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Enormous Changes at the Last Minute: The Videos of Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby
By Jason McBride
Watching a video by Emily Vey Duke and Cooper Battersby is a little like entering a ménage à trois where the sex, while fumbling, is always good, and the pillow talk is even better. Canada’s budding Miéville-Godard, Vey Duke-Battersby have been working together since 1994, and, in that decade, have produced some of the most witty, charming and, yes, sexy video art this side of Spike Jonze. An inappropriate comparison, perhaps, but their work bears all the giddy inventiveness and delight found in Jonze’s music videos, if not his features.
To borrow a phrase from novelist Matthew Stadler, very few other Canadian artists distill so much learning and intelligence into such intensely pleasurable work. The pleasure in the work comes from a variety of sources—its humour, its aesthetic self-assurance, its improbable, convincing sadness—but largely from the personalities of the artists themselves. The couple, partners in love and work, star in many of their videos, and they place their bodies, faces, and voices in beguiling and surprising combinations, posing themselves as artists, raconteurs, white trash, scientists, headbangers, druggies, sexpots, and poseurs. In the short-lived history of video art, such role-playing has foregrounded its own fictiveness (and attendant issues of subjectivity, identity, and autobiography) to the point of redundancy. Vey Duke-Battersby have taken on those concerns as well, but what’s more interesting, and charming, is how their performances largely hinge on language and its limitations—that is, how speech and writing can articulate systems of control or, conversely, new forms of freedom. Narrative might be problematized, but it’s not exactly a problem; increasingly, their work has embraced an eccentric, even whimsical, type of storytelling.
Battersby and Vey Duke were born respectively in 1971 and 1972, he in Penticton, British Columbia, she in Halifax. In 1993, Battersby, then a skateboarder and computer programmer, met Vey Duke, who was an art student, in Halifax, and the two decamped to London, Ontario where they studied with Canadian artist Steve Reinke. Reinke was their instructor at both the University of Western Ontario and, later, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where the couple did graduate work. He was an immense influence on Vey Duke-Battersby, who had up until then been only making poster art and, in Battersby’s words, “crappy little animations.” “Most video art is horrible, unwatchable,” Vey Duke says, “and Steve’s videos were really watchable.” Reinke’s work, the most famous of which is The Hundred Videos (1996), consists largely of episodic videotapes composed of both original and found footage (home movies, training films, porn flicks, etc.). His videos are typically acerbic, diaristic (or falsely diaristic), often philosophical, even elegiac. What seems improvisatory in voiceover, is, in fact, very polished, precise prose. Vey Duke-Battersby borrow heavily from Reinke’s technique: narration and dialogue is of paramount importance. Likewise, they group apparently disparate elements in a sort of modular container, creating loosely unified (not overdetermined) variations on a theme.
Take Being Fucked Up (2001), one of their most notorious and widely screened tapes. Compulsively watchable, it consists of a half-dozen separate segments, beginning with a glassy-eyed Vey Duke hauling on a crack pipe and then placing a plastic bag over her face. Over this, her voice—thin, untrained—sings a hummable ditty whose lyrics include the lines “I don’t know how to be a worthy companion/I don’t know how to be a worthy citizen/In this perfect nature world.” This disillusionment is reworked and developed in the segment “Monologue for Robots,” in which a digitally altered, disembodied voice provides a running commentary of self-pity and disaffection (“My secrets are so boring”; “I lie to my mother”; “People form misguided coalitions to protect themselves from hopelessness”) over snapshots of Battersby, Vey Duke, assorted friends, and landscapes. These Nan Goldin-esque photos, which flutter in front of the camera, depict the couple’s everyday life and usually show the pair at play (sometimes nude, often seemingly drunk or stoned). Another sequence, “Yoga Practice,” features Vey Duke describing the feelings of inadequacy that plague her while meditating: “God, if I am your daughter, you will stomp your giant foot through the acoustic tiles, crushing me and releasing me from any future obligation.” But Vey Duke is wearing fake plastic lips and is unable to actually speak; it’s Battersby who’s talking in voiceover (accompanied by Cat Stevens). In the final sequence, “Headbangers,” Vey Duke-Battersby silently respond to a series of subtitled questions, like: “Would you describe yourself as a happy person?” They shake or nod their heads vigorously. The final question, “Do you believe in the possibility of redemption?” elicits a different response from each. The camera’s shutter speed blurs their movements, while Gordon Isnor’s guitar thrum provides a sweet soundtrack. Scattered throughout the tape are brief animations, line drawings of dogs with human faces, who mouth funny, often sexual, dialogue in funny voices.
While Vey Duke-Battersby speak artistically with a single voice, all of Being Fucked Up is about multivalent voices, impossible voices, muffled voices. Moments when speech fails, when self slackens. Much of Vey Duke-Battersby’s work is about self-image, not only about how one represents a self, but also: is that self ever singular? And why should it be? Do too many selves cancel each other out? Being Fucked Up embraces despair and its Adornian remedy, redemption. Self-awareness is kissing cousin to self-hatred, a refusal to accept one’s existence as it is. Being is being fucked up, and being fucked up is a means to obliterate being, a way to deny, cancel out identity, selfhood. To silence the voices in one’s head.
“I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t have frequent bouts of self-loathing,” Reinke has written in reference to Bad Ideas for Paradise (2002). This 20-minute tape, Vey Duke’s personal favourite, bears tonal resemblance to Being Fucked Up, but it reaches further outward, away from the domestic, private spaces the artists inhabit and into a greater, but no less screwed-up, world. It begins with a pair of head shots, the artists’ faces pixilated beyond recognition and voices altered, offering up the ridiculous utopic visions of the title. Vey Duke details a paradise where she is the most beloved person in the universe (a combination of Jesus Christ, Elizabeth Taylor, Jacques Villeneuve, and Nelson Mandela) who goes out of her way to make everyone insecure, while Battersby’s version is one where no one is famous, everyone loves each other, and if someone’s feelings are hurt everyone sits in a gigantic healing circle. Comic, yes, and it sets the tone for what might be Vey Duke-Battersby’s most wry and winning work. Again employing a series of monologues, the artists work in two narrative modes: the confession and the rant. Taking its cues from those introductory fantasies, the tape muses on notions of shame, the consciousness of animals, the false dreams of Hollywood, and marriage. The work’s central monologue is an English girl’s (or at least a girl with a fake English accent) excoriation of teenage boys’ grotesque appetites and arrogance, lack of reserve, and abundance of entitlement. It’s a breathtaking sequence, composed of images of skaters hurling their boards against parked vans, girls flashing their tits, boys flipping their middle fingers—Kids (1995) as shot by Donigan Cumming.
Vey Duke describes their work as “aphoristic,” likening it to poetry. (She is currently, in fact, working on a project with artist Shary Boyle, a sort of call-and-response where Vey Duke writes a poem that Boyle responds to with a drawing, and vice-versa.) Battersby says he requires the “arc of narrative” and that the work is more about storytelling than what he calls “shocking sculpture”: “The work would ideally be viewed on a TV in someone’s house.” Neither have any desire to make more bombastic installations, nor feature films. Miranda July (a key reference for Vey Duke-Battersby, along with Alex Bag) may be experiencing a small hit with Me and You and Everyone We Know, but Vey Duke-Battersby insist they won’t go that route: “I feel the same about feature films that I do about gambling in a casino,” Vey Duke says. “The house always wins.”
Nonetheless, their latest work, The New Freedom Founders (2004), could be called their most cinematic. Made as their MFA thesis, it’s a featurette in three parts, a trio of speculative fictions again involving the inadequacies of language. “I Am A Conjuror” features the couple as scientists who “can bring anything into existence.” They obliquely muse—in bathtubs, in bed—on the medical system, on endangered animals, on the misuse of antibiotics. Their movements are jittery and stuttered, their voices played backward (the dialogue is all subtitled). Daniel Cockburn has speculated that the style of the piece owes as much to Hal Hartley and SCTV as it does to European art-house cinema, and it’s true that the piece skirts parody. But it’s parody of a poignant, uneasy sort—Vey Duke and Battersby’s characters seem conscious of the archness of their speech, their faith placed forlornly in their utopian, unbelievable achievements. (It reminds me, deliciously, of the Guided By Voices’ lyrics: “I am a scientist/I seek to understand me/All of my impurities and evils yet unknown.”) The second section, “A Cure for Being Ordinary,” features Battersby as a vagrant dwelling in the bowels of a bank tower. To his interlocutor, played by Vey Duke, he explains (again in an altered voice) the vagaries of time. How clocks represented, when he was a child, superior beings that everyone revered. How time operated differently when he was a hamburger-flipper. How he has learned to exist, freely, between chunks of time—as in the cuts between images on TV: the “free place.” The final section, “Attention Public,” operates as a type of advertisement for an obscure, futuristic cult centred on the creation of a new language, a new dimension of “psycho-emotional space.” Played by Vey Duke (a dead ringer for Mary-Louise Parker here), this character describes her life underground, her parents, how they would, “with their language, make freedom.” As in the other sections, Vey Duke’s voice is manipulated into a sing-song-y thing that’s both mellifluous and jarring; her movements are slightly spastic, performative. Visually, it’s the lushest video Vey Duke-Battersby have ever made: candlelit, the backgrounds more detailed. All three sections add up to an extremely sustained and satisfying whole, neither sci-fi nor conventional drama. And at just 26 minutes, it’s like reduced Resnais, boiled down to a heady and enchanting essence.
Battersby-Vey Duke’s work, when shown in gallery spaces, is typically viewed on pedestal-mounted monitors, on flat-screen monitors attached to walls, or projected in darkened rooms. When I first saw The New Freedom Founders presented, it was in Toronto as part of a Pleasure Dome mini-retro, and it was shown on three, consecutive, separate screens. Vey Duke-Battersby were dissatisfied with that screening, believing that the apparatus was too conspicuous, that it created an unwanted anticipation. Indeed, none of the three screens interacted, and it was difficult to discern why the three screens were necessary at all; why not show it as a single-channel installation, the way their other tapes were presented? It will never be shown that way again, according to Battersby, and its next major screening will be at Winnipeg’s Plug In Gallery in May, where it will be shown in a small, black-walled room where the piece will run continuously, each of the three segments alternating on different walls.
While The New Freedom Founders finds Vey Duke-Battersby incorporating more specifically filmic elements (reverse-shots, a more complex mise en scène), the writing, according to Vey Duke, always comes first. “My expectations of art are founded in literature,” she says, namechecking everything from Madame Bovary to Minette Walters. “Our practice is to do a vast amount of writing and then figure out what we can cull to say something specific.” Images and music are constructed to form the best means “to get that writing to the viewer.” Vey Duke describes her self as a writing junkie, “a total glutton” who writes copiously. “A lot of it is really horrible,” and she allows Battersby who, out of a “terror of embarrassment,” prunes, purges, and edits it. The video-editing stage, on which they collaborate, is, in Battersby’s words, “a chance to rewrite at the last minute. We’re able to manipulate and completely change the entire shape.” Vey Duke compares this fine-tuning to the way a single word can alter the entire meaning of a sentence: “Fairly small changes can affect big things.” This is as good a description as any for their entire body of work: an incipient oeuvre whose piquant modesty belies its awesome achievements.
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