Making Space, Taking Space, and Finding Anti-Utopia Through Reanimated Images and The Cinematic Experience
04/30/20
by Emily Eddy
Part 1: The Space We Make
The Nightingale is a large building on Milwaukee Avenue, a few blocks south of Division Street. To me, it is home, all three floors and the roof: summertime sunbathing, light splintering through glass brick, the warmth of the basement in the winter. It has much-too-high, virtually unusable shelves, weird triangular corners, noises I’ll never understand, and a newly-tiled, all-white bathroom reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That’s where my shower is, which is probably my most beloved corner of the house. But to most people who enter the Nightingale, it’s just one big room, with a kitchen and a bathroom, and no lock. You come in from icy Chicago, hand someone 0-to-5-to-7-to-10 dollars, sit in a painfully uncomfortable metal folding chair, and watch a screening of experimental or otherwise unseen film and video (which will inevitably start 20 minutes late). This whole place—the it-ness of itself, and more importantly, the People of the Nightingale—have carried me through years, and I am forever indebted to be able to hold such a special shimmering thing. In our collective time inside, I’ve been trying to further understand what spaces like the Nightingale mean for our communities, how we (artists, programmers, viewers) can support each other better once we can share space again, and the work I want to see on our screens.
For me, the Nightingale started out as that one big room too. I was 22, and the world felt infinitely terrifying, and I felt my ideas couldn’t possibly deserve attention. I first discovered the Nightingale in college, when my video editing class hosted an event at the space. Soon after I started coming to screenings, I asked Founding Director Christy LeMaster if she would give me an internshi. She laughed and said something like, “We don’t do that here, but by all means, help if you’d like to.” I fell in love with being loved by the Nightingale—from screenings to Friendsgivings, to sitting on the porch with Sally, drinking Hennessey and talking too late. Every time I entered, I would be offered a plate of Christy’s spaghetti with meat sauce (in which you really can taste deep care). After ten years of carrying the load of the space, and three years of having me as live-in Assistant Director, Christy decided to move on from the Nightingale physically (but not spiritually), and I inherited her role of Director and Chief Spaghetti Provider.
The Nightingale is an odd thing to inherit, and over the past two years of grad school, with a full time job and other commitments, I have found it very difficult to feel like I wasn’t failing this place. I’ve been insecure of my ability to hold a community in the same way that Christy always did: to guide but not dictate, and to keep the room warm. Now, with this time (that no one asked for) to sit and think, I am considering what the Nightingale means to me, and what it can mean for its community.
The Nightingale lives under the umbrella of DIY venues, but has never acted as a traditional DIY space. We are “rough and ready”—Christy started the space with intention and structure; significantly, a commitment to pay artists and to create alternative forms of video distribution and viewership, which is not always seen in the DIY community. I’ve found upholding these standards, and finding my own voice as Director, to be both exciting and daunting. The idea of DIY has certain counter-cultural idealistic tendencies that it doesn’t always deserve; it can presume the notion that what happens outside of the mainstream will always be better, more equitable: a kind of artistic utopia. I was a teenager in Portland, Oregon during the mid-2000s, so I learned early on that DIY doesn’t equal utopian. In fact, it often smells like moldy basement, PBR, shitty people, and shittier weed. A DIY space, at best, can be a caring and supportive environment—note, also cliquey—and at worst, a bid for cultural power on behalf of its organizers. Though the idealistic clichés of DIY venues are not completely removed from the culture of the Nightingale, our intention has never been to create a false utopia, and the pedestal of counter-culture is never what attracted me about running the Nightingale, or any other apartment / gallery / bedroom / cinema / underground / exhibition space.
In Chris Kraus’s 2011 essay, “You Are Invited to Be the Last Tiny Creature,” found in her book Where Art Belongs, the structure and intentionality of DIY spaces is discussed through the lens of Tiny Creatures, a gallery and music venue operating in Echo Park, Los Angeles from 2006 to 2009, directed by curator and musician Janet Kim. Discussing the philosophy of Tiny Creatures, Kraus writes, “It was in this climate that Kim produced her first manifesto: ‘Tiny Creatures is not a gallery… is not a venue… a label… Tiny Creatures is a community center… glorifies expression and communication, not the ego… Tiny Creatures is not to be used to commodify art or music, but… as an instrument of communication.’ Each artist would be required to sign the manifesto before hanging their work.” This mode of existing as a community-oriented tool, and a room to get things done, is how the Nightingale has operated, and how I see it continuing to operate in the future. DIY doesn’t equate to anything, but it does present a place where people can meet and connect, where things can happen that can build up to something.
I find it pressingly important to have spaces for artists, programmers, and viewers to meet and collaborate outside of traditional institutions restricted by scheduling, politics, and finances. Although I believe that running a DIY venue is counter-institutional in a broad sense, I also believe that the meaning of “institution” is mutable in describing venues. It isn’t limited to only large, established academic centers of research with large budgets. The word “institution” signifies a space, or society, with an operational structure, a community which it serves, and an educational or ethical goal. I believe DIY spaces like the Nightingale ultimately become institutions within their own communities, and that this comes with its own set of problematic power structures.
