VERY Magazine, Fall, 1999, pp. 16-17
In their 1992 video Heidi, artists
Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley turned the classic tale of a young girl’s
coming of age into a three-ring circus of family dysfunction. In this orgy of
obsessive-compulsive behavior interspersed with lofty Socratic dialogues on the
relationship of nature and culture, Grandpa, a sadistic paternal figure,
teaches Heidi and her brother Peter what they need to know to grow and thrive
in the adult world; how to read, how to get beaten up, how to push sausages out
of your ass. Now New York-based artists Laura Parnes and Sue de Beer have given
the story a media-saturated spin in a two-channel video installation titled "Heidi
2" As the script notes the new
production “is not a critique or on homage but a sequel, and follows the
roles of any good sequel: more blood, additional celebrities, and more special
effects”.
The video begins with a disgusting birth scene
suggesting a cross between Cindy Sherman’s sex toy photos and the monster
births in Larry Cohen’s "It’s Alive" films. The
character of Heidi later appears as both mother and daughter, played by the two
artists in rubber Charlie Brown and Pigpen masks, Grandpa is reduced to a bit
player and Leonardo de Caprio (an actor in a cardboard mask) fulfills the
celebrity quota. Mocking parenting in the age of rampant bulimia and art school
instruction in the age of Abjection 101, Heidi 1 shows Heidi 2 how to
projectile vomit (“Like this?” daughter asks—big
splash—”No, that’s too self-conscious” mom replies) and
at the climax of the tape, how to “self-operate” In this
disturbingly affectless scene (combining radical weight-reduction surgery with Teletubbies-style
auto-surveillance) Heidi 2’s stomach is cut out, tossed into a bucket,
and replaced with a TV monitor carrying her image in a continuous live feed.
To those familiar with the artists work, Heidi 2 is an intriguing marriage of
sensibilities. Parnes’ video "No Is Yes". 1998, limns a more straightforward (but equally
depraved) narrative in which two teenage girls murder a misogynist punk rocker
in a "Thelma and Louise"-style
face-off, give him a "Clueless"-style
makeover (stripping him nude, tying him up, adorning him with knife inflicted
scratch-iti), and then ask their mentor, a dominatrix named Sarah, for "Pulp
Fiction"- style help in disposing of
the body. (“Who do you think I am, Harvey Keitel?” Sarah asks).
Enlivened by quick editing and MTV-style inserts, "No ls Yes" is a teen rebellion film reinterpreted far a gallery
context and its bleak message—that rebellion in a world of commodified
nihilism is meaningless—echoes throughout "Heidi 2".
De Beer, in her own
solo work, has a flair for catchy, surrealistic images, resembling the shock
iconography of fashion and advertising (e.g. Diesel’s recent “dead
teenagers” campaign) but with a creepy, personal vibe. Through low-budget
f/x, including digitally altered videos and C-prints, she has depicted herself
as a pair of clones in a languid make-out session, an ax-murder victim split
from skull to sternum, and an impossibly long-legged Frankenwaif straining to
touch the floor with her fingertips. Although arrived at collaboratively with
Pames, Heidi 2’s vomiting
scene—with its doppelganger composition and obvious "Exorcist" reference—recalls de Beer’s
characteristic union of horror-movie scenes and choreographed body art
pathologies.
This immersion in
media and popular culture sets Parnes and de Beer apart from an older generation
of performance artists (McCarthy, Schneeman, Nitsch), who seek to heal a split
between a “repressed, cultural” self and an “authentic,
natural” self through ritualistic acts of transgression (fecal smearing,
orgiastic sex, and so on). In de Beer’s and Parnes’ view, no split
exists because everything is mediated: the most extreme acts can be found on
tape at the corner video store and “real” experience is suspect.
Rejecting the superior vantage point of the artist/shaman, the artists use pop
culture tropes without apology; expressing the most “primal”
events—childbirth, orgasm, incestuous rape— in the idiom of
sitcoms, video games, and splatter films.