Review: Very Large Array

Peripatetic, pedestrian, a film as a series of moving postcards. Very Large Array at Nationale (811 E Burnside) last evening featured Elizabeth Jaeger, Jenna Kaës in a silent “film” shot by Thomas Oliver, a travelogue, really, of short segments of the performers executing movement phrases at picturesque locales across this great land of ours. In short black frocks and spectacles with long hair blowing in the wind, they hop, stand on their toes, lean, and do awkward arm movements in on red clay soil before a purple butte and a big blue sky, in front of a Loretta Lynn tour bus, in a field of cows, beside a freeway, and in tall pale grass among Donald Judd’s concrete works in Marfa. The colors of the film were occasionally so remarkable, so lush, like the colors of a 50s postcard, saturated but a bit off. Turns out the film was sort of herky-jerky because it wasn’t a film at all, but many digital stills compiled into a very fast slideshow.

When the film was finished, we audience members crammed into Nationale were instructed to execute a series of movements (helpfully read out by Jaeger and displayed on an overhead) making it clear that the performers in the “film” had been executing just this set of instructions in the film we just saw. It was a smart little revelation. And we were funny in our efforts to simply do as told (or maybe only I was funny). In the end Jaeger told us that the instructions were text messages sent by their fourth collaborator, Sarah Elliott, from July 15-30, while she was in New York and the rest were on the road. Accompanying the performance was a booklet entitled MOVEMENTSCORE containing the instructions and an abstraction of the path of the road trip during which the piece was made.

One couldn’t help but be reminded of the robbinschilds performance/installation at last year’s TBA. Both works employed mundane movement by a pair of women in picturesque non-urban locations. What I liked about Very Large Array is its layering, or I should say the iterative revealing of layers of information and its self-referentiality in regard to its making via “film,” audience performance, and booklet. The notion of performer as receiver is intriguing, the Very Large Array, you’ll recall, is an array of radio telescopes…receiving/reading radio waves.

A DVD of the VLA will be available at Nationale in the near future. Check it.