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Time after time

Museum And Gallery

Absence and presence

LET’S GET PHYSICAL/DIGITAL: When Christian Jankowski fails, it isn’t for lack of wit or commitment.

“Sensorium I,” which was up at MIT’s List Center between October and December last year, was an ambitious mixed bag of what one critic aptly termed “circus art.” Mega installations that included tall walls that gave up foul-smelling odors when touched. Long corridors whose lights and sounds could induce a seizure. Various big rooms, some actual and some on video, where events occurred that were either mysterious or banal, depending on your taste and patience.

Now we have “Sensorium II.” Gone are the elephants and big cats and human cannonballs; we’re down to the jugglers and clowns, and not many at that. The one carry-over from “Sensorium I” is Mathieu Brand’s Ubiq, a Mental Odyssey, in which you don ingeniously engineered headgear and find your perspective switching between seeing what you’re looking at and what someone else wearing the same headgear is looking at. It was delightful the first time I tried it; I hadn’t realized how much of a one-liner it would turn out to be until last week, when I was in the company of the MassArt graduate students I teach who’d all seen “Sensorium I.” Of the 25 of us who’d partaken of the mental odyssey last time around, only one was inclined to repeat the experience.

Christian Jankowski is a funny, iconoclastic, smart video artist, so even when he misses the mark, as he does in Let’s Get Physical/Digital, it isn’t for want of wit or commitment. Jankowski inserts himself into videos that are themselves real-world events — a TV psychic hotline in which he’s the caller; an evangelical prayer service during which he lies passed out on the altar; a television talk show on the subject of performance art that sees him silently circle the set while the guests discuss his antics. He’s at his best when he’s unrehearsed, when the dialogue is unscripted: the richness of his playful intrusions depends on the complete seriousness of the other performers. Let’s Get Physical/Digital takes Web chat-room conversations between Jankowski and his girlfriend — from a period when they were living in different countries and couldn’t afford to phone — that are mouthed by varying pairs of amateur actors in drab sets with bad lighting. Even though we don’t know the exact origins of the dialogue, it’s clear that the words being spoken issue from cyberspace, with the result that the physical nearness of the actors is weirdly at odds with their echo-like protestations of love. But the hollowness Jankowski is after — language emptied of meaning, proximity stripped of closeness — is undermined by the artist’s self-consciousness. He knew all along he’d be saving the transcripts of the conversations for a performance piece, so the male half of the now spoken dialogue sounds stilted and insincere. There’s also no reason, except for the List Center’s need to occupy its cavernous space, for the video projection to measure in at something like 30 by 30 feet; what’s interesting about Let’s Get Physical/Digital isn’t about the gigantic, it’s about the small.

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