Plastic Masks: Possibly in Michigan as Urban Legend

Art & Trash, episode 33
Plastic Masks: Possibly in Michigan as Urban Legend
Stephen Broomer, May 17, 2024

Possibly in Michigan is a work of American video art that brings Surreal fantasy into dialogue with feminist critique. In it dwells an absurd synthesis of Melpomene and Thalia, a grotesque grin creasing tear-stained cheeks, topped with a nest of snakes like the head of Medusa. Its story is a fable, told in operetta and masquerade. Masked players populate this elsewhere, somewhere in America, somewhere we met before, possibly in Michigan, or in the suburbs of Cleveland, where it was shot. They are symbolic, lurking, stalