Johanna
Burton, Time Out New York February 28, 2002, p. 60
Lori Hersberger
How Can You Kill Me? (I'm Already Dead)
Swiss Institute
through Mar 9
Lori
Hersberger says that he borrowed the title of his exhibition
from lyrics written by an avant-garde country protest musician,
a pronouncement bound to give anybody pause. (What does "avant-garde
country protest music" sound like, exactly?) Yet, in the context
of Hersberger's chaotic, cobbled aesthetic - and his stated
desire to demonstrate that "cinema offers no safe haven" from
the real world - the strange mixture of musical sources makes
poetic sense. The gallery, dimmed to accommodate three floor-to-ceiling
film projections, is a whirling centrifuge of brutal sadistic
and ruefully cliché clips: Hersberger has harvested grand
denouements from sources as disparate as spaghetti Westerns,
Bruce Willis action flicks, and end-of-the-world epics. These
images are linked only by their moments of utter calamity,
and by the artist's short-shrift cuts to scenes that audiences
usually wait through an entire movie to see.
Hersberger's
editing technique highlights the visual and acoustic opulence
of these sequences, which in turn emphasizes the materiality
of film- and nearly renders the medium sculptural. For instance,
just after an ill-fated cowboy takes a bullet in the chest,
the celluloid stutters and pulls his lurching body back upright,
only to repeat the painfully Sisyphean gesture, thereby dramatizing
the idea of an ending while, weirdly lyrical. In another clip,
the looped sound of a woman screaming "My dog's in there!"
takes on a nonsensical ring. The words simply slip from meaning.
Hersberger
also outfits the gallery with shattered mirrors, tinsel curtains,
bales of musty straw and plenty of smashed Budweiser cans.
While he calls this setup an updated Plato's cave, equipped
with all the necessary ingredients for humankind to hunker
down and avoid facing the light of reality, the installation
feels like a schizophrenic drive-in. There is certainly no
illusion of a "safe haven" here among the wreckage, but (and
perhaps this is Hersberger's point) we're still happy to hang
out and watch.
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