Video art

Solyanka VPA presents

An Endless Casting Call: Against the Greens, For the Reds

Actress Meryl Streep is truly in style: with two Oscars to her name, she can be a devil and an angel, wear not only Prada, but everything else that is fashionable, raise four kids, and be active in politics. Her age mate, the well-known New York artist, photographer, and filmmaker Laurie Simmons is more than a match for her: Simmons stages puppet plays for adults, has been single-handedly expanding the frontier of video art to include mini-musicals (it isn’t the genre that counts, but the person behind it), writes poems, continues the tradition of conceptual pop art, and diligently fills the collections of major US and international museums with her works – the MoMA in New York and the MOCA in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan and the Whitney, the Guggenheim and the Stedelijk, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and the Ellipse Foundation in Portugal. Simmons even manages to get involved in the scandals of the rich and famous: her photograph of a pistol from which an elegant pair of female legs emerges caused an argument between JayZ and Beyonce. Beyond found the work her husband had purchased was aggressive and perverted, and the rapper was forced to ask the gallery to send a replacement. The new piece featured a perfume bottle instead of a revolver, and this perfectly suited the queen of R&В. We’ll have to be patient in a way that Beyonce was not: the screen version of the fateful gun opens the third act of The Music of Regret. Its first act is almost an example of commedia dell’arte, only performed by puppets in search of the American dream, and thus complete with mid-level managers, a cake-baking contest, houses, swimming pools, and (of course) an ideological conflict that centers on differently colored (green and red) ties. Between this puppet drama and a desperate performance by dancers from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the divine Meryl Streep tackles the motif of endless casting call. This universal actress sings of unhappy love in the company of five ventriloquist’s dummies, while the ventriloquist’s impersonal male voice echoes her “thinking aloud” and thus reinforces the sense of disappointment. Streep’s character has a hard time deciding to be a human rather than a puppet: the apparatus of total competition wears us out because it operates everywhere – at home, on the job, in love, and, only sometimes, on the stage.