E-Mail This Article to a Friend Laughing matters Christian Jankowski’s art-world tonic BY CHRISTOPHER MILLIS
	"Christian Jankowski:Everything Fell Together" List Visual Art Center, 20 Ames St, Cambridge | Through December 31
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You may come away from Christian Jankowski’s alternately ribald and serious, outrageous and penetrating exhibit of videos and photographs wondering: how does he get away with it? By turns Jankowski skewers art patrons, curators, art critics, actors, televangelism, television, and film in ways that are unmistakable and merciless. Yet this boyish 37-year-old German-born artist, who’s enjoying his first major survey at MIT’s List Center, does get away with it, to judge not only from the MIT exhibit but from his growing list of international credits, which include showcases ranging from the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale to the Swiss Institute in New York and London’s Serpentine Gallery.

His secret is humor — and an appealing dose of ego. In his better projects, he inserts himself into a more or less scripted TV or TV-type broadcast (one of the installations involves film footage he’s made for a traveling karaoke bar) that he transforms from the preordained and pedestrian into the delightfully strange and often unbearably funny. Supreme among those accomplishments is his 2001 The Holy Artwork, which found its way to the Whitney Biennial three years ago. The video represents one of the great diplomatic coups in the perpetually embattled art world, right up there with Christo and Jean Claude’s obtaining permission to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin. Jankowski enlisted the beefy, goateed, ingenuous, and above all loquacious televangelist Pastor Peter Spencer, who presides over the Harvest Fellowship Church in Texas, to collaborate on what becomes simultaneously a traditional evangelical broadcast and an unsettlingly hilarious piece of iconoclastic video art. It’s all about getting people to agree beforehand.

A few seconds of footage at the start of The Holy Artwork set the scene: a sign like those that hawk roadside motels identifies the church. Cut to a nondescript low-slung cinderblock building. Cut to the interior, where the congregation — a working-class medley of teens, young families, the middle-aged, and the elderly — occupies folding seats in a fluorescent-lit space reminiscent of a high-school auditorium. On stage, before a spare backdrop of Roman column and potted trees, Pastor Spencer announces, "We have somebody who is with us here today. He is doing something very special . . . This is Christian. He’s from Germany."

Suddenly the camera perspective switches. We’re no longer looking at the preacher but seeing through another lens, the one Jankowski totes as he makes his way from the back of the auditorium to the stage, getting zigzagging takes on the folks in their seats. Then, just as the artist gets to within handshaking distance of Spencer, the camera goes woozy, there’s a crashing sound, and we’re back to the perspective of the church’s camera crew. Jankowski has dropped to the floor, prostrate. For the duration of the service, he doesn’t move, not even the miniature video camera disabled in his extended hand. Hee’s playing possum, but you can’t keep your eyes from his preposterous place and posture.

Then the real fun begins. Pastor Spencer continues, "He did just about the last thing that you would have expected: he fell over. And I know you wonder why. Let me tell you why. What you are looking at today is not just a video. It is what is considered Holy Art. Holy Art? Let me tell you what Holy Art is . . . " Yet for all his garrulousness, Spencer never quite gets to the definition. Instead he offers a wealth of platitudes ("I come from the world view that there is only one Creator but many people who are creative"), a trove of misunderstandings and contradictions (" . . . it took Christian falling down, no longer becoming the center of attention, to make this a great piece of art"), and a stockpile of pleonasms ("So if you get nothing else today from this Holy Art, it is critical you understand this simple point. You are going to see many creative things, but there is only one Creator."). The real kicker comes when the chorus makes its way onto the stage and breaks into an earnest, generic number while the phone number for donations stretches across the bottom of the screen like a mattress beneath Jankowski’s inert body.

The disparity between a man playing dead on stage holding a miniature video camera (Jankowski wears a white shirt and white pants for the occasion, perhaps to suggest his role as fallen acolyte) while an energetic, humorless evangelical strives to bridge the gap between art and religion proves more than just a send-up, though it is hilarious. Jankowski’s powerful, unsettling æsthetic is predicated on direct physical involvement with people’s closely held beliefs and an understanding that art lives at the intersection of incompatible forces.

That æsthetic unites the 12-year span of projects covered by the retrospective, beginning with his 1992 Shamebox, in which people were invited to sit in a storefront window with placards announcing their sources of shame: "I am ashamed of neglecting my children," or "I am ashamed of my re-education as a real-estate agent." Unfortunately, the human element of contact and surprise that must have marked the event itself doesn’t carry over to the 34 black-and-white photographs that document Shamebox.

In an interview with List curator Bill Arning, Jankowski insists that his work shouldn’t be viewed as ironic, that his videos represent a sympathetic involvement with his subjects. Uh, right. Does he really believe anyone can watch his 2000 The Matrix Effect and not come away with an appreciation of its scathing sarcasm? Five years ago, Jankowski was commissioned to create a new work for the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Matrix Series for emerging artists. The artist sent questionnaires to the former director and curator as well as to artists who had participated in past Matrix exhibits. When the responses came back, he transcribed them and gave the script to a cast of untrained children to act out. In this art-world version of Bugsy Malone, a blond boy with oversized glasses and a pinstripe shirt is Sol LeWitt; a thin black boy in a fashionable vest and slacks is Glenn Ligon; an athletic boy in jeans and a work shirt is coupled with a girl in a satin dress and red scarf as — who else? — Christo and Jean Claude. The "artists" are interviewed in the palatial Atheneum in front of their works by a composed, effervescent eight-year-old (she wears her pearl earrings and black A-line dress like an experienced docent) who introduces herself as curator Andrea Miller-Keller. As the children parrot the art talk they’ve been fed (the little kid playing former director Jim Elliot says, deadpan, "Well, before I came to the museum, I was chief curator at the LA County Museum of Art"), the effect transforms from whimsical to eerily hollow. By putting adult reflections in the mouths of innocents, Jankowski makes us aware not just of the empty self-importance of art talk but also of the mask of language itself: everything spoken is simultaneously truthful and untruthful. Only Sol LeWitt doesn’t come off as a bozo. When questioned by Andrea as to why so many people had difficulty with his wall drawings 25 years ago, he responds tersely, "You have to ask the many people."

Jankowski’s brilliance isn’t uniform (whose is?), but his gentle disruption of prefabricated formats (in one piece he calls in his problems to a television psychic; in another he walks around the set of a Greek talk show and listens intently as the guests discuss, in a language he doesn’t understand, the meaning of his art) provides the kind of tonic we look for and need from art.