Don’t miss the inspiring and absurd feature-length video chase by Liz Magic Laser at Derek Eller Gallery that closes today! Laser adapts Bertolt Brecht’s 1926 play, Man Equals Man and filmed her cast of 9 performing it in the ATM sections of different NYC banks. She videotaped each actor’s performance separately and then edited the scenes together to present the complete tale.
It’s hard to believe how successful the resulting film is with the characters convincingly conversing with one another across the spliced together segments. The concept and technique speaks to Laser’s quiet brilliance. The actors deserve a lot of credit for delivering their lines with a range of emotion to the ATM machines and dealing with the bank’s unsuspecting customers and guards.
In the gallery press release, Laser writes: “I see the ATM as a contradictory space that on one hand constructs an utterly private experience and on the other reduces the individual to a completely generic and anonymous subject.”
Man Equals Man is an allegory about a man who relinquishes his private identity to assume power as an egoless machine. Man Equals Man, originally set in colonial India is both a comedy and disturbing social parable that presents the dehumanizing transformation of an ordinary man into the perfect soldier. At the beginning of the play, four drunken British soldiers break into a temple and when one of them is badly injured they recruit a local simple civilian Galy Gay to replace him. Over the course of the story, Galy Gay loses his own identity and turns into a fighting machine.
As Holland Cotter pointed out in his NY Times review, “Ms. Laser’s idea of uniting traditional theater and visual art in an untraditional way, undertaking the merger in public spaces, and on such a scale, puts her, in terms of concept alone, ahead of the current, not-so-great, object-fixated New York pack. That the work, about money and war, has pertinence to the news of the day goes with saying.”
For more info about chase, read the insightful interview with Laser in Sadie Magazine.
Check out Laser’s website to see other work she’s done: http://www.lizmagiclaser.com/ including Mine which Jerry Saltz mentioned in his NY Magazine review as a work he really liked in P.S.1’s Greater New York
exhibition.
Liz Magic Laser
chase
Derek Eller Gallery - 615 West 27th Street
until June 26, 2010