Stephanie Barber constructs film like someone confronting a fridge full of magnetic words. She is the first filmmaker that I recommend to poets, and one of the few whose work is only enhanced by her physical presence in the theater. And, she will be present at Anthology Film Archives to perform a retrospective of her 2011 residence/installation/performance Jhana and the Rats of James Olds, conducted for 31 days at the Baltimore Museum of Art. During this period, the filmmaker worked fruitfully in the Museum's main gallery, using it as a studio space and creating one video per day. The previous day’s video would then be added to the exhibition. The Museum’s attendees were not only audience to the final pieces, but to her filming and editing. They were also very often collaborators; their voices grace the majority of the works. For the duration of Jhana, the boundaries between work, play, and meditative repetition became fuzzy: a noble, disciplined commitment to a joke. Per the artist herself, Jhana was “a spiritual obeisance, an athletic braggadocio, a consideration of Marxist theories of production (with the assembly line so lovingly lit).”
Many of these 31 fragments of video are remarkably strong, and very funny, on their own—brief non-sequitors strung from archival material, Barber’s way with wit, and crowdsourced participation. A re-edit of intertitles from a 1950 travelogue becomes a surreal tribute to W.G. Sebald in Travel without Travel. Museum-goers lend droll voices to tiny Elizabethan portraits in Miniatures. The hypnotically ridiculous Some Animals turns the repetition of different animal cut-outs into a musical score (“the patterning of sound sound sound repeating like the shapes which make a giraffe’s coat or the molecules of steam which flow from the bison’s broad nose as he exhales the scent of a wildflower,” states Barber’s equally addictive prose program notes). A favorite, Tatum’s Ghost, highlights “real and imagined” YouTube comments on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries. (Tatum’s Ghost reminds of another of my favorite Barber works, her 2013 book Night Moves, which assembles its love poems from YouTube comments on the titular Bob Seeger song). Each piece is a grab bag of words and images. Considered as a whole, they are activated in a new context—bon mot pool balls ricocheting against each other.
Struggling to imagine these works within the confines of a traditional theatrical screening, I asked Barber for a preview and was told that she plans to choose which videos to screen in the moment, "based on wherever the talk goes." I should’ve known, but it’s the improbable dichotomy between this improvisatory looseness and the hyperfocused conceptual devotion of her short films that make the Jhana project so impressive. Barber’s screenings always find a way to be one of a kind.
Jhana and the Rats of James Olds or 31 Days/31 Videos screens evening, March 22, at Anthology Film Archives as part of “Stephanie Barber: Jhana and the Rats of James Olds or 31 Days/31 Videos.”
