The curtains are drawn at Crawl Space
gallery, and Zach Rockhill’s new video If Dreams Were Lightning is playing on the big wall. The video is three minutes thirty-three
seconds long. It is a fractured piece, so it wants a fractured
criticism.
If Dreams Were Lightning is a
nerd’s paradise, a meta-metastasis, a piece of art with content so
congruent to form that it rides a beautiful loop circuit through the
brain. Taking up most of the screen is a model house made of foam core
and plywood that is being built by a pair of hands. They are the
artist’s hands.
The roof is set down, then lifts off. An eave is hot-glued on, drops
away; a staircase appears, disappears. The house is spray-painted
orange, white, black, red, yellow. The colors bleed into a nuclear
sunset, or the next monochrome obliterates the last quickly and
brutally. As decorators say, everything changes with a coat of
paint.
These events happen physically (a hand removes the roof, sprays the
paint), but they also happen digitally—poof and the roof is gone,
the color other. Parts of the screen switch to another channel,
introducing an alternative feed, but of the same subject: the house at
an earlier or later moment in its construction-deconstruction, when it
was another color, another shape, another scale.
Which of these jangling segments are memories and which are futures?
Nothing too romantic is allowed, since a caged lightbulb adds a
glaring, no-frills cast. The video surface, like the house, is
morphing, being cut up and divided and changed. If Dreams Were
Lightning is a videocollage based not on the collision of disparate
things but on the explosion of a single thing. It is a highly crafted
sculpture but also a performance. A soundtrack resembles the vague
noise of tape being fast-forwarded or rewound. Nothing, nothing,
nothing will sit still.
In historical terms, If Dreams Were Lightning descends from
all those flying parts compressed inside a frame by Picasso and Braque,
from the hand-carved-up derelict buildings and reconstitutive
photocollages of Gordon Matta-Clark (and, later, voracious
photocollages by the painter David Hockney), from the perception
experiments of ’60s artists like Dan Graham, from the
one-after-anotherism of the serial minimalists. It wishes fragments
were complete. It is a bit of YouCubism.
Rockhill is an artist full of pasts: His most widely known is Allan
Kaprow, the late Happenings artist whose works Rockhill has repeatedly
been called upon to reenact—most recently at this summer’s Venice
Biennale. For Rockhill’s reinterpretation of Kaprow’s 1961 environment
Stockroom in Venice, the artist added components from the 1961
novel about alienation from past times and other places,
Solaris, underscoring the overlying question: Why such hunger
for reenactments?
Rockhill names his Seattle show STOCKGAP after
Stockroom, indicating a link but also a disconnect between his
work and his historical reenactments. He also reprises a Kaprow secret
in the gallery handout—involving a fellow named Theodore Tucker,
and Tucker’s authoritative words about “the vapid glories, qualities,
and eternities which we think are History.”
Like Corin Hewitt’s photography performances, which yield series of
images of the endless coming and going of materials—decaying food
reproduced as sculpture, both fixed in a photographic image, that image
later reappearing in another image or in the compost bin to support the
growth of new food in the kitchen-studio—Rockhill works with
ordinary props and without a starting point, origin, or fixed view.
If Dreams Were Lightning is a frantic marriage of time and
space. The house shifts, the ground shifts, and everything is
constantly remade because everything is in the process either of
becoming or becoming located. This is about physics and mechanics and
art history, sure, but who can’t relate? Space is limited, time is
running out, something better or more could always happen.
Even after watching If Dreams Were
Lightning—and Rockhill’s other video in
STOCKGAP, in which an environment is similarly put
together, taken apart, but never seen in an original or whole
state—there is still an embedded narrative you don’t know. The
artist is from Kansas.
Kansas and model houses mean only one thing, as the artist’s
statement confirms:
Rockhill drew on personal experience and the parallel crises of 1893
with today’s economic collapse, both fueled by rampant property
speculation. The earlier crisis inspired L. Frank Baum, a socialist,
to write The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in part as a secret
screed: the tornado drops the farm house on the Wicked Witch of the
East—i.e., the eastern banking interests that created the
crisis.
In the center of Rockhill’s rescrambling moving picture is
where the “alternative” broadcasts of the house appear. That center
zone can be seen as a window inside the window of the
projection—a window where images blow past as if by the force of
weather, even as the house spins. It’s like Dorothy’s view out the
window of Auntie Em’s. And to underline the housing-crisis theme, the
house in If Dreams Were Lightning has no foundation. It sits on
a hole.
A line of dripping hot glue where a part,
pushed on, failed to adhere to the house; a tropical gush caused by too
many layers of spray paint applied too fast; tall, dark shadows cast by
the caged lightbulb climbing the walls inside the house: If Dreams
Were Lightning is driven by ideas, but it’s powered by a visceral
quality not unlike that of the most heroic paintings and the nastiest
horror flicks. The old stereotype that ideas and objects are hostile to
one another is defeated in this work, and so is the old stereotype that
video and photography are aphysical. This work comes from the whole
body. As the image of the house fades to a digital ghost at video’s
end, the artist’s hand spray-paints white the physical surfaces. The
effect is equivalent. 
