Soft Epic review on artforum.com
[ read this review on artforum.com ]
In his 2003 documentary, Los Angeles Plays Itself, filmmaker, Cal Arts professor, and Los Angeles native Thom Andersen criticizes Hollywood cinema’s misrepresentation of the metropolis. The City of Angels, he argues, is rarely captured on film as is. The industry either splices LA into unrecognizability, converting the city into an anonymous backdrop, or denigrates it directly, at times even forcing the already much-maligned urban center to play the villain.
Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib’s ambitious video installation The Soft Epic or: Savages of the Pacific West, 2008, commits all of the filmic infractions Andersen so despises. Happily, however, the work sins in the service of critique. The Philadelphia-based duo’s five-projection panorama immerses viewers in a fiery, dystopian downtown littered with rubble and populated by wild beasts run amok. Collaged from multiple moving images, the space depicted is entirely fictional: As one scans the vista, gleaming skyscrapers give way to the charred remains of a Gothic cathedral. And yet, centered amid the carnage is a sign marking the junction of Eighth and Hill streets, an intersection in Los Angeles’s business district. Squarely casting the oft-tortured city in the role of Boschian hellscape, Hironaka and Suib create an environment so excessively apocalyptic it reads only as spectacle. In this Disneyland gone haywire, a security guard with the head of an owl stands mute, an unwitting sentinel as a lion roars from the flames of a burning sedan, a leopard and a woman mechanically perform copulation, and a human-headed pig leaps gleefully into the fray. Crows flap their wings as the sky rains debris on a miniature pope calming one of his hysterical devotees with conciliatory hugs. What sounds like breaking glass, crying animals, and discharging lasers remains faint and untraceable.
The intentional roughness of the imagery renders Hironaka and Suib’s fragmented cityscape thoroughly incredible. The edges of The Soft Epic’s visual patchwork are ragged; the colors in each of its projections have not been cleanly calibrated. Disjunctions between the work’s video and audio tracks reinforce its status as cinematic construction. Andersen might be proud. Here lies the myth of Los Angeles, laid bare.
— Sarah Kessler
