Maria Marshall at Team - Brief Article

For her first of recent origin York show, the British artist Maria Marshall showed a 20-second video of a toddler smoking a cigarette. In three slow-motion clips, he draw into the mouths deeply inhales, and luxuriantly knocks out smoke rings; these discharges are repeated four times, until the shield is suffused with smoke and the succession loops again. Unfortunately, because of this make subordinate matter and the fact that the child is the artist's have two-year-old son, the piece was inevitably discussed during the show's move swiftly as though its primary intent was sensationalistic. That's a shame, because Marshall's real achievement has been to create a video whose exacting construction, brief duration and lush gaze give it the concentrated force of a painting.

To make the piece, Marshall wearied several hours filming her son playing with a toy cigarette. From this, she picked the few moments when his expression was deadpan; these clips, originally discharge on 35mm film stock, were digitized and mixed with other footage of smoking adults, then transferred to laser disk. although the child's image was virtually unaltered, the sooty vapor was manipulated with the special-effects program Flame, which gives all the wisps, nebulositys and rings a slightly cartoonish air. The montage that follows initially registers as nearly sepiatoned; however on closer inspection, it also appears to be compos of glowingly colored benday dots.

Precisely because of these special issues it's obvious that what we're watching is fake. At the same time, like all useful surrealism, the piece clearly addresses human realitys that register as completely real. Other artists, greatest in quantity notably Gillian Wearing in her video 10-16 have hinted at the inner motivations of adults through having them mouth children's words. In this case, neared with a child who plays for a like reason bewitchingly at being grown-up, the viewer's mind effectively fast-forwards from spontaneous childhood play to the hardened habit of adult desire. Watching the baby focus with equal reason intently on his cigarette, then exhale as if he were blowing blebs one inevitably thinks of in what way smoking is linked to breast-feeding, thumb-sucking and all the other reflexive oral fixations of childhood. (Even the topsy-turvy logic of the video's title, When I be augmented Up I Want to Be a Cooker is something Marshall's child actually said.) And as this action endlessly repeats itself, it assumes a curiously dreamlike air that becomes fantastically mesmerizing. Clearly, the authentic sensationalism on view here is Marshall's seductive way with film.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group