Stuart Bender

Press

Coming to terms with 'Time' January 21, 1994

Santa Barbara News-Press

by Michael Darling

Notions of time, and specifically time passing, have been present in art throughout the ages, and an exhibition currently on view at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum points to contemporary treatments of this age-old fact of life. The exhibition, "In Terms of Time," curated by Ruth Weisberg and Rabbi Laura Geller, presents a wide array of approaches to the constant flux of life, crossing a range of media and representational convention…

…(One of) Two works which are much more successful in fleshing out issues of time (is) "The Earlier Known" (1993) by Stuart Bender and Angelo Funicelli. "The Earlier Known" is an engagingly schizophrenic video installation that tugs at the viewer's attention with four separate video tracks and three audio loops. The bombardment of visual and aural stimulation creates a hypnotic amalgamation of fleeting and fragmentary information that comes close to an evocation of the idea of collective memory.

"Shooting at Ghosts" Targets Memories Lost and Known September 20, 1994

Los Angeles Times

by Cathy Curtis

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.

Installation Description

The Earlier Known examines the architecture of memory and history through the forms of personal narrative, pseudo-scientific appraisal, objective narrations and text fragmentation.

The objects recorded on video occupy the space both physically (as images presented on monitors embedded in pedestals) and psychically (as the viewer recognizes and identifies the objects through video representations of real things). The transient videotaped images of objects, figures and text, with the passage of recorded voices and electronic music, thus occupy a space simultaneously in the physical present (the room in which the viewer stands, watches, and listens) and in memory (i.e., the images and sounds, which are the artists' electronically recorded memories, and which become the viewers' memories as they pass in time).

The monitor in the left pedestal displays images of various objects, precious and mundane. On the soundtrack of this tape, narrators read abstract stories in various languages (English, German, Spanish, and Chinese) which highlight the role objects play in defining self and personality. These narratives are read in a halting, hesitant manner, translated at sight as if from ancient inscriptions. These stories address the construction of memory, meaning and the configuration of personal identity based on associations with objects.

The monitor in the right pedestal displays more objects (some of which are the same objects as shown in the left pedestal). These images are shot with different backdrops, from different angles and points of view. On an English-only soundtrack, a narrator guides the viewer through a conceptual space, a fictive archaeological ruin, which eventually evolves into a description of the room the in which the viewer stands. This twelve-minute looped narration is very loosely based on descriptions of actual ruins that are located in the countries whose native languages are heard relating the personal narratives on the monitor in the left pedestal. These descriptions fluctuate almost imperceptibly between what seems to be the scientifically objective and the utterly fantastic.

The center monitor, facing the viewer directly, contains scrolling text of fragmented memories, all related in the present tense (e.g., "Remembering lying awake at night, watching the car lights through the Venetian blinds make traveling patterns across the walls and ceiling." "Remembering how small the room seemed after he returned many years later.") These written fragments deliberately obfuscate meaning by confusing the subject of the memories with the one who is remembering. Thus, the architectural framework encompassing memory disintegrates, coaxing the viewer into an imaginary space of infinite proportion, a psychic hall of mirrors with no certain subject present.

The projection on the far wall displays disjointed images of people, objects, and architectural details, each fading up from and fading out to black. Projected as a giant vignette with no discernable border, this element pulls the viewers through an endless corridor of evocative, associative imagery interrelating architecture, objects, and human gestures.

Throughout the piece, an electronic music track plays a continuous, brooding score, consisting of a low bass note overlaid with reverberating bells.

Installation Exhibitions

Fresno Museum of Art, CA

Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, CA

University of California Riverside, CA

Site Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

Single Channel Version Screenings

Worldwide Video Festival, The Hague, The Netherlands

LA Freewaves, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA

6th International Video Week, Geneva, Switzerland

Travelogue, Fundacao Athos Bulcao, Brasilia; Instituto Municipal de Arte & Cultura-Rio Arte, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil