An Ugly, Ugly Scene

In a darkened corner of Cal State LA's Luckman Gallery, a cool haven from the dizzying smoke and ash, the infamous fight between Indiana Pacer basketball players and fans that took place nearly four years ago to the day unspools as a short 16mm animated film loop titled Brawl. Made by San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa, the film reimagines the video documentation of the event as flat, painted images that resemble paint-by-number cartoon characters in motion, with all the overt drama and violence emptied from the footage. The audio sportscast remains, however, emanating from speakers behind the 16mm projector. At one point, an announcer grimly exclaims, "This is an ugly, ugly scene."The scene may indeed be ugly, but the animation is quietly beautiful with its pale colors and often indiscernible abstract patterns. Watching the film, you're left suspended somewhere between the ostensible truth of the original footage and the aesthetic conundrum of its remake, with a series of questions and contradictions that pivot on the recognition of shared historical moments as they're rendered visually.

Ezawa's previous body of work includes similar revisions of troubled moments in history, including The Simpson Verdict from 2002, showing a key moment in the O.J. Simpson trial, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy in The Unbearable Lightness of Being from 2005. In each case, Ezawa's technique, which is to redraw frames of video as vector-based images, triggers strategic cultural memories and at the same time drains them of their original power. Rather than fixating on the drama, then, we look at the surface of the image. But in looking at the surface of the image, we may see more than the purported truth offered in the video footage that is its source.

And this is Ezawa's peculiar genius: he shows us that video has never been able to render "the truth." In Brawl, we can see fans throwing cups of beer at players and players storming into the stands to slug people, but the event is defamiliarized just enough to insist that truth is slippery. However, it's not that truth merely slips away; it was never "in" the original footage in the first place. Hovering between the real event and constructions of it - in the virtual - is right where we need to be to glean that truth.

the details
Brawl is on view through December 20
Luckman Gallery
California State University, Los Angeles
5151 State University Drive
323-343-6604
www.luckmanarts.org