Jesse Rosser
January 12 - February 24, 2001
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Originally trained as a painter, Jesse
Rosser began working with video in the late
70s in the wake of one of the most significant
confluences within contemporary art:
the rise of the feminist movement and the
birth of video art. In retrospect, curator Mary
Jane Jacob observes, "access to video…
allowed women and others — until then
marginalized by the mainstream — to have
an equal voice. Through these new genres
they could proclaim a place for themselves
in the artworld that could be achieved
through the Western, male dominated field
of painting." Inspired by Lynda Benglis'
video, which she first saw during a workshop
for women artists led by Benglis, Rosser put
aside her own brushes. Her subsequent
work furthers an important tradition of
women in video by continuing to explore
those features which attracted women to the
medium in the first place. Namely, video as
diary, as mirror, as timekeeper, and as a
means of conveying subjective vision and
content.
Among video's pioneers, many used the
camera to explore the everyday aspect of
women's lives, such as Nancy Holt's Underscan (1974), which frames photographs
of her aunt's house while a voiceover
reads from the woman's letters.
Incidents (and sounds) from Rosser's own
daily life as a mother and an artist raising
children on Manhattan's Lower East Side
are recorded throughout her work. Audio,
when it occurs, often snaps on like a radio,
or intrudes as noise overheard in a room or
from the street. Her young sons at play are
the subject of her earliest work, Toothpicks (1976). A daughter, introduced through this
mother's watchful eye/camera as an infant
in Baby Jesus (1979-1981) literally matures
with her mother's art. By 1987, the infant is
a young girl playing with a friend within the
small confines of a tenement apartment in Home and Hearth, The Magic Marker ( 1987-1997),
a work that integrates passages of
computer animation.
In a germinal essay on video art, Rosalind
Krauss attributed a seemingly inevitable
narcissism in works by both men and
women to the camera's mirror-like presence
in the studio. For women, this afforded a
new opportunity to switch their role as
observed subject and take charge of their
own representation in art. Joan Jonas' Mirror
Check is a video documenting a 1970 performance,
in which the artist scans her
entire nude body through a small, handheld
mirror. Rosser's Home and Hearth ends with
her lowering her own naked body into a
bathtub and shaving her legs. As seen from
above and behind, the figure appears
abstracted, caught in awkward self-absorbed
poses similar to the Impressionist
Degas' bathers, but here the bather is also
the artist.
Water provides a recurrent motif in
Rosser's work, particularly in the form of
steam. In Moonflower (1994-1996), a
steaming Melita coffee cone is formally juxtaposed
with a white blossom the artist is
growing in her rooftop garden. And there are
many kettles on the boil, marking time in that
way that video has allowed (and sometimes demands) us to experience real time. For
the nearly 10-minute duration of Anna Bella
Geiger's Passages (1974), we watch a
woman climb a series of increasingly steeper
staircases. The video makes symbolic
use of the repetitive task-like actions central
to art of the 1970s, by offering a metaphor
for the passage of women's lives. Likewise,
in Rosser's Elbow Goddess (1991-98), we
look through a glass door, at an older
woman laboriously scrubbing a flight of
stairs, step by step, with a mounting sense
of impatience alternating with humility.
We watch the woman through a glass
door that appears to have flowers painted on
the surface. But the flowers are actually
drawings inserted into the video — a technique
Rosser recently introduced to underscore
the subjectivity of her works.
Elsewhere, her use of synthesizers,
animation, and refraction are all deployed to
a related purpose: showing reality
manipulated into images that sometimes
verge on abstraction. Rosser's installation Geisha (2000) marks her return to painting
by hanging watercolors in the space with
video projections of a work Rosser made in
Japan of geisha buying sandals inside a
shop, which, seen from the street, becomes
a tiny theater.
