The red, white, and blue bunting popping up everywhere is your cue
that Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness: American Art from
Yale University Art Gallery is the headlining exhibition at Seattle
Art Museum this season. (Oversize, plush Uncle Sam hats are for
sale at the gift store.) That exhibition, on the fourth floor, is about
mythmaking, about rebels and patriots, about old Americans. New
Americans elsewhere in the museum are taking apart those old Americans
and their certainties. On the third floor, Titus Kaphar’s re-created
history paintings have been hacked into with an X-Acto knife.
Down on the second floor, the themes and agendas of Young
Americans, a 15-minute film by Northwest artists Mary Simpson and
Fionn Meade (both now live in New York), are far less specific. Not
much happens in the film. Six not-particularly-young-looking people
dressed like they’re going to a funeral on a cold day play games
and look around at the Home of the Good Shepherd, a bucolic campus in
the bucolic Wallingford neighborhood that, from 1906 to 1973, put up
orphaned girls and “wayward” women (today it is a community
center).
The only dialogue is a series of voice-overs. One man says, “Okay,
here’s the story.” Another man says, “No, that’s not the way it goes,”
but he only tells a riddle. They switch on and off like this a couple
of times.
In the game scenes, a man on all fours is protected by one
member of the group while the others try to get at him, pushing him,
taunting him, hugging him. In another game, each person has a stick of
chalk, and in a frenzy, they all descend on a circle of floor to make a
drawing, but no image materializes because they keep interfering with
each other; it’s like collaboration on meth.
In the looking scenes, the characters stand outside and contemplate
something in the sky, or they stand inside the Good Shepherd, in the
chapel, looking out the windows. Simpson’s camera work has always made
familiar spaces seem suddenly invested with layers and layers of
history. Here she shoots into the light, standing in positions
of relative darkness and facing a blinding brightness that makes
silhouettes of its subjects. It’s a spellbinding technique, especially
given the Good Shepherd’s stained-glass windows and the purple Seattle
day outside, but it also has implications about the possibility of
seeing clearly depending on where you’re standing.
These “young” Americans seem old-fashioned, tired, and stranded,
like alumni returned to a college years later to find it empty. Simpson
and Meade were born in 1978 and 1973, respectively, around when the
orphanage was closing (and when David Bowie wrote the rueful “Young
Americans”), and they’re inheritors of the last days of
20th-century American adventurism. Their actors behave like amnesiacs
in this windy and beautiful place. They may be looking back through
time for something, but it’s like they can’t remember what it is
anymore. 
