Julia Meltzer and David Thorne: Saying Makes it So
This February, The New York Times reported, a camera toting college student was arrested on a Bronx subway platform. Like the photographers of U.S. buildings and infrastructure represented in Julia Meltzer and David Thorne's installation, “In Possession of a Picture,” he was informed that the subject of his just-snapped photo was off-limits. The case made news because the officers were in error: no law bans photography in the New York subways.
We never learn the circumstances surrounding Meltzer and Thorne's photographers, nor what their intentions were. We only sometimes know their names. Their disputed pictures are represented by an empty rectangle in each frame. What we do know is that in every one of these fifty cases, the artists were able to find photographs of the forbidden object on the Internet. It's these we see mounted beside the blank shots. Some are as innocuous-seeming as a Denver hotel. Others are tourist magnets represented here by multiple images-the Empire State building in a dozen different weathers, giddy teens in Disneyland's teacups. There are those, too, like a shot of the twin towers, that produce a stab of unease.
What lies at the center of each of these frames is a visible boundary between information and its absence. The uses of media and the construction of history are themes that concern both Meltzer and Thorne. What are the strategies we use--publicly and privately--to navigate from what we know to what we don't? What is the role of dogma? Storytelling? Faith? These questions are investigated further in We Will Live To See These Things, filmed in Syria in 2005-6. Using both documentary footage and imagined texts, the artists trace currents-political, material, religious-shaping that country's public life. And, by extension, ours.
In the first of what the film's subtitle calls “five pictures of what may come to pass,” an architect relates the story of a public building he designed in the 1960s that remains unfinished. What, he wonders, might replace it: “A new headquarters for the U.N.?...A Starbucks?” In a segment shot in a brightly carpeted mosque, we watch young girls in barrettes and jeans study verses from the Koran. We recognize the architect's sardonic humor, the effort of concentration in the childish faces. Other scenes leave us reaching for a guidebook.
In “a perfect leader, or the appearance of one,” the unexpected constellation of images--an equestrian meet and a recitation, written by Thorne, envisioning a messianic leader--refer to recent history. The late Basel al-Assad, elder brother of Syria's current president, noted horseman, and patron of riding clubs, was slated to succeed his father in office until he died in a car crash. Even with explication the mystery remains of why certain personalities-a Basel or a JFK-grip a nation's imagination long after their deaths.
Perhaps as illuminating as the issues raised are the varieties of speech explored. Following the chant of “a perfect leader,” a dissident discusses his work with the Syrian democratic movement. “I feel like I am extracting with difficulty and hardship,” he tells the camera, which pans away to spare apartment blocks and empty streets, “like somebody who is digging in stone, a larger space for public life.” The film's final segment accompanies private acts like shopping and going to the barber with a poetic tract that fuses the diction of prophecy (”I hear singing in my ears”) with the rhetoric of recent foreign policy (“I see decisive victory”). What-we're left to wonder-will fill the blank page of the future. Pronouncements or dialogue?
