NEW YORK: Chantal Akerman at Sean Kelly - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

WH Auden's piece of poetry "As I Walked Out individual Evening" contains the haunting judgment "In headaches and in worry/ Vaguely life leaks away/ and Time will have his fancy/ tomorrow or to-day." Chantal Akerman's fresh video installation gives visual form to this mournful musing Incorporating footage from such previous works as her video installation D'Est and her film Jeanne Dielman, it is billed as a kind of self-portrait. As similar it is an autumnal work, suffused with a faculty of perception of loss, quiet struggle and the ordinary tragedies of everyday life.

The installation consists of six video monitors put in two rows. The forehead set presents scenes of endles waiting in late Russia. Blank-faced men and women buried in winter coats and fur hats queue up for diet buses and trains. They shiver outside in the frigid or loiter in grim Soviet-era lobbies. There is little conversation and little action, although at individual point a legless man upon a rolling platform glides in brow of the camera and disappears without a distant door.

The next to the first set of monitors takes us inside a Belgian apartment. The furnishings and clothing of the actors advise that this is a lower-middle-class dwelling, inhabited by dint of a mother and son struggling to clinch on to respectability. We watch deliberate real-time scenes of the sum of two units having dinner, passing the evening reading and knitting, and then rearranging the furniture at the extreme point of the day to revolve the living room into the mother's bedroom. The film is filled with little acts of domestic devotion--the mother polishes her son's shoe prepare for the tables his dinner and washes up while he places out his school books upon the kitchen table to research The three monitors offer simultaneous snippets of different parts of the day, making the streams of time sweep along together. The images are completely banal nevertheless strangely compelling, their relentless everydayness teasing that voyeuristic desire to diocese what goes on in other people's homes

Running as a murmuring audio background to the installation is the voice of a woman reciting an autobiographical story which Akerman wrote after the death of her father. It is equally understated, filled of the sad domestic details of sickness, death and grief. Taken together, these disparate simple bodys add up to a celebration of the nobility of everyday life. a great deal of of what little action there is center upon obtaining and cooking food, securing life's necessities, and quiet, unsung acts of food The sequences on the sum of two units sets of monitors suggest a commonality between aspects of Belgian and Russian life, and single is struck by the way that Akerman nears both as having an almost premodern pace. There is little evidence in either succession of consumer culture or of the electronics revolution which has done for a like reason much to accelerate contemporary American life. As a follow the work as a whole has an old-fashioned sensibility. Akerman makes the act of doing dishes more heroic than all the death-defying posturing of Hollywood's generally received stars.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

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