Uri Aran: Two Things About Suffering

Uri Aran’s new video, Two Things About Suffering (2016, video, 16 minutes), presented on the Walker Channel from February 18 through March 18, 2016, is part of the second set of Moving Image Commissions; Aran’s work responds to the rich conceptual legacy of Belgian poet, filmmaker, and artist Marcel Broodthaers (1924—1976).

 

A Yard, a Tank, a Whale

They said to us

Thou shalt not kill and they

deserved to die themselves.

Thou shalt love Thy neighbor.

 

They drew rafters

inside the A’s and on top of the T’s

They made images

They told us we were children,

They kept us from reading the texts,

since there is not a line which does not condemn them.

Belles lettres

plugs the eyes,

they filled my language with Jazz and jazz

is cotton stuffing. Silence! Silence!

Children and fishes

they will throw us into the sea

they will throw us into prison

They have lost their faces.

—Marcel Broodthaers, Untitled Poem (translated by Paul Schmidt)

Uri Aran’s new video work, Two Things About Suffering (2016), features an early scene in which two men walk side by side. The space in which they walk is curious. Enclosed but cavernous, natural light yet high brick walls, it resembles the bowels of an industrial ruin—a little too tall, a little too narrow. As the pair of men pace together, the more verbose of the two speculates grimly about “the conditions in which we are expected to act.” His roguish companion, without warning or much care for what has been said, takes the other’s fist and pretends to have the latter punch himself. The scene cuts before the action is completed, leaving the viewer to consider the conundrum central to Two Things About Suffering: the ways in which one is conditioned—through environment, language, and intervention.

At first glance, these conditions in which the characters are expected to act appear binary: the men perform two monologues that refuse to enter into dialogue, yet are spoken in parallel; they play out a minute Beckettian drama, switching a small work light on and off as if to refer to themselves passing in and out of character; there is a day scene, there is a night scene; there is a performance scene, there is a downtime scene. So too does the title refer to the duality of the work. “I wanted the title to sound like a lesson. Maybe these figures are two forms of suffering,” ventures Aran. “They ‘walk the yard.’ They are two fish in a tank. The space is so deep and so high they could be two men inside the belly of a whale.”

A yard, a tank, a whale. Such an allegorical impulse has been a defining feature throughout this New York–based artist’s body of work. Aran’s practice repeatedly trades on the uncanny combinations of things—of surrogates and substitutions, as well as the ability to say two things at once. His exhibition By Foot, By Car, By Bus (2012), for example, included a video of a man telling a story into a studio microphone. Each time he came to the end of the story, he reformulated his tale from the beginning, creating imperfect iterations anew. Much like Aran’s Two Things About Suffering, the video was a double-tongued piece—a recursive serpentine loop that reveals itself through repetitions and revisions both familiar and unfamiliar.

The casting of Two Things About Suffering operates out of a similar engagement with the notion of “familiarity” and the structures of acquaintance. Aran uses his identical twin brother—jazz musician, Dan Aran—as an analog or shorthand for gestures the artist recognizes as his own, while drawing the rest of the cast from musicians with whom his brother regularly works. The configuration of these people is a nesting of prior relations both social and professional, while the content of the work seeks to penetrate the conditions through which individuals participate in the collaborative act of drama. Although it aggressively resists a narrative impulse, Two Things About Suffering can be described as the sum performance of competing powers between familiars: of ambition, mimicry, ability, the desire to stop, and failure to do so. “Familiarity” is, after all, not just a principle that that describes conditions of intimacy. It is about technique, mastery, even the supernatural.

Formally trained as a typographer in Israel prior to studying art in New York, Aran is well-versed in the containment of meaning, how it might be laid out aesthetically, as well as how phrases, styles, might leak into one another. “The infinite possibilities of producing meaning through the interplay of sign and signifier—I address this aspect of language through repetition, re-organization, and quotation,” says Aran. “English is the language of the West and of Pop—you can’t escape it. The way it’s received is so mediated that it feels quoted.”

Aran’s Walker Moving Image Commission has its own quotations, not just within its circular dialogue and repeated gestures, but also within its script and the material of performance. The script is drawn from two sources: Richard Boleslavsky’s Acting: The First Six Lessons: Documents from the American Laboratory Theatre (1933) and Aran’s own antagonistic and highly critical notes he jotted down in the margins while reading the book. The video material, meanwhile, is documentation of an earlier performance he presented in Rome as part of the artist’s exhibition project, Multicolored Blue (2015). Aran treated it as if it were found footage, disregarding the original intentions of the initial live performance and the documentation it produced, and instead tackled its current container: video.

