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Democracy in a drum
The other Steve McQueen, at the Davis Museum
BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
"Steve McQueen: Video Installations"
At the Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College,
106 Central Street, Wellesley, through June 29.


The art of Steve McQueen — the living, celebrated filmmaker and prestigious Turner Prize-winner, that is, not the late actor — is, like so much experimental film and video, an implicit argument with Hollywood. Hand-held cameras, minimal production overlays, simple or nonexistent narratives, unscripted and without actors, McQueen’s films signify an effort to return the artistic process of movie making to the individual creator and take it away from the mega-budget, homogenized, big- screen power brokers and, in the process, return it to "art" in a way that most movies aren’t. One senses the democratic spirit in McQueen’s three films on view at Wellesley College not only in their style but also in their content. In one, two shy, middle-aged, working- class black men transport by hand a couple of potted palm trees as they navigate a busy intersection of East London. In another, traffic and pedestrians are caught in their noisy, random comings and goings on a Manhattan street.

In fact, McQueen’s films have more in common with certain schools of photography than they do with their counterparts in Hollywood, Europe, or Asia, and it’s telling that the Davis Museum identifies his work there as "video installation," as much related to sculpture and performance art as to the cinema. The action that takes place on the screen — even when it’s in roiling motion as in his 1998 Drumroll — asks to be understood as a moment in time, a cross-section of experience, reminiscent of the photography of Nan Goldin, Jules Aarons, or Roy DeCarava. Unlike traditional films, McQueen’s videos present no conflict requiring resolution, offer up no character who undergoes change, make no effort to mimic the lived-through experience of time.

However, what’s wrong with comparing McQueen to Goldin or Aarons or DeCarava is that unlike those photographers, McQueen makes his focus deliberately more distant; it is much more sociological or anthropological. In fact, it could be argued that McQueen rejects psychology altogether. In McQueen’s videos there are no studies of people’s faces, no attention to the idiosyncrasies of personal gesture or inflection or style. On the rare occasions when you do hear someone’s voice in a film, it’s not attached to a face or a conversation. Instead, it’s part of a soundtrack and represents a small fraction of a large, acoustical background. When you see a body, it’s as likely to be from behind as from the front, and it’s as likely to be a body part as a whole person. In addition, no matter what the portion or angle, a human form in a McQueen film will almost certainly be fleeting.

Steve McQueen’s interest lies in the larger cultural forces that shape our experience. Nowhere is that more evident than in the 22-minute Drumroll, a vertiginous, noisy, giant triptych of a movie — the three simultaneously projected videos fill a 40-foot-long wall and stand at something like 20 feet high. You don’t especially need the accompanying wall text to figure out what the artist has done to make the film: he’s positioned three different cameras in an oil drum and simply rolled it along a city street. Judging from the way the imagery reveals itself — the two outside screens spin with footage of different buildings, vehicles and pedestrians while the inner screen spins with sidewalks and streets — you gradually get the idea that two cameras were placed on the sides of the drum and one camera recorded the view from the middle. In their tremendous size and their bizarre symmetry — naturally, no two scenes are ever the same, and yet they’re always related in content and they’re all spinning at the same speed — you feel like you’re experiencing the world from the spin cycle. It’s one small step shy of totally mad.

Drumroll stands as an effort to structure the viewer’s experience so extremely that one inevitably walks away appalled by the deafening, orchestrated confusion of city life. For us city dwellers — and keep in mind that ours remains a comparatively small, comparatively humane city — Drumroll works as a wake-up call to the assaults we’ve grown used to. One of my favorite moments (it’s the artist himself, incidentally, who’s rolling the oil drum and whom we sporadically see a few times) comes when a voice calls out "Sorry!" Somehow, not knowing what the apology was for, amid the din and triple cyclonelike screens, becomes an emblem of McQueen’s overall critique: urban life overwhelms us to the point that we aren’t conscious of the harm we inflict or the harm we withstand.

Unconsciousness could also describe the theme of McQueen’s most enigmatic film in his triad at Wellesley, the 1999, six-minute-long Prey. The first half of Prey is almost completely static. An old-fashioned tape recorder (one reel’s red, the other’s green) is viewed close up, surrounded by strands of grass and hay. As the tape plays, we hear the clippity-clop of what could be an amateur sound engineer imitating a horse’s canter with coconut shells. Just at the point when it stops making any sense to waste another second watching a tape recorder and listening to the approach of Dudley Do-Right, the tape recorder lifts up from the ground of its own volition, the camera backs away, and we witness the machine rising into the air, attached by strings to a large, white balloon. Up, up it goes, into a gray, overcast sky, until the balloon and its attached machine nearly disappear. The sound of the coconut shells grows faint, and the formerly static image of the tape recorder in play mode is now replaced with the newly static, minuscule image of the balloon you can barely see. That nearly unmoving picture lasts for most of the remaining three minutes, until the tape recorder eventually parachutes back to earth and the cycle repeats itself.

The admirable concerns and undeniable intelligence of McQueen’s films unfortunately do not make them dramatically or visually arresting. No matter how painterly the red and green reels of the tape recorder, no matter how surprising at first its lift-off into space, no matter how balanced the film’s overall imagery — color becomes whiteness; loudness becomes a whisper; nearness becomes distance; focus becomes blur — it’s still a disembodied, six-minute document of a tape recorder and a weather balloon.

McQueen has said about the making of Drumroll that "Everything was filmed. People in the street, I myself. Everything was perfect. I could do no wrong. I felt almost like a musician. All I had to do was keep this oil drum rolling almost like keeping a beat. The chaos that was recorded of people, cars, trucks, etc., was almost like improvisation. Everything that slipped into the frame was permitted, it was impossible to make a ‘mistake,’ everything is allowed."

If it’s impossible to make a mistake, it also means it’s impossible to get anything right, and you only have to stand in the room with Drumroll for a few minutes to appreciate both its inventiveness and its dullness. It proves to be a wonderful conceit of ultimately very limited interest since, like all of McQueen’s work, it never evolves. Scenes are always changing in a McQueen film, but they never progress; nothing builds on anything else, with the result that not only do you end up where you began, the middle passages are typically indistinguishable from the beginning and ends. It’s a sameness that doesn’t appear to be what the artist intended, either. Minute four of Drumroll packs the identical visual and conceptual punch of minutes nine, 12, and 19. In Prey you’re either looking at a tape recorder or squinting to make out a distant balloon. In Exodus (the 65-second film with the two men and the potted palms) the only change takes place when the two men board a city bus in the last frames of the film.

McQueen videos turn out to be additive, not developmental. Ironically, even the turmoil of the three topsy-turvy cameras becomes oddly static. The drum never changes speed or hits a bump — it doesn’t appear to have rounded many corners, either. And the street to which the drum of Drumroll purports to bear witness is never allowed to reveal its own drama of human and extra-human events, the dogs and drivers and passersby. That drama has been subsumed and obscured by the technique of visualizing. McQueen’s guarantee and awareness that "everything is allowed" has as its necessary corollary that nothing is particularly important.


Issue Date: April 9 - 15, 2004
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