As part of the extended reach of the 2008 California Biennial, Queen's Nails Projects hosted D'nell Larson an LA based artist who works with video, performance, installation. There was a performance for this show, Under the Milky Way, which I did not see, but the video, Close Your Eyes and Think of Me, I suspect represents the experience of being there.
Sometimes when this place gets kind of empty
Sound of their breath fades with the light
I think about the loveless fascination
Under the Milky Way tonight
In this show, Larson is concerned with differentiating her identity from the milieu of her upbringing—the parental and collective culture—specifically in regards to music and musical memories. She wonders "what is inherent in one's own emotional response separate from the rest of the world?" The rest of the world, in her case, includes parents who are wedding singers. Not everyone is rooted in such an atmosphere of popular romanticism. Wedding singers, like lounge acts, sing to set a sentimental mood, to elicit a certain saccharine response that befits an occasion of romance. Well-known, popular songs are stripped of their defining characteristics and synthesized into a cliché of the original. What is retained is the core melody and the lyrics. Ah, the lyrics. The lyrics which are often banal, usually maudlin, certainly evocative. Everyone can sing along, for the performance triggers the memory of the band, the era, the album, the track, and all the associated memories of time and place.
So what did Larson do? She filmed, simply and without embellishment, her parents, Dennis and Arlene Larson, singing a selection of personally meaningful songs, in their studio. They are dressed casually; the camera is set for a middle distance shot. They sing versions of songs by The Cure, Nirvana, Interpol, to drum machine, synthesizer & tambourine. The video lasts 17 minutes and then it loops again.
Love, love will tear us apart again...
When I was there, I watched the screen for a bit, then turned and watched the street through the window, cars and buses passing, people strolling by, with Joy Division the audio track for the scene. Will I associate that stretch of Mission Street with that plaintive harmony from now on? For sure it is now wedded to the memories of driving to the album in Southern California, memories embedded in the emotional-response-portion of my mind.
But even more interesting to me is the way that these songs can reach in and elicit such feelings of longing, tenderness, dismay. The heart seems particularly susceptible to this kind of sentiment, across these musical lines, despite how they are delivered. After I adjusted to what I was seeing and hearing, especially after I looked away from the screen, I was reconnected to the original songs and their emotive effect. Powerful stuff.
In a second untitled video, Larson created a a moving image from hundreds of still shots of birds flying over water. While mesmerized by the halting image which wavers and repeats, and somehow curiously replicates looking overboard at undulating water—meanwhile, through earphones came the sound of Larson singing The Killing Moon by Echo and the Bunnymen.
Fate
Up against your will
Through the thick and thin
He will wait until
You give yourself to him
The film is a reconstructed memory, with feeling tone and meaning supplied, I suppose, by the song—which is sung à la familia. It is a beautiful piece in itself, but it also serves as a self-portrait. Here she works with the parental vocation, reconditioning songs, recreating associations, at the same time as reconstructing/constructing something of her own experience.
Wish I knew what you are looking for
Might have known what you would find
Under the Milky Way tonight
Larson, searching for her own singularity, found it interwoven, indistinguishably, with her world, culture, era, upbringing. Even memory of a particular moment carries all these associations. But the truth is, there is no I there in identity—or better said, I, as I experience I, is an amalgam of all that I am, I being a composite figure.
And all this because of a song.
What was it Walt Whitman said?
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
—Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself
