More than Movies

PARK CITY, Utah—The Sundance Film Festival can feel a bit like Art Basel Miami Beach, with the opposite climate. An entire resort town, snowy Park City, Utah, is appropriated by a culture industry, with satellite festivals, exclusive parties, luxury goods, and the usual celebrity glitter (Paris Hilton and Mary-Kate Olsen were party fixtures this year) dusted over the surface. And artistic integrity is often eclipsed by big-money deals. But where visual art is glam in Miami, at Sundance it maintains an alluring bit of outsider status.

The festival gets plenty of attention from mainstream audiences and media—entertainment journalists and bloggers are everywhere—but its programmers also aim to earn contemporary-art cred. Based on what I saw, the Sundance organizers might want to try harder in this regard, but try they do, most specifically with a program called New Frontiers, which includes films, cinematic installations, and performances. But this wasn’t the only place where contemporary art took center stage.  

I was particularly intrigued that the festival included a documentary on Vanessa Beecroft—a star in her field, but not necessarily outside of it. I wasn’t aware of her attempt to adopt African infants, which is the subject of the powerful documentary, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins—included in the World Cinema Documentary Competition. I met the artist in the lobby of the Yarrow Resort Hotel for an interview. At that point, I hadn’t seen the film, but I had seen Web site documentation of her troubling 2007 Venice performance VB61, in which she doused African women with blood-red paint in a fish market. Jackson Pollock and Hermann Nitsch, Beecroft says, were the reference points, though additional political allusions run rampant. At Sundance, Beecroft was clad in stylish white snow boots, her hair tied back. She was friendly and enthusiastic as she spoke about her work and the documentary. Of VB61, she said, “People were looking at it a little bit mortified. It wasn’t taken lightly, and I like that.” Such statements reveal an intentionality behind her iconoclasm.

Director Pietra Brettkelly’s film offers a troubling but evenhanded look at the impassioned, willful, and controversial Beecroft (including interviews with Jeffrey Deitch and other art-world notables) and her connection to the hot-button topic of cross-cultural adoption. And it makes clear that the artist’s actions are motivated by a complex intertwining of personal, political, and artistic impulses. Brettkelly adds revealing interviews with Beecroft’s long-estranged parents—her eccentric and apparently absent British dad is a particularly disturbing figure in reference to family dynamics—and follows the artist’s shift in trajectory, clearly influenced by her experiences in Africa. “Perhaps it will humanize me,” Beecroft says of the documentary. “It does not present a flattering character. I didn’t do my hair or eyes. It was completely me—the film will show there’s a person behind these images that are so hard.”

After meeting with Beecroft, I caught the press screening of The Black List, a series of interviews with prominent African-American figures, including Toni Morrison, Chris Rock, and Vernon Jordan, as well as curator Thelma Golden, who talked about her childhood interest in museums, and artist Lorna Simpson, who spoke of her father’s impulse to mask his Cuban heritage. The film, directed by portrait photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, was handsomely composed, but its structure was repetitive—with dozens of subjects, there was just too much of a good thing.

Other festival films beckoned, and I dashed to a packed public screening of New Frontiers shorts, which included a made-for-Okwui Enwezor’s Seville Biennale piece by Olivo Barbieri—an aerial view of that city that makes it appear toylike. This was followed by a gorgeous digitally processed view of urban streets by Stadtmusik, and bracing agitprop animations by Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung, whose widescreen Pop mash-ups address issues such as global warming and the 2008 presidential campaign with kaleidoscopic brashness. Unfortunately, the New Frontiers shorts also included a 37-minute disaster by Andrea Fasciani, which prompted a steady audience exodus. The film attempts to channel Paul McCarthy-style abjectness into a tale of a headless woman, with a computer generated voice, looking for love. I felt moments of my life evaporating into the thin mountain air.

Later that afternoon, I saw part four of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, which debuted at the Venice Biennale last summer. In her brief introductory remarks, Rose Lord of Marian Goodman Gallery said this was by far the largest screen on which the film had ever been shown, and it did seem odd to see the film in a plush cineplex, where viewers munched on popcorn (part five screened there the next day). The black-and-white, shot-on-HD artwork played like a filmed Pina Bausch piece: A group of attractive men and women, dressed alternately as fishermen and businesspeople, walked along a craggy coastline before wading naked into the sea. More of Fudong’s series was also on view at Sundance, but in the seemingly more appropriate “microcinema” in a dark, basement-like lower level of a Main Street shopping mall, a venue called New Frontier on Main.

Screens Here, Screens There
In addition to films, that space also contained several projection-based installations, such as Jim Campbell’s wall-mounted LED Home Movies, and Jennifer Steinkamp’s swaying Mike Kelley Trees, digitally constructed animated images originally shown last fall at a gala at the Hammer Museum in L.A., which here took on a soothing backdrop quality. According to Sundance senior programmer Shari Frilot, New Frontiers is intended to showcase how artists engage with filmic practices and the ways in which technology continues to shift the way we look at movies. “The hardware of cinematic practice is changing,” she told me. “Screens are everywhere.”

A blackout disabled the New Frontier space during Friday night’s opening reception, causing a scramble the next day, with Hasan Elahi re-jiggering his surveillance-based installation, and San Francisco-based ©ause ©ollective re-syncing sound for Along the Way, their video mosaic composed of more than a thousand separate video portraits. Since last fall, the latter has been installed as a public art project at a baggage claim at the Oakland International Airport, where it depicts the city’s diversity. Re-contextualized here, and shown at a smaller scale, the notion of place diminished, making the technique the primary feature.

Something similar happens with Doug Aitken’s New York-centric Sleepwalkers. Made for the outdoor walls of MoMA, the work shows here in a single-channel format on a large, home-theater-type screen in a black box space. In this setting it seems more like a traditional film than a place-based installation.