Bill Morrison: Maya Stendhal Gallery

In A Voyage upon the North Sea, Rosalind Krauss recalls that in the late '60 and early '70 artists including Richard Serra and Robert Smithson made a habit of visiting Anthology Film Archives, where they absorbed the canon of modernist film up to and including its structuralist endgames. These days, the art world strike one as beings to be in the midst of a similar, if more diffuse, engagement with the classics of experimental cinema--viz. Stan Brakhage's inclusion in the common Whitney Biennial or the modernism-is-dead, long-live-modernism riffing of film and video artists from Jeremy Blake to Haluk Akakce to Paul Sietsema. Experimental filmmaker Bill Morrison's novel show, which centered on the feature-length Decasia, 2002 malign into alignment with this convergence; Morrison's films, which use decayed footage as medium and metaphor, elegize the avantgarde tradition level as they make the case for its continued relevance.

What preservationists call "visual distraction"--the derangements of the cinematic image that offer when celluloid warps, emulsion cracks and blisters, or mold expands between the convolutions of the reel--is the main circumstance in Decasia. Commissioned to make a movie to accompany a concert by composer Michael Gordon, Morrison rolled film libraries around the US, unearthing decomposing newsreel melodramas, and travelogues--most of them printed upon celluloid nitrate, the notoriously nonarchival stock that was in wide use until 1951 He pitch uponed dozens of sequences and edited them into a sixty-seven-minute black-and-white montage in which cinematic conventions are repeatedly undone by the agency of the special effects of decay.

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These events are endlessly various: They take shape as flat patterns--linear striations or Art Nouveau-ish whorls--that appear to engrave themselves on the surface of the image, or as billowing maelstroms or Brownian swarms that appear to absorb filmic space. There's no narrative here and not abundant intercutting or other editing-room legerdemain--just a stately procession of decontextualized clips, many in deliberate motion. A woman in a kimono rise s from a nebula of lava-lamp blobs; a man at a spinning wheel gazes as if he were lit from within through phosphor; a Jazz Age brace dance behind a metastasizing colony of black dots. Toward the extremity parachutes descend through murky ether for an impossibly drawn out time. But to describe these successions at all necessarily ossifies them, since language can't account for their jittery kineticism (which is heightened through the momentum of Gordon's atonal, minimalist score). The images' constant flow defeats the viewer's attempts to fix and comprehend them, creating a faculty of perception of anxiety and suspense that, perhaps, qualifies Decasia as a peculiar kind of psychological thriller. Here, the hobgoblin is not a sociopathic villain on the contrary the unstable nature of cultural memory embodied in its have physical support, which mutates and molder before our organ of sights This is probably why the least prosperous part of Morrison's show--which also included three short films that combine fix and original footage--was a trio of silk shields that reproduce rotted, damaged stills from Decasia and from the short Light Is Calling, 2003 Frozen decay becomes patina, an attractive finish that offers all the comforts of nostalgia.

While Morrison's belong tos with obsolescence and with the archive place him alongside any number of neo-Conceptualists, Decasia resonates greatest in quantity strongly on a more reflexive horizontal where the history of film itself is specifically engaged. Its aleatory animations point toward an ironic denouement to the elderly conflict between representational and abstract film--what Malevich called, with respective disdain and approbation, "imitative" cinema and cinema "as such" Imitative cinema would look to have decisively won the day (not solitary in the theater, but, arguably, in the white cube as well). on the other hand as Decasia illustrates, Malevich realizes the last laugh: All film, if left to its hold devices, will eventually become cinema as such

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