The Earlier Known

'Shooting at Ghosts' Targets Memories Lost and Known
Los Angeles Times
By Cathy Curtis, September 20, 1994

When we watch a movie - unless it's by Robert Altman or one of the few other directors who go in for overlapping dialogue - we expect to hear clearly what everyone has to say and to see (or at least glimpse) all the action. Unlike real life, sounds generally are audible in a film only when they reinforce something happening on the screen.

Visual artists making installations don't feel constrained by these conventions. Sounds and voices - and video or still imagery - may overlap and undercut each other, evoke contrasting experiences and blur past and present, real and unreal, making it impossible to get a straightforward, linear sense of the piece as a whole.

In "The Earlier Known", a sound-and-video installation by Stuart Bender and Angelo Funicelli, viewers must sort through four channels' worth of imagery plus three layers of sound, including voices speaking several languages.

It isn't that Bender and Funicelli are deliberately being obscure, or don't wish to communicate. Rather, they are engaged in combating the myth of a single-track narrative cleanly yielding a single "truth".

As in real life, viewers are obliged to process competing streams of information and draw on cultural and personal referents to give meaning to what they hear and see.

Using a combination of imagery and texts, two of the video screens juxtapose childhood recollections of unique moments ("the day they picked the only apricot on the tree") and ritual actions occurring either in religious settings or at home (pouring tea, drying the dishes). Some of these rituals are shown both in Western and Asian settings. The silvery ping! of Asian temple bells occasionally underlines the ceremonial quality of this imagery.

Images of seemingly unrelated single objects on the other two video screens - a skate key, a shell, a crystal bibelot - are more elusive. Perhaps they are meant to evoke touchstones of memory, like Proust's famous madeleine.

Several voices relate long stories in German and Italian. Meanwhile, a droning, intrusive English speaker describes in exhaustive detail the interior of a building. Perhaps he is meant to be a reminder that bald, measurable "facts" cannot substitute for the intuitive world of sense experience. In any case, for the English-speaking viewer at least, the most memorable "voices" are mute, rendered as fragmentary text on a video screen.

Buried among more benign memories in these texts is someone recalling his father "climbing into {my} bed in the middle of the night and saying 'be good like a good little girl' ". At other moments in the tape, we read about "the look on her face when he told her the truth" and how his father's skin felt like cold wax when they touched".

Is this what it appears to be, a memory of sexual abuse? None of the visual imagery seems directly linked to it. But isn't that the way terrible things occur, surrounded by the familiar, repeated actions that make up a life? And doesn't a pattern of abuse itself become a ritual, however repressive?

The remainder of the exhibition consists of three videos by Bender and Funicelli, whose work had been seen at such major venues as the New York Film and Video Festival and the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.