Big Bear
You see the leaves first, rustling, flickering yellow shapes blanketing the exterior walls of a small room. Then you hear grunting and jumbled, muffled thumps and thuds. As you enter the darkened space of the gallery, you come face to face with a huge brown bear. The video projection is doubled, and the bear seems to tower over you from two walls. He's in a cabin, but he's really too big for the small room. He paws at the bed, his claws catching in the yarn of a crocheted spread. A slight woman sits quietly next to him. She touches his paw. She leans on his shoulder. He leans back onto her. He sprawls sleepily across her lap. And he cuffs her hard, just missing her right eye.The project is Hilja Keading's The Bonker's Devotional, a video installation that ponders the line between nature and culture, triggering the desire to know and understand the mysterious aspects of our own interior selves. For the Los Angeles-based artist - who is also the woman in the room with the bear - the project represents the culmination of a series of ideas and formal experimentation that she has followed for years. For viewers, it's a provocative, visceral treat.
"I wanted the project to be humble but life-sized," Keading explains in recalling how it came together. "And that was hard to do - you spend two weekends with a bear, and you don't forget that! So my first impulse was to make it really big and powerful. But I also knew from the beginning that my goal was not to translate the experience but instead to communicate something about the untamable, both inside us and outside us. So it's not about my connection to the bear; it's really about the interchangeability of the bear and me."
The two projections are on adjacent walls, and while they feature similar imagery - the bear, the woman, the room - they're slightly different, and together create a syncopated dance that asks you to look from one side to the next in a constant back-and-forth motion.
"The placement of the projections forces you to assume my position in the room," explains Keading. "I was constantly checking to see where Bonkers [the bear] was and wondering if he was going to maul me." The doubled screen helps Keading express both a plurality of perspectives while provoking a very embodied viewing experience. "I've always wanted to create projects that are kineasethetic experiences, things that you experience through the body. This project achieves that."
Perhaps one of the most striking aspects of the installation is the way it makes you witness attempts to understand the bear and the woman, and their relationship. The bear looks tired, bored, playful, contemplative, lazy and irascible. But these states are projections of human attributes. Let's face it: despite our keenest attempts, the bear remains unknowable. (And so does the woman, for that matter.) Keading's installation asks you to take note of the desire for meaning, and then to sit with the impossibility of ever attaining it. In some ways, the project reminds me of Susan Sontag's 1964 essay "Against Interpretation," in which Sontag lambasts critics for endlessly interpreting art. In place of interpretation, she argues for experience, writing, "What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more." So go, sit quietly in the dark with Bonkers and Keading, and find a way to see more, to hear more and to feel more.
the details:
The Bonkers Devotional
part of the exhibition "20 Years Ago Today: Supporting Visual Artists in LA"
Through January 11, 2009
Japanese American National Museum
http://www.janm.org/