In terms of scale, Long Wall is Rosser's
most ambitious installation to date. It is also
uncharacteristically public; most of Rosser's
work has focused on her own domestic
landscape and family. After her visit to China
in 1998, Rosser composed Long Wall, an
animated panorama of futuristic abstraction,
which brings to mind the Great Wall of
China. Although the Great Wall is never
actually seen, its running length and global
legend — as well as a sense of travel — are
all suggested.
Despite the myth, the Great Wall of China
is not visible from outer space, as confirmed
by astronauts, who have checked for its
1,500 mountainously contoured miles from
their capsules. Nor is the Great Wall a single
wall protecting Chinese civilization against
Mongol hoards, but a network of fortifications,
open at places and easily marauded.
These myths originated in the West, attracting
tourists since the 19th century. The
Chinese themselves didn't even refer to it as
the Great Wall until the 20th century, when
they adopted the site's reputation abroad to
inspire patriotism within. First around 1912,
the Wall was newly revered by founders of
the Republic of China. Then in 1966, it
became a target of cultural revolution, when
Mao Zedong ordered all vestiges of Chinese
tradition be destroyed. After the Chairman's
death in 1979, the Wall was extensively
restored, and, with the gradual re-opening of
China to the West, it has resumed its status
as a classic tourist destination. Perhaps it is
this romanticism that has interested so
many artists. When Andy Warhol, who
made Pop wallpaper from Mao's portrait,
traveled to China in 1982, he declined to
visit the man's tomb, but made a day-trip to
the Great Wall outside Beijing, where he had
his picture taken. Post-modernist Laurie
Simmons made a reproduction of the site —
visited by Americans, who are represented
by plastic "teenette" figurines — the subject
for one of her famous suite of tourist photos,
from the 1980s.
Long Wall is projected as three sequential
silent tapes onto a 24-foot long screen. The
screen forms a corridor along one wall of the
gallery, becoming a luminous passage for
viewers to enter. The video is also visible
from the reverse side. It runs as a loop of
images that go from being mysteriously minimal
(scratchy marks that look like bundles
of chromosomes) to weirdly complex (a
woman's head snipped off her body and
morphed into a sci-fi automaton). At some
point while viewing, it becomes apparent
what's going on. The artist pointed her
camera out the window of a moving vehicle,
then edited the tape using a computer to cut
the landscape in half horizontally and double
it to fill the screen. The effect is the kind of
mirroring that one sees in a Rorschach test,
a kaleidoscope, or at the water's edge. (In
fact, the artist says that she was inspired by
a collection of old photographs of a flooded
Ohio town — trees and buildings abruptly
cut off and reflected in the rising tide —
found at a flea market.) Where the two
images join, there's a seam of tension, as
between two pools of mercury resisting the
attraction to merge into one. Viewed
vertically, the rhythm is of waves lapping and
gobbling their way across the screen.
The journey through town and country, as
constructed on the long screen and through
loops of tape, mimics the Wall's seemingly
endless length. Seen along the way, modern
day electric towers resemble the watchtowers
erected at intervals in sections of the
Wall during the 15th and 16th centuries. The
road, not actually seen in the video, but
taken, relates to the Wall's topside, which
was flat and wide enough for soldiers to
march along. The business of the townscape,
contrasted with the streamlined
starkness of the countryside is reminiscent
of the Great Wall's own complex architecture
of ribbons and outposts of fortification.
Then there's the very foreignness of China
to an American tourist, captured by the
synthesized view, which transforms things
as ordinary as passing cars into spacemobiles.
At the same time, there's the sense
of the Wall as a valuable tourist commodity:
it remains authentically Chinese in a world
increasingly Westernized — as witnessed
by the clothes and cars passing by.
In Long Wall, one now sees a conflation of
Rosser's constant themes: the use of everyday
imagery, the synthetic effect of watery
reflection is a kind of mirroring; the looping
tape establishes timelessness, the trip itself
is a diaristic travelogue. Long Wall is
comprised from mundane moments into a
ceaseless, abstracted, and rhythmic movement.
Rosser's imagery of the nonevents
of everyday life has turned the banal into the
poetic.
Ingrid Schaffner
New York
2000
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