The Frightful Power of the Camera

A man starts out telling a tragic story from his life to the camera.
He has answered an ad. He’s 42 and has a long scar down his forehead. A
few years ago he met a woman. They got pregnant and she had a baby
girl, Angelina. Angelina was the best thing to happen to the man. He
tears up. The offscreen director, wearing a preposterous layer of
silver paint on his face, interrupts the man. The frame is too dull, he
says; it needs something colorful. He gives the man a big, red,
rustling flag to hold, then exchanges that for a weird pennant he
insists the man wave while he tells his story. The man resists, but the
director prevails. Soon, the man, in addition to holding weird stuff,
has whiskers and a beard scribbled on his face in black marker.
Jump-cut. Now clumps of tinfoil and other assorted crap have been taped
to his head. You laugh; you can’t help it. Jump-cut again. His shirt
has been yanked over his head so his chest is showing; there’s an arrow
drawn to his nipple with the words “Free drink.” He’s trying to tell
the story of how he was separated from his daughter because he drank
too much; how he finally got sober and back in touch; how soon after
that, he took his daughter to the beach but was driving too fast,
and… the ending is impossible to make out. A folded towel appears,
stuffed in his mouth like a burrito. The director screams frantically,
which drowns out the man as he keeps trying to tell his story. In the
final shot, the man’s cloudy eyes are cast down and he’s drooling and
silent. In the process of giving a true testimonial, he’s become like a
rape victim, mutilated and dripping.

It’s pretty hard to watch this. It makes you—makes you—laugh, which you soon regret. But on second and third viewing
you can’t keep that laugh from coming, like a gag reflex. The story is
real, the man is named Rob Hoekstra, he is the first person thanked in
the credits. Why did he go along with this? What was he feeling during
filming? How does he see it now? Why did the director look like an
alien? Why does it feel so familiar when tragedy is presented as
pornography?

“This is the work of mine that people have the most reaction to,”
Japanese video artist Meiro Koizumi—the silver-faced
director—said during the opening of his Seattle show last week,
which included a special large-screen projection of this piece, called
Human Opera XXX. The applause was unsteady. So was Koizumi.
Did applauding mean you wanted this poor sucker to be tagged and
gagged? Is Koizumi a terrible guy? It was a little too much to handle
for an art opening. But all that means in this particular case is that
it’s a staggering work of art.

Koizumi is an artist from Japan whose devout parents sent him away
to a Christian school in Canada when he was young. As an artist, he has
lived and worked in London and Amsterdam, and for the last two years,
he has been back in Japan. His current survey at Seattle University’s
Lee Center for the Arts is a 10-year retrospective of 11 videos shown
on a long row of screens of various sizes and with various forms of
seating (bench, window seat, floor mat). Watched all the way through,
it’s about 90 minutes—a career condensed into the length of a
feature film. This is the first time Koizumi’s work has been seen so
completely anywhere; credit goes to Seattle curator Yoko Ott, who first
brought Koizumi to Seattle as part of a PUNCH Gallery video group show
in 2007.

The standout of that show, Art of Awakening, is also here.
It involves three men, also responding to a random call by the artist,
seeking “the Freedom of Spirit” by coming into the artist’s studio and
poking a plastic-bag creature with a stick to a climax that’s both
cruel and comic. (Note to self: Never go into Koizumi’s studio.
Anything might happen.)

Koizumi subjects himself to violence, too, like the classic video
artists of the ’60s and ’70s. In Amazing Grace (which his
strictly religious father declared “disgraceful”), a cigarette hangs
out of his lips as he whips himself with a bow on one cheek. He hums
“Amazing Grace” with increasing difficulty as the pain increases, and
with every exhale, a tiny paper figure attached to his face mimes
strumming a guitar painted down the center of his face and around his
mouth. The pain is real and connected to the famously penitent song,
but not by sentimentality. It’s like a brutal version of Bas Jan Ader’s
video I’m Too Sad to Tell You, which features the artist’s
face, crying, for several minutes, without any explanation of why he
cries. The mechanisms for expressing pain are short-circuited and
rerouted.

Topically engaged but anarchic artists like Bruce Nauman, Chris
Burden, Vito Acconci, Paul McCarthy, Shozo Shimamoto, and Marina
Abramovic might all be seen as touchstones, but Koizumi’s work is not
about references or art in-jokes. This isn’t art-nerd stuff, not by
far. Every element is right there—there’s a camera, there’s
something or somebody in front of it, and things happen inside that
universe. Sure, the videos can be read as allegories for complex real
situations involving global capitalism and media—Rob Hoekstra is
like a disaster victim in some impoverished faraway country whose
recorded plight is intended to inspire compassion; what happens is as
preposterous as the exoticism of the alien director, who perverts the
possibility that this taping might bring any relief, either to viewer
or subject—but every work is also a simple and direct tool for
eliciting reaction in the viewer.

Without resorting to big-budget production values, Koizumi is
masterful at manipulating the frightful control that a film and its
soundtrack can exert. (That’s both music and sheer sound, as in the
firecracker-like crashes caused only by a pencil, a sheet of wood, and
a strategically placed microphone in the earliest work in the show,
2000’s Untitled.) To watch his videos is to be entirely in his
hands, and there’s no sense of safety in these hands.