treywillwest

I saw a program of works by the experimental filmmaker and video artist Vincent Grenier. It was introduced by artist Madison Brookshire, a former student of Grenier who made a moving tribute to his former mentor. Brookshire convinced that Grenier was a special professor. Indeed, one came away from the evening more convinced of Grenier's status as an educator than as an artist. A couple of the works shown impressed me greatly, but many stood out for their paucity.

The earliest piece, "Light Shaft", was a minor but amusingly playful work of geometric abstraction. Windows became cubes of light that danced with each other within the frame. They competed with each other for space, the dominance of one or the other threatening to, ironically, obliterate all geometric representation within the frame which is, of course, itself a square of light.

By far my favorite works of the evening were two later short films, of about 15 minutes each. The silent "Time's Wake" evokes both domesticity and nature, the exterior of a dwelling property. Through footage suggesting the upkeep of a garden it seems to instill a sense of a lifetime. An order is imposed through shaping and shearing, meant to demonstrate a presence that is itself effaced by the imposition of nature's reclaiming in the aftermath of a proprietor's existence. In a way the film takes on a cosmic meaning, suggesting the arc of human history and its end.

The first sound work of the evening was "Out in the Garden" from 1991. It featured a man in middle age within, once again, his wooded domicile. A series of static shots shows the man speaking to, it eventually becomes clear, his same-sex partner. Brookshire had claimed a cubistic quality to Grenier's aesthetic, and it was only with this film that I fully sensed that. The monolog is broken up and rearranged, suggestions of different emotions brazenly contrasted with each other. We eventually realize the man is fairly stoically discussing his forthcoming death from AIDS. Through the figure's words we develop an intense intimacy with mortality itself.

The remaining several pieces shown were all video works made since 2013. "Watercolor (Fall Creek)" is a very pretty looking series of close-ups of water flowing through a stream. The piece had a geographical intimacy that made it passably interesting in and of itself. However, with the subsequent works one came to realize that Grenier devoted the rest of his career to... close-ups of flowing water. The effect was rather like seeing a painting in a museum that one finds just passably interesting and then coming to learn (we've all been there) that the artist only painted variations on this middling work their whole career.

While it didn't detract from the power of "Time's Wake" and "Out in the Garden", the cumulative "flowing water" videos ultimately left me rolling my eyes.

Margaret Honda's "Color Correction" is a fascinating example of cinema as found object. There is a Duchampian aspect to this work, minus the self-congratulatory absurdism generally associated with dada.

A color correction print was, in the days prior to digital projection, somewhat like the unseen underbelly of a conventional film. It would be projected along with the film, underneath it, to provide a saturation of a particular color deemed insufficiently represented in a particular scene of the film. In an after-screening discussion, Honda explained that she requested the color correction print from a studio of a mainstream movie made between 2000 and 2013. She did not want to know what film the correction print that was provided had been meant to accompany. Honda then printed the correction print and offered it as her actual film.

The result is a feature length work consisting of nothing but changing patches of one color or another taking up the whole screen. The predominant color of a scene in a film of course reflects the narrative tone of that scene. "Color Correction" thus reveals the narrative rhythms of a Hollywood film without offering any such narrative or even any embodied object.

Watching the entire film was a unique experience to say the least. I found it profoundly meditative, studying the ways my mind wondered almost as if they were happening on screen. It also made the medium, the material-less projection of light, seem objective and sculptural. The colors became subjects of extended contemplation and even arbitrary aspects of the print we were watching- its dirt and scratches, seemed to take on a life of their own as their traces flickered across the screen.

Predictably, many audience members left before the film was finished. However, the majority stayed until the end and seemed enthusiastic about the experience and eager to engage with Honda about the work. It was an unconventionally stimulating evening.

David Cronenberg has done a great favor to those of us who try to write about his new film, "The Shrouds". Critics often make half-baked presumptions about the relations between an artist's work and their life, which most often are denied by the artist. Cronenberg, however, has prominently asserted that, yes, this tale of a person's macabre way of mourning their dead spouse is a response to the death of the writer-director's wife and that "The Shrouds" is the closest Cronenberg has offered to an autobiographical film, or at least a kind of cinematic self-portrait. It is surprising, then, that this is one of the octogenarian filmmaker's most irreverent works, one might even say his first comedy.

"The Shrouds" is a work fueled by disgust- at the state of the world, the pain of loss, even the self and its artistic practice. Those who dislike the film- and most will- might say that Cronenberg's art has deteriorated to the point of self-parody. I think the film constitutes intentional self-parody, a pasquinade of everything Cronenberg is experiencing in old age. The viewer has the uncomfortable feeling that Cronenberg is mocking his own grief, and that might be exactly what he's trying to do.

If "The Shrouds" is irreverent, it is also more immediately directed at our historical reality than other of the filmmaker's works. It might be said to being the closest this director has ever come to the openly political. One of the less discussed aspect's of this oeuvre is its geographic, almost caligrographic dimension. Cronenberg movies are filled with allusions to fantastical locations, some literal, some metaphysical or spiritual. Few filmmakers are as consistent in ending their works with the sense of a completed journey, even if this is a journey to an inevitable destination, like the choreographed transformation from pupa to insect.

Here the geographic allusions are to real places on our planet- specific sites in Iceland, Romania and its primary setting, Toronto. These are all sites of potential burials. The location and storage of corpses is central in this story. It is as if the site of a corpse has become the only proof of life, death the only site of the real. There are many illusions to all too realistic social media data that has come to categorize and "frame" our lives, our selves. If life has become this set of immortal, digitized "facts" then does death really come in our world, and if there is no death, then is there still really life?

Another reoccurring theme in the director's work is of unfathomably complicated and sinister conspiracies concocted by incomprehensible conspirators. The supposed conspirators here are recognizable and realistic: the governments of China and Russia, as well as realistically depicted right and left wing fundamentalists. But the conspiracies here are not causes for wonder but bemused disappointment- like our "Russia-gates" and TikTok panics they are thin excuses for a reality that doesn't deserve to be legitimate but has become so.

Cronenberg has lost his wife and will soon enough lose his life. He has strongly suggested that this will be his last film. He is leaving us with a depiction of exhaustion and disappointment but one that is, I think, a not unbeautiful depiction of negativity.