Afterlives and Other Agonies
@ Gallery 400
400 S Peoria St, Chicago, IL 60607
Opening Wednesday, February 16th, at 7PM
Films and videos curated by Doug Ischar.
Derived from the Greeks (no surprise), agony traveled a typically internalizing route, from fetishized contest in sport to an umbrella term for all varieties of pain; the only requirement that the pain need be dreadful, at the limits of our endurance. Today’s agonies are as often psychic and social as they are physical. Our emotional habitat is one of increasing danger and, as we are reminded daily, treachery. Thus, while physical pain is still very much with us—its uses shamefully familiar—psychic pain, underscored by social and political pain, seems ever more inescapable. This is our epochal trauma—the one that ‘just won’t go away.’
Peggy Ahwesh’s The Ape of Nature (2010) is a split screen, single channel version of her first gallery installation from 2009. A treatise on the malaise of post-industrial cultures, the lion’s share of this film unfolds in a bucolic Hudson River mansion rather than an anachronistic factory environment. Ahwesh proposes an equation between women under hypnosis and the mindset induced by the current economic climate, observed in the men she films at work in a vestigial industry. The Ape of Nature eschews melodrama and the outright expression of anguish, there is a clinical, at times humorous, timbre to the film, one markedly at odds with its timely rueful observations.
Colin Campbell’s pioneering The Lady from Malibu (1976) is the first in a series of six tapes about a woman who lives in Southern California and talks about her life and the lifestyle of Los Angeles, which she documents in obsessive detail. This tape recounts the death of her husband in the Himalayas.
“The Agonal Phase”—a biological term—denotes the end phases of the dying process, and as the title of Jennifer Montgomery’s 2010 film, it forewarns of grief to come. Still, nothing could forearm us against Montgomery’s steady gaze and unflinchingly lachrymose treatment of both her mother’s passing and—yet more horrible and unforgivable—her father’s and her own survival. The agony in The Agonal Phase is familial and deeply personal, but its acutely lived and ruthlessly observed discomforts belong to us all. Like death, this film tries the viewer in irredeemable ways. Its triumph is in refusing to comfort, in assuming a stubbornly democratic stance toward its easily dramatized subjects: the remarkable and the not so remarkable (as if there were any).
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