Marianne Boesky Gallery, through Jan 10
Sue de Beer's new video installation, The Quickening, 2006, smartly
blends elements of slice-and-dice slasher films with hints of the
eccentric gleaned from elder artists Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley. As
in her previous work, the gallery contains a sculpture created in tandem
with the video production - a thirteen-foot-tall illuminated ring of
trees, made from plywood, that projects shadows on the surrounding
walls - and a specially constructed screening room, this time decked out
with red shag carpet, beanbag chairs, and a dropped ceiling. The video
portrays a fragmented narrative, laced with the repressed sexuality
endemic to mid-eighteenth-century Puritan New England and voice-overs
excerpting texts by Joris-Karl Huysmans, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and
Jonathan Edwards. More brainy than bawdy, de Beer conflates high and low
culture within a frayed psychedelic aesthetic. Shaky camera movements,
superimposed images, and cheesy audio effects reinforce a heightened
sense of artificiality, and everything - including the campy constructions
of femininity - appears disconnected and spurious. Her point, it seems, is
to expose the frail underpinnings of most horror films (as well as
Puritan witch hunts) and the uneasy visual pleasure - the flip side of
fear and disgust - we take when we suspend our disbelief. Taking these
sentiments into account, which is easier said than done, de Beer's
exhibition charts a new, well-considered path for her growing oeuvre.