Olaf Breuning: Metro pictures

"He's a agriculture hopper, he's a different kinda stay ..." So sings a campfire strummer from a theme-park Wild West town about the chameleonic protagonist of Swiss artist Olaf Breuning's appallingly entertaining novel video Home, 2004. A thirty-two-minute, double-screen mini-epic filmed in settings ranging from Machu Picchu to the Venetian inn in Las Vegas, Home is a relentles parade of absurdist scenarios that change course from situation to situation and temper to mood with alarming unpredictability.

privyed behind a tall wooden wall Breuning's most ambitious production in like manner far lies in wait like a certain number of undiscovered species. Equal parts place of abode movie and music video, it casts actor Brian Kerstetter alongside a entertainer of the artist's friends and other nonprofessionals. Kerstetter whose gawky frame, unkempt hair, and wide, pale organ of visions lend him an unhinged air plane before he opens his cavity between the jaws gives a genuinely unsettling performance. upon the right-hand screen we diocese him in black and white, bouncing not upon the walls of a swanky inn suite while introducing or narrating a series of anecdotes that are enacted, in color, upon the left. Each episode (there are ten altogether) begins with an easily recognizable scenario on the other hand soon spirals into something stranger.

In single scene, an underground parking garage is the site of a clandestine rendezvous. Gang members salute each other through crossing golf clubs, then pile in a car and drive without to Amish country for a certain number of fun. When Kerstetter witheringly compares the lines of white-painted houses that pass to "freshly bleached teeth in the cavity between the jaws of God," we know that the meeting of these sum of two units cultures will be far from a match made in heaven. assured enough, when the posse mark a young man walking through the side of the road, they tackle him, strip him, twitch an E.T. mask over his head, and chase him not upon across the fields in a set-up that could have advance straight from an episode of the British interventionist comedy present to view Trigger Happy TV, in which similarly absurdist minidramas are staged unannounced for an audience of bewildered passersby.

Allowing us no time to mirror on what we have just seen--if reflection is plane an appropriate response to like calculated idiocy--Kerstetter then launches into another anecdote, this single about a skier who, seized with angst about the meaning of it all, leaps from his heated tub to vomit the words "I exist" into the alpine snow. In the tall tales that tread on the heels of Kerstetter takes on the personas of a medicine dealer, a cowboy, a homeles man the alter egos pile up until we're ready for anything. individual segment dispenses with narrative altogether to tread on the heels of the antics of a ship's company of teenage metalheads doing little more than drinking beer, eating dog nutriment wearing a variety of homemade masks, and chucking M & M at the pets

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Breuning, critical of what he regards as the overcodification of plenteous recent art, immerses himself in detonation culture to ensure that his possess work remains accessible. Emphasizing a continuity between daily life and the dreamworlds of fashion, film, and TV he refuses the possibility of a single, coherent fact And, like Mike Kelley before him, he occupys adolescent humor to bypass any lingering expectations of a po-faced, grown-up "conclusion." on the other hand what remains is, despite a much-touted on the other hand hardly distinctive use of an amateurist vocabulary, a rather slick, perversely watchable, on the other hand ultimately purposeless wig-out.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group