After making the Michael Jackson wrestling video, Jamie heard about local teens staging wrestling matches in their backyards. He began videotaping these contests in 1997; that culminated in his visceral film BB (1998–2000). Teen boys in masks and painted faces wrestle in a makeshift ring surrounded by one-story bungalows, crashing into one another, leaping off ladders and roofs, bashing one another with metal chairs. They ape TV-wrestler moves in an apparent mix of play and real violence. Jamie’s format — gritty black-and-white Super 8 film accompanied by the roar of the sludgy metal band the Melvins — is a perfect match for his subject. He puts his camera in the middle of things and then slows the action a bit, heightening the drama. The more you watch, the more it seems a study of modern American male coming-of-age rituals.
Jamie moved to Paris in 2000, sick of the soullessness of Southern California and seeking a quiet, old place, away from the pack. But he returned for work. Shot in Detroit in 2002, the video Spook House is a montage of overlapping amateur haunted-house skeletons, smoke machines, electric chairs, flying ghouls, and demon clowns. Over its 19 minutes, the blood and gore begins to feel all the same. Jamie favors an artless, authorless style that suggests police-evidence photos. He sees it as a way to draw viewers in. (For me it can grow dull.)
That December, he visited a small Austrian village to document its St. Nicholas feastday traditions. In the video Kranky Klaus, a man playing the saint visits shops and homes giving out chocolates. He’s accompanied by a group of Krampuses, “companions of St. Nicholas,” costumed men that look like evil Wookies with goat horns, chains, and clanging bells. The ritual is astonishing for its mix of cheer and brutality. While St. Nick placidly stands by, the Krampuses wrestle shoppers to the snowy ground. They invade homes and meeting halls, overturning tables, throwing boys to the floor, harassing parents, pulling children’s ears. The Krampuses scatter a group of shell-shocked teens, punching the boys and bringing one girl to tears. “There is no need to be afraid,” a beast growls. “You must behave yourself. It’s okay to be a little bad like me. Stop crying.” You feel you’ve witnessed a violent crime.
Jamie’s most recent video is JO (2004). For the full effect, check out the screening with Keiji Haino’s live performance of the score at the List tonight (May 17). An exploration of patriotic rituals, it combines footage of a Fourth of July hotdog-eating contest in New York with French celebrations of Joan of Arc. The events aren’t very visually compelling, and the horror-movie music feels heavy-handed.
But as a group Jamie’s videos represent an anthropological study of overlooked middleclass folk rituals. And they haunt like the surprise of catching your reflection at an odd angle in a dark window and briefly seeing yourself as a stranger.
The Worcester Art Museum is presenting Ed Ruscha and Raymond Pettibon in “The Holy Bible and THE END,” a show exploring a collaboration between these two icons of Los Angeles–area cool. Organized by Pomona College Museum of Art, it was brought here by Worcester contemporaryart curator Susan Stoops, and it’s the sort of small, sharply framed exhibit at which Stoops excels.
