Where every day’s a holiday
Because you’re married to me
-- from "Blue Room" (1926), Rodgers & Hart
This March, the Western Front turns fifty (its building will be a hundred-and-one!). Hard to believe -- if you haven't already forgotten.
Covid took our taste and smell, a number of lives and some memories too. Western Front co-founder Michael Morris had a pretty good memory. He didn't die of Covid, but his loss is felt amongst those who, if in doubt about a past event, could always count on him to at least set us on the right track.
In many ways the Western Front that began in 1973 ended when Morris and Vincent Trasov moved out of the building in the 1980s, eventually to Berlin.
The current exhibition -- The Apparition Room -- is the first in a four-part series that "brings to life digitized artworks from the Western Front archives." The works included -- from Paul Wong & Kenneth Fletcher's 60 Unit Bruise (1976) to ceramics by Laura Wee Lay Laq -- were selected by guest curator Lee Plested, while Nile Koetting supplied the design.
This design, we are told in the press materials, "evokes the cool aesthetics of the waiting room to welcome visitors to slow down, stay awhile and engage in contemplation." But for this viewer, the experience was anything but.
Try as I might, I couldn't get past the Tron-like atmosphere. Where was I, really? Amidst the blue screen that awaits its superimposed context (the narrative context I am asked to imagine)? Or less malevolently, a room where I awake to the glow of the monitor long after the video has stopped playing? Either way, I did not feel welcome. More like imprisoned.
Blue spark
He waits in the beach apartment
Blue spark
Thousands of lights, thousands of people
She’s forgotten him for the bodies around her
-- "Blue Spark" (1982), X
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