San Jose Museum of Art

On Sunday, Darius, Dan, Katie and I visited the San Jose Museum of Art. The first piece we approached was a set of three metronomes, altered and set to hypnotic voices by Paul DeMarinis (a Stanford artist). Shortly thereafter, I entered a room about the size of our classroom and saw three different videos projected onto three different walls. Each video captured the same scene from a different perspective (in both angle, magnification, and time period). The scene, called “Fashionably Late for the Relationship,” was comprised of a traffic island in Manhattan, occupied by a makeshift bedroom. Inside the bedroom, a hybrid bed-couch, an upholstered chair, an antique-looking wooden desk, an oval shaped mirror, several lamps and a number of hanging dresses were surrounded on four sides by pavement, bordered beneath by an oriental rug and above by a pole-supported white pavilion tent. An actress, Lián Amaris Sifuentes, treated the space as one would treat a bedroom: she slept there, put on makeup inside, changed clothes within a small, closet-like space, and was gone for most of the day. One stationary camera showed an empty daytime bedroom; another followed the actress with a close-up perspective of her nighttime preparations; the third was also stationary, set at nighttime, and showed the actress sometimes sleeping, sometimes preparing, and sometimes missing. All three projections were sped up to sixty-times real time.

At first I was drawn to the daytime camera, primarily by the way passing cars would zoom through at a blur until the light turned red, then pause, and then zoom forward again. This process combined a visual pleasure with a time-bending twist. Observing Manhattan at a sped-up rate, I was able to see how many cars passed through, what kinds of cars they were, how often passerby crossed that street, how often cars cut off other cars at that intersection, how often pedestrians cut off cars at the intersection, how often cars inch up at the light (rather than remaining stationary for the duration), in just a few minutes: data that would take hours of standing idly on the street in real time to compile. I was nearly compelled to conduct a statistics-sociology experiment on patience in Manhattan while in the room. (Though I turned to another camera angle instead.)

A close-up view of Sifuentes’s preparations brought a new dimension to the piece. From certain angles, I could barely detect that her bedroom was set in the middle of traffic; in these moments, her application of makeup and adjustment of clothing seemed to be nothing particularly unique. At angles that captured the surrounding streets, however, I saw both her present and her future--both her preparations and what she was preparing for, both the first part of her night and the second. Were she in a typical bedroom, she would descend to the rushing street soon enough; by way of the artist’s creation, however, there was no delay. In this sense, the artist was comparing public and private space, tranquility with transition, the deliberate with the hasty. Why do we transform from peaceful creatures into anxious ones as we cross through the doorway? Why don’t we treat the space of all like the space all our own?

Upon exiting the room, I noticed another film playing on a much smaller screen. Putting on the attached headphones, I realized that the film was “Dazed and Confused,” a 1993 movie I’ve enjoyed many times before. In this version, however, the actors’ voices were dubbed over by the voices of Indian workers to whom American jobs have been outsourced. In a superficial sense, the result was humorous: foreign accents contrasted sharply with the slang-laden vocabulary of obviously-American teenagers. After watching for a few minutes, I noticed that the piece’s blurb asked the viewer to consider the “themes of outsourcing American identity”--a comment that I found altogether unhelpful and a bit bothersome. While the dubbing certainly altered the film--greetings and profanity were especially surprising to hear through the new voices (“Wuss goin’ on” became “What is going on?” and so forth)--the piece was never convincing enough that I became immersed in the new version. In other words, the knowledge that the original voices had been dubbed over was always in the front of my mind, and as a result, I never worried about “losing” the original to the new or the old voices “becoming” the new voices. I never felt any concerns about the outsourcing of American identity. I did enjoy realizing how essential our slang is to the way we relate to each other: the characters in the new version certainly lost some of the intimacy that they shared in the original.