The idea that a DIY space can be a utopic center of culture is misguided. Instead, I want to investigate how a DIY space could act as an anti-utopia—not un-utopic, but against utopia: a place that pushes against the idea that utopian communities can or need to exist in the art world. I want the Nightingale to exist as both a platform and a community: an imperfect, but productive way of working towards new ways of thinking, making, and championing art and artists. An anti-utopia is something that shifts, something that continues to grow, something that continually assesses how it can work to be better. Because of this, it grows from the bottom up, and becomes smarter and stronger with time and knowledge.
Viewers at a Nightingale screening.
Part 2: The Work We Need (Reanimated Images)
The bottom-up politics apparent in DIY and non-traditional venues can also be seen in the experimental artwork built, performed, and screened for and in those spaces. Expanding upon the term, and discussing it with genius thinkers, writers, and makers who I’m incredibly lucky to know—including my graduate thesis advisor Kristi McGuire—, I’ve come to identify the idea with building from the bottom up while acknowledging the bottom as holding power and wisdom; referencing the inherent physicality and queerness of power reversal—hence the term power-bottom politics. The artwork I want to see succeed in the world is that of power-bottom politics; artwork that comes from a place of making space for yourself, taking some of the power dynamics in our late capitalist art world (money → institution → curator → artist) and flipping it (artist → curator → institution → money).
Last year, I saw media artist and videomaker Sondra Perry climb to the top of a ladder at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of the series Conversations at the Edge. Sondra Perry is a feminist new media artist who isn’t making feminist new media art; she’s making Sondra Perry art. Her performance was the best use of a movie theater I’ve ever seen (and I live in a movie theater). During the whole experience, all I could think was: “This. Is. It.” This is not only the art I want to see, this is the only art I want to see. Perry’s work transformed the cinema into an electrifyingly mutable and communal space; the audience experienced the work as she did. Using collaged video, sound, and online elements, she crafted a delicately woven web of people, places, and objects. Deeply personal and based in familial relationships, Perry’s piece Lineage for a Multiple-Monitor Workstation: Number One (2015-17) struck me in particular. A multichannel, multimedia video-performance, Lineage records the artists’ family members cooking at their grandmother's house, and performing for one another: talking and posing in front of the house, all while wearing neon green balaclava masks. Perry talks over parts of the woven pieces of video, describing people and their actions, and telling stories. The artist brings a ladder in front of the screen and leaves it there. A video starts in which Perry is on the phone with her grandmother. She asks her grandmother to sing a specific song for her: ”The Guns of Brixton,” by the Clash. Meanwhile, the Roy Ayers song “Everybody Loves the Sunshine” plays off and on. When the audience has nearly forgotten the ladder, Perry walks over to it, climbs to the top, and scream-sings “4th of July” by Soundgarden. The imagery, the sounds, hearing Perry talk: everything about this video performance is so vivid and emotional. Letting the viewer witness the deep care and trust between her relatives, she weaves a combination of the personal and political, and then, literally flipping the power dynamic of screen, artist, and audience, she stands on a ladder in front of it, claiming space for herself, her family, and her experiences. I found myself brought not only to tears, but big heavy weeps.
Coming out of experiencing Sondra, I started putting together an idea for a term, a theory, and a program of multimedia works that utilizes the idea of power-bottom politics: the Reanimated Image. To roughly define the application of this term, I look to works that comprise a radical and relevant cinema, a cinema of images without hierarchy: a femme-dominant, networked, remixed, and downloaded cinema. An entity created by—and reacting to—uncivil society, Reanimated Images are the Frankenstein monsters of moving-image art, sewn together through pieces of film history and shocked to life by the internet. Rejecting the traditional cinematic canon, their practitioners take the parts of the medium that they need and then strike out on their own. Taking revenge against film history’s racism, misogyny, and heteronormativity, Reanimated Image artists have created a community of brilliant, angry, femme makers. The Reanimated Image is part of an alternative economy of images made by artists, in which experiences of living in the world (and in our specific bodies) are shared with their viewers. They articulate an anti-institutional (or a make-the-institution-work-for-you) dynamic, in the same way that DIY spaces use institutional rhetoric and systems that suit their community. Tying into discussions of self-care and self-worth, they know the institution needs them, ultimately more than they need it.
The Reanimated Image refuses a true home other than with its maker; the works are gifted to us, and should not be taken lightly. Viewers should see Reanimated Images as not only expressions of the artists individual politics, but tools towards greater understanding of why makers make. Building off the argument of Hito Steyerl’s “In Defense of the Poor Image” (2009), one can think of Reanimated Images as the disbursement of the artist into the web-ether, in which the spaces they hold—be they physical or uploaded—convey something TRUE and REAL about the artist’s experience of society, IRL and online. They offer up an acute sense of the artist as they move about the world, not only through their dialogues and perspective, but their physicality as well. In turn, the audience can see parts of themselves in the work, as the diaristic qualities are relatable and emotionally affecting. Personal, relatable work is complex and important, and, I believe, anti-institutional. Allowing the viewer to see themselves in art is further power-switching, turning the dynamic where artist and viewer are on two separate ends of the spectrum into a Venn diagram, with a muddled middle-ground combining the two.
