[-empyre-] pump lines and petroleum fields

[christina]

dear -empyre-

  One winter-ish sunny morning early in the year,  I walked into the  
adaptive-of-fifties-modern penumbra of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles  
Projects.  It felt like an auto showroom from a time of finned  
convertibles.  The military-gray cement floor slanted handicapped- 
regulation-style up a half level,  I turned, and saw what looked like  
a conventional video install.... large projections wall to wall. But  
wait, in front, in shadows,  what were these very long railroad ties  
then a hand pump ?  A breast pump, no, a wagon for delivering water  
along the tracks.....

The video wasn't, it was film, it looked like filmstrips, it looked  
like the documentary filmstrips from the forties and fifties and  
sixties.  The kind that extolled the wonders of 'Lahhhs AN-gle-es" ,  
as my grandmother of Anaheim would say amongst her clipped lawn-edge  
roses mellowing in smog.


Then I heard a whispering voice in an accent and timbre uncannily  
close to that of David Lynch, but younger. No: again I slipped and  
turned, and stopped in my tracks in front of the rail.  It seemed like
a long film.  The pumping, the pumping, the whispering, the black and  
white 16 mm feeling... I sat on the cool cement floor like a child in  
kindergarten waiting a turn.  The turn came, the work circled round
again--it was a pumping cycle..

The installation involves performance as re-enactment,  in  
registrations of oil and water....


Pumping / an installation by Joel Tauber....


http://www.joeltauber.com/pumping.html


-christina









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Christina McPhee
http://christinamcphee.net