[-empyre-] Pumping

[christina]

Joel,

In your installation "Pumping"-- you have filmed yourself as a  
pumpman/ lineman.  Your character is dressed in a thirties or forties  
period work outfit.  Even the glasses (little round horn rimmed) are  
right.
The art direction recalls Hollywood films of the same period. I am  
thinking especially of the Steinbeck adaptations to film .  Grapes of  
Wrath.  Of Mice and Men.   When I watched it at first I was completely
involved in this atmosphere, so much so that I really thought it was  
old period footage or outtakes.

When i realized that it was you, performing as pump man,  I felt  
pleasure at having been awakened out of  reverie. I had to think right  
away about why you were performing like that, in apparently actual  
locations,
like dry desert sites near LA.

The shots struck me as true- not landscapes 'like' or evocative of the  
region (as with "No Country for Old Men" , the Coen brothers exam on  
early oil in California).   You went to a lot of trouble to get these  
shots.
Your landscape of rail, desert hills, and parched dirt has  
extraordinary craft.  And you make us watch this place roll by over  
and over.  The pump man never gets done.

What grabs me by the scruff of the neck and shakes me is, how you have  
used the current vogue for
'reperformance' to do MORE than recapitulate ironically, as it were,   
a forties aesthetic.  Unlike, perhaps, Longo,  with the 'MadMen'  
style  falling suits of the sixties.
Remediation, but with a difference.  What is this?

Please tell more about this strategy of reperformance and the tactic  
of extreme verisimilitude, combined with repetition.

-cm


On Mar 11, 2011, at 9:55 PM, Joel Tauber wrote:

> 1873.  Los Angeles.  6,000 people living in a semi-desert.
>
>
> Dreams of trains.  Rumbling through the landscape.
>
> Ushering in “Civilization”, Christianity, and Economic Progress.
>
>
> A massive government handout.  The Southern Pacific Railroad seizes  
> it, and commandeers the City.   Bribes.  Propaganda.  Squashing of  
> rivals.  Escalation of freight prices.
>
>
> Pullman Strike.  Army quells strike.
>
>
> Trains. Tracks.  Infrastructure.
>
> Proclamations of paradise.
>
> Migration.  Rapid growth.  Sprawl.
>
>
> An exciting city emerges.  A powerful railroad facilitates and  
> shapes its growth.
>
>
>
>
> http://www.joeltauber.com/pumping.html
>
>
>
> -- 
> Joel Tauber
> joeltauber at gmail.com
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