It’s been a very bizarre, but interesting, experience to transition from writing and theorizing the Reanimated Image before to now during quarantine. It feels like we can learn more than ever from artists making work that lingers between digital and physical experiences. I find myself asking: can the Sondra Perry contained in the arranged videos on her desktop versus the Sondra Perry on top of the ladder ultimately say the same thing? Obviously, the two Sondras build upon each other; they are part of the same whole (which is the piece itself), but what happens when we only see half? I feel more and more that the optimism of the digital experience reflects the misguided idealism that a DIY venue can be a stand-in for some kind of utopian experience. The digital community is the tool we need to make it work, but without each other, without the ladder in front of the screen, the discussions of this work fall flat and unfulfilling.
The living room at the Nightingale. On the sofa, Nightingale roommate David Toledo.
Part 3: Where We’re At
The Nightingale feels aggressively empty when few people are inside its walls for a long period of time. I used to relish the weeks when we didn’t have a screening—time to stretch out and sit with myself, time to get work done. Now all I can feel is a biting lack of energy; a love-filled space demurring without loving bodies. I’m inundated everyday with streamables, Twitch-sitches, Zoom-a-thons, and pay-as-you-wills that disgorge some bits of screen-contained culture. Large and small art centers Zoom alike—there’s a massive blanket laid out over the art world, under which everyone is confined to this specific infrastructure, which is both democratizing and demoralizing. Is this what contemporary corporate culture feels like? Something initiated with a promise of ease, ending in consequential loss of emotion. This type of democratization is ultimately the enemy of artistic thought. Considering how Reanimated Images use technology as a means to put ideas in a megaphone, I had high hopes for the virtual experience, but here now, while we’re inside, I can’t stand it. It’s made me realize that I was taking the experience of these images for granted. The feeling of viewership as a collective, now gone, feels like a massive loss for which Zoom can only be a Band-Aid.
Unraveling the reasons why it feels so difficult to engage in critical work online (especially when it was not meant to be online in the first place), I’ve come to this: what makes the experience of art interesting is to be in a room together to talk about it, to feel it together. In a description of the exhibition Video Spaces (1995), longtime MoMA contemporary art curator Barbara London says, “The works envelop the viewer, who moves around and through them. Engulfed by the assemblage of temporal parts, the process of looking is as much about the physical experience as the composite memories that live in the mind.” This discussion of video installation can be used to describe the difference between watching alone versus watching in a group, when the physical experience, the sensation of the room becomes an important factor in the experience of the work. The semiotics of the cinema are community-specific, meaning we observe the screen together, soaking in each other’s energy. The individual experience is different for everyone, so the ultimate effect is a together-alone-ness, specific to sitting in a dark room silently with others. When I sound check, I know that the film’s audio will be quieter when there are people in the room, because sound is softened when it bounces through bodies. I don’t want to watch experimental works on my laptop by myself, without others to share the space.
What is potentially interesting and good about this new world is the accessibility and generosity of artwork. Artists have taken distribution into their own hands, publishing their work for free online, or in some cases with a modest paywall. This can be seen as power-bottom politics at work: when the institution doesn’t (or can’t) serve you, you will find ways around the system to let your work live in the world, outside of the vacuum of your own practice. There has been a collective realization by the film and art community that the norms of institutional systems are not set in stone, and we can create our own realities with our work. However positive this appears, it is not sustainable. Artists can’t live off of Vimeo links, and art institutions of all kinds, large and small, cannot survive on Zoom lectures and virtual exhibitions—not only financially, but ideologically. Sharing thoughts and ideas through the fiber-optic cables needs more emphasis on communal experience, not just access to the artwork itself.
How can we take note of this change and create better, more open futures for art? How can we find alternative ways of engagement? Right now, the whole world seems like one big empty room, where anyone can create a new way of looking and thinking. The Nightingale feels again like one big empty room to me, and the world is terrifying, yet again, only now I have more experience on which to stand, and more ideas to ground me. Taking from the energetic exchanges of both Reanimated Images and the cinema, I want to push to co-create the physical and digital systems we desire. I’m not sure how to put a ladder in front of the Zoom call just yet, but until we’re back in the same room, I’ll try my best to.
Emily Eddy is a film, video, and digital media artist and curator based in Chicago. Combining many forms of moving image, her work utilizes strategies of video diaries, archival practices, and experimental documentaries. She is the Development and Marketing Manager at Video Data Bank where she is proud to promote artists’ video, and she directs the Nightingale Cinema where she has curated film, video, and media works since 2013. Emily also serves as programmer of the Onion City Experimental Film + Video Festival, a project of Chicago Filmmakers. Emily has curated screenings and exhibited work at many venues in Chicago as well as in Los Angeles, CA; Milwaukee, WI; Reykjavík, Iceland; and her hometown, Portland, OR. @emilykeddy
Emily Eddy worked on this piece with Mairead Case, the Quarantine Times Thursday editor. Each week, Mairead selects a Chicagoan to share a commissioned creative response to the pandemic.
