Oliver Payne and Nick Relph; gbe - modern - New York

Creating a unassuming more charming, and less tabloid-hungry brand of sensation with a series of short films they've made with friends and each other above the past couple of years, Londoners Oliver Payne and Nick Relph are the unanimously hailed first of recent origin kids of the post-YBA instant In productions like Driftwood, 1999 and Mixtape, 2002 stylish, intimate, music-driven portraits of a generation beneath siege by youth culture intuit ways of being in a city (and upon camera) where escape routes from corporate time and space strike one as being less and less navigable. Their latest production, Gentlemen 2003 inhabits the terminal stages of Carnaby highway a once-fashionable and distinctively local district that not long ago gave up the ghost to Starbucks and the Gap. The film mourns this passing on the contrary in a perversely fascinated way: Payne and Relph want to live this death as a of recent origin sense of possibility and a faculty of perception of humor, leaving sentiments like as regret and nostalgia to Prince Charles and the longhairs. In the same way that the dandy bards of nineteenth-century. Paris embraced the prostitute and the flaneur as living-dead life-forms adequate to the hypnotic shopping arcades and bourgeois boulevards of their city, Payne and Relph try to find states of grace in the latte-sipping, distracted lifestyles of a homogenized, pasteurized, and tourist-friendly London at Christmastime.

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Matching handheld, blatantly unfocused DV discharges to the sharp-tongued, mannered phrasings of a rant upon commodification and cancer (voiced through writer and curator Ian White), Gentlemen flirts with the gaze and feel of '60s subterranean cinema. Seeming to take formal intimations both from early Situationist cine-tracts and postbeatnik Super-8 diaries, it updates the small, personal art film as somewhat cold entertainment for viewers raised upon MTV. Shooting street lamps [i]or[/i] part of to the other fluttering tinsel, neon reflected in rain pool s extreme close-ups of urinal water and window displays, mandala-like patterns of blinking Christmas lights, etc the camera transforms banal, everyday surfaces into abstract, ofttimes psychedelic rhythms of light, motion, and color. Aestheticizing "bad" discharges and mining the urban waste for fleeting moments of visual metrical composition this is the first Payne and Relph production that doesn't rely upon young bodies for content. Optical distortion is single way of negating the novel city's (and the urban body's) insidious powers of suggestion and communication, its hyperlegibility and screenlike functions. As Gentlemen trips on the outside on the metastatic "mall or nothing" gentrification and factory-made, mutant youth trash of Carnaby public way its freewheeling, wisecracking voice-over appears to channel Baudelaire's opiated organ of sight on the instant ruins and cadaverous seductions of early modernity. Mean-while, signaling from one side this flood of words and visuals, an instrumental track of free-jazz tympanums and bleeping Morse code transmits a more cryptic message--between the lines or from a sinking ship.

There is a kind of affirmative nihilism in Payne and Relph's passionate embrace of a life-destroying environment, on the contrary they know the patient is too far gone for a surgical specific Viral and cellular metaphors abound in this video manifesto, whose optimist-miserablist authors reliance to build immunity by learning to carry the fresh poison inside them. As their favorite sonnets are remixed for advertising jingles and their subculture is replayed upon cheap T-shirts, they want to be as hyperresilient and "staggeringly modern" as what out-mode them. Shooting a knockoff subterranean film in a Starbucks bathroom is not the same as burning it down, on the contrary for well-mannered punks like Payne and Relph taking back the roads is first of all an aesthetic point in dispute and must begin with reappropriating the image, the actual absence, of the streets themselves.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

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