Two Things About Suffering inquisitively probes the frame, using comic pans and zooms to capture the actors’ glances straight to camera. The minor technical movements form the basic punctuation or rhythm of the scene; a nod, a tick, an error or an intervention creates its own patterns and events within a score of semi-rehearsed, semi-improvised actions. Aran also challenges the appropriateness of the “outtake” as valid material, where the “in-between” of performance becomes an event itself, tipping the genre of the sober chamber play into that of a slapstick comedy. “I wanted to use the material again, to deal with its inadequacies—to use these figures, the work, the actions to kick it back into the light.” But Aran’s “light” is not necessarily the space of clarity. It is purely an effect or quality that might better reveal that which is already present.

Two Things About Suffering is, in many ways, a conscious undoing of material. The video plays out in three sections: walking the yard; a “downtime” scene, where the actors sit and light matches in the artists’ studio (“I wanted them to play with fire, to have something bigger than themselves in the scene”); and the final ballroom scene, which initially plays out as if a dream but is interrupted, obscured, and cancelled by the digitally overlaid stock image of a roast chicken. Invoking the comic desires of cartoon character Wile E. Coyote, the wholesome sentimentality of an American chicken dinner, or the abject image of a dead animal, this absurd image forcefully rejects any kind of unconscious meaning of the performance. Flattening out the screen with an incongruously hovering chicken, Aran makes it clear there is no psychology to be understood “underneath” this performance, or apart from it. There are simply two things that exist within the same container: a performance and its intervention; two trapped men and a dead animal; inappropriate actions and unexpected ones. Aran’s surrealist gambit is a terminal gesture that forces the performance towards a conclusion, and yet persists for one final comic turn: the retinal burn of a chicken appearing in the dark glow of the cinematic fade out.

With its circular gestures, goofy interventions, and melancholic self-consciousness, Two Things About Suffering recalls Marcel Broodthaers’s declaration that art “is a prisoner of its phantasms and its function as magic.” The Belgian artist added, “I choose to consider Art as a useless labor, apolitical and of little moral significance […] Urged on by some base inspiration, I confess I would experience a kind of pleasure at being proved wrong. A guilty pleasure, since it would be at the expense of the victims, those who thought I was right.” Doomed unto itself, art will continue to perform the conditions of its own entrapment, always hoping for something outside of itself. It seeks and fails to connect with political power, and is reduced simply to a performance of certainties, hopes and doubts. “In this video, I wanted these two characters to act as if there was meaning,” says Aran. The subjects pass time, play to camera, and wait for the artist’s permission for the period of performance to stop, while being caught up in the absurdity of such an impossibility. Recalling his source material, Aran notes that “the funny thing about ‘method acting,’ and even the idea of the ‘Actor’s Studio,’ is that it acts as if there is something outside.”

An obsessive assemblagist dedicated to exposing the operations through which meaning could be applied as well as nullified, Broodthaers often put his things into what curator Dieter Schwarz describes as “conditions of equivalence.” His work puts objects, symbols,  and text together in order to expose their structural qualities and values that were, for him, both economic and cultural, though not necessarily truthful. “This equivalence does not work toward an aesthetic or logical condition of tautology. Rather, it addresses the mutual insufficiency of both the written and the visual presentation,” argues Schwarz. Referring to his “egg paintings,” for example, Broodthaers declared his work thus: “I return to matter. I rediscover the tradition of the primitives. Painting with eggs. Painting with eggs.” The artist’s statement, the objects displayed, and the environment in which the statement and object come together allude to the use of yolk in painting pigment, as well as the history of folk art. Here, the order and the repetitions of words which appear to operate with meaning both place and displace Broodthaers’s references and influences. “Painting with eggs” does and does not equal “painting with eggs.” In such transparent deceptions Broodthaers hints at another subject: the performance of dependencies of meaning. His medium is neither object nor text but rather, as Schwarz describes, “a rhetoric that will deprive us of our certainty of being ably to verify a statement’s truth.”

Aran’s prankish relationship with physical theater and its perverse interventions into the scripted word directly emerges from this cultural inheritance, specifically the latter’s summation of art as captive to its own illusions. Two Things About Suffering perfectly demonstrates such a paradox as a mise en abyme—a space of absolute recursion. It is at once hopeless and hopeful. Just as the first two words that open the video are a miniature drama of the title itself—“Please help”—Aran’s work doesn’t seek authenticity. It desires to simultaneously show a story and its difference—the inconstant glimmer of revision in process.