COLABORATORY

The art gallery is in many ways supposed to be the most neutral of spaces, typically white, sterile and carefully lit, a space which would be absolutely blank were it not for the art placed within it. And it's the job of the gallery to sit back and allow the art to work its magic, to make as little intrusion upon the viewers connection with that art as possible. What makes installation art so spectacular - when done right - is that it interacts with a specific space in ways no traditional painting or sculpture can.

The exhibition currently installed at Columbia's Glass Curtain Gallery until November 2, called CoLaboratory, is composed of very few, very simple elements: a set of projectors, casting across the gallery videos of human shadows painting blue lines into geometric patterns and simplistic images, and a series of mobile scrim structures arranged around the room.

The video was created by an art group called ED JR., during a series of workshops in which visitors were invited to add painted lines to a large sheet of paper hidden in the corner of the gallery. The screens were provided by (ƒ)utitlity projects, another collective, and are designed to be shifted around the room, reflecting and refracting the projections. The theme of collaboration derives from the magical crossroads between both the two groups and the gallery's visitors, who are themselves apart of the evolution of the work.

The immediate effect is quite eery. The shadowy figures of the projections create the ghostly illusion of a crowded room, even when no one else is in the gallery. The scrim structures contribute to this, arranged in geometric shapes like the ones being painted on the screen, disembodied walls and phantom hallways. There are times when you feel surrounded by activity and times when it hits you that you're standing in an almost completely empty room.

I do have one nitpick: I understand Colaboratory works on a difficult premise to communicate, but the writing surrounding it gets so muddled in the conceptual that it forgets to describe exactly what you are going to see. Despite researching beforehand, I still did not understand the nature of the project as a single piece rather than an exhibition of several pieces.

Despite this one snag, there is a lot to take away from Colaboratory in terms of the nature and presentation of the piece. Its simplicity, in relation to its scale, is incredible, and the fact that it even happened is more incredible. At a time when most galleries are surely more concerned with maximizing visitors and putting a premium on space, an institution like Columbia can afford to devote an entire gallery space to a single, captivating piece of art. If they pay off as well as Colaboratory, Columbia would be smart to take more chances on these kinds of large-scale collaborative projects.

WAYS OF SEEING: THE WIRE

My first blog entry here was on HBO's The Wire and since writing about it then, I've managed to power through the rest of it and have already moved onto catching up on other TV shows. But The Wire isn't really a show you can leave behind or stop thinking about, and of course I haven't, it's sat at the back of my mind ever since the credits rolled on the last episode.

The Wire's fifth and final season introduced a new thread to the show's already busy narrative, the daily inner workings of the Baltimore Sun newspaper. In all honesty, it was the weakest setting the show had ever tried to draw in, and it often showed. The characters rang unusually false and the ripped from the headlines story of a dishonest reporter being fast tracked for a Pulitzer seemed overly simplistic for a show like The Wire. Series creator David Simon can't be blamed for trying though - he began years ago as a reporter for the Sun and the introduction of a news setting seemed like a logical final piece in The Wire's puzzle of urban American life.

Simon presents the news media as yet another failing system, just like the establishments of law enforcement, business, politics and education the show had spent its first four seasons picking apart. But this particular portrait of this particular sinking ship is unique in that it's one that Simon himself (as well as the show's writing staff made up of former reporters) jumped from long ago. And where did he end up? Making the television show you're watching right now.

I'd like to believe that Simon is making a point here about the ability of art to do what the news no longer can: tell the stories worth telling. The fictionalized Baltimore Sun constantly misses major stories, the deaths of major characters whose stories we have followed so intently dismissed by editors as random street violence. The Wire tries to present you with a world more authentic and truthful than the one you see in the news by showing you things they won't. And this is certainly achieved, through some of the most accomplished writing and meticulous realism to ever grace a television set.

Art that sets itself to a social purpose often falls flat, but The Wire soars in its attempts to reach the tricky balance between incredible art and dire information. David Simon has never been shy about admitting the show's purposefulness, in every interview I've read with him he suggests that he badly wants people to take what they learn from the show and apply it to the world, to feel a bit more aware before they step into the voting booth or turn on the evening news.

My trouble with The Wire is that I understand it as a great tool and it has severely altered the way in which I view government, class and race, but I've never quite figured out how to put it to use. It's become something a joke on the show's fans, that it's praised endlessly by white, middle class liberals for exposing them to a side of America they were sheltered from, but most of them can only seem to brag about their awareness rather than find something to do with it.

I've taken a lot away from The Wire. Bunny Colvin's "Hamsterdam" reinforced the illegitimacy and pointlessness of the so-called "war on drugs". The rise and fall of Mayor Tommy Carcetti reminded me that politics is always about money and reelection, not the people, no matter how much anyone wants to change it. And of course the struggles and tragedies of the four West Baltimore kids chronicled in the show's fourth season taught me just how much of a toll the failures of America's broken systems can take on it's most vulnerable citizens. The problem is I don't know how to use all this. The situation presented is so all-pervading and bleak that it seems insurmountable, particularly not by any average person.

I can't help but think that many of the "occupy" protesters currently sweeping North America are fans of The Wire. Most of them seem to fit that aforementioned white, middle class liberal demographic. Personally, I don't think they're going to accomplish much. Their demands are too vague and their affiliations too wide, but I can't blame them for trying. It feels like something has to be done, but The Wire left me with the impression that we are far too gone to do anything. The systems which are tearing America apart have become autonomous, independent not just from us but from even the people who are supposed to be running them.

I chose to write about The Wire because there are few pieces of art I've encountered which have had such an effect on the way I understand the world, but it will be a long, long time before I understand what that means and what I'm supposed to do with it.

COFFEE

There are more than a few mass cultural fervors which I have never quite been able to share with my fellow Americans, but there is nothing which I seem to be more out of sync with than our obsession with coffee.

Americans love coffee. They make it a part of their daily routine. Coffee-filled paper cups have become so ubiquitous that they almost assimilate entirely into interior spaces and become invisible, indistinguishable. In the morning hours, every person you meet might as well be accompanied by their all-important liquid companion, in classrooms and workplaces and walking down the street. It's impossible to escape the cult of the coffee bean.

Americans don't just love coffee, they thrive on it, live for it, depend upon it. How often do you hear someone say that they can't wake up without a good cup of coffee? As if, without a cup or two of this drink, they could never possibly tear themselves from the comfort of their beds, assemble themselves into a presentable adult and face the crushing existential torture of modern existence. This elixir invigorates them and breathes life into their otherwise weak and limp bodies. The rich aroma of coffee alone is attributed with restorative effects comparable only to smelling salts.

Really, you only ever hear comment on the taste or enjoyability of coffee from those more invested than the typical morning sipper. Most coffee drinkers seem to treat it as a medical substance, something which matters most for what it can do and not how it tastes.



Entire industries are built upon it. Starbucks has 17,000 coffee shops all over the world, so many that stand-up comedy jokes about the ubiquity of them became cliched long ago. And for those opposed to the corporate coffee juggernauts, there are thousands more coffee shops ready to serve you.

Coffee contains caffeine, which is of course America's most beloved and accepted drug. Everyone knows that it is essentially a drug but nothing could ever make a person truly see it that way. Still, in coffee, we find all the qualities we desire from a drug, with none of the social and physical ills that come with real drugs.

The truth is that no one needs coffee - personally, despite my own unhealthy habits, I can at least say that I can't stand to drink anything caffeinated in the early morning, only water or maybe orange juice - but we pretend that we do. People tell you that they need coffee, that they cannot function without it. They want desperately to itch for it, to feel withdrawal when they go without it, to let it take control of their life. Essentially, to indulge in a socially acceptable form of drug addiction.

Americans love to become addicts, but particularly when they can mask that addiction. Our country is built on a kind of delusional dependence on hope and ambition, on the kind of motivational energy that coffee gives us. Coffee is the quintessential American drug.

LIVING OUT LOUD

From the opening credits sequence - aerial shots of the city skyline set to jazzy, nocturnal music - Living Out Loud (1998) positions itself as a classic New York film, and over the next hour and a half, director Richard LaGravenese desperately checking off each requirement, eventually making the film a jumble of well worn reference points: George Gershwin and Woody Allen, jazz clubs and bored socialites. This indecisiveness and inconsistency comes to characterize the entire film.

A tale of two lonely souls in the big city, Living Out Loud stars Holly Hunter as Judith, a neurotic divorcee who often imagines her life taking fantastical turns, only to be jerked back to reality: her dismally disappointing lack of romance and friendship and the burning resentment she still holds for her ex-husband and his new wife. Things aren't all bad though: Judith lives in an improbably spiffy apartment in Manhattan (she works as a nurse, but must collect loads in alimony). It's here she meets down and out doorman Pat (Danny DeVito), who is also divorced, and mourning the recent death of his daughter. The two form an unlikely friendship and an even unlikelier romance, Judith seeking something more "real" than the comfortable upper class life she's come to know.

DeVito is truly made for these kinds of roles and he plays this one with an undeniably endearing genuineness. He's an unexpected leading man, and there is a subversive quality about pairing him with Holly Hunter, but much of this goes unexplored as the movie pushes their relationship to a more realistic and perhaps more predictable resolution than one would hope.

Along the way, they befriend a singer played by Queen Latifah, who performs regularly at a kind of jazz club around which their lives seem to revolve. Given a somewhat cringe-inducing role to play - essentially Judith's "exotic" new black friend - she handles it with dignity and warmth.

Holly Hunter's performance is manic. At varying points, we see her calm and collected, raging and destructive, and (in one memorable sequence at least) blissed out on ecstasy. DeVito and Queen Latifah draw a welcoming friendliness out of simplistic characters but Hunter seems to have more difficulty making Judith the likable, spunky heroine she is clearly intended to be.

It's hard to blame her though, she's at the core of a wildly inconsistent film. Indeed, Living Out Loud never seems to quite figure out what it's supposed to be. Is it a wry deconstruction of romantic comedies, a classic New York love story or a modern update of the novel of manners? (Alluded to during a scene in which Judith reads Edith Wharton's House of Mirth during a lonely dinner.) The film's frequent and unnecessary diversions don't do much to center it, from Judith's steamy encounter with a hunky masseuse to a drug-induced, hallucinated dance number at a wild night club.

Living Out Loud certainly has its charms - an engaging cast and a classic setting - but it proves that when a film tries to be everything to everyone, it can often end up as nothing at all.

OUR ORIGINS

The "big questions" in life are so well worn and hopelessly elusive that art sometimes avoids them altogether. Our Origins is an evocative collection of photography and multimedia artwork currently on exhibit in Columbia's Museum of Contemporary Photography which faces these questions head on: who are we, where did we come from, where are we going and how do we wrap our heads around the brevity and miniature scale of our lives in relation to the universe?

Its entrance located on the first floor of the 600 South Michigan building, the Museum of Contemporary Photography is a traditionally sparse, white exhibition space spanning three floors. The organizers of Our Origins, however, have made deceptively creative use of the space, allowing the viewer to descend through time while ascending through the gallery.

Much of the first floor is concerned the man's primal origins: from Alison Ruttan's vulgar and mesmerizing portraits of modern day humans acting out the behavior of Jane Goodall's apes to Jennifer Ray's lush and sensual photos of scenic natural beauty juxtaposed with used condoms, Viagra and the debris of modern sexual life. The monochrome landscapes of Mark Ruwedal's photos evoke both the ancient past and the apocalyptic future.

Our Origins' second floor shifts to the pre-human, with a series of photos by Rachel Sussman of some of the world's oldest plants. The concept is rich - it's incredible to see trees, coral formations and bacteria which have been on the Earth since before civilization, before mankind - and the photos are beautiful, but they are more scientific curiosity than artwork and seem somewhat inappropriate for a gallery setting.

Things turn cosmic on the exhibition's third floor. One is first greeted by a huge and stunning video installation above the staircase, artist team SEMICONDUCTOR's Black Rain. Composed of several minutes of unprocessed NASA footage from satellites rotating the sun and a hum of ambient noise, the experience is one of the most powerful the exhibition has to offer. A moving pattern of stars and grainy bursts of light emanating from the sun, the scratchy digital artifacts of the video are intended to mark the boundary maintained by technology between us and the infinite, but there is something purer and more powerful about Black Rain than the spotlessness of official NASA images.

Black Rain by SEMICONDUCTOR.

The other works found on the third floor range from Julia Büttelmann's whimsical but overly novel cardboard microscope kit to Jason Lazarus's starkly powerful, monochrome portrait of astrophysicist Eric Becklin. Though tucked away on the first floor, Ken Fandell's The Most Important Picture Ever fits snugly with the cosmic theme - it's an animated video installation which slowly abstracts a Hubble Telescope photo of thousands of galaxies into the colorful smears of an impressionist painting.


More analytical and scientifically contemplative than the typical art exhibition, Our Origins (running till October 16) may appeal best to those usually perplexed by more ambiguous artwork. This is not to sell it short though - it's a relaxing and thought provoking collection and well worth anyone's limited earthly time.