multi-leveled channel surfing. Whether these scenarios hold potential for a positive outcome for human beings is yet to be known.

While we wait to find out, Doug Henry and Joe Potts have elected to spend their time experimenting at the threshold where one scenario gives way to the other, where judgment, the last judgment-–TOO MUCH– finally gives way to the inability to make judgments at all.

Cardwell Jimmerson Contemporary Art
8568 Washington Blvd. Culver City, CA 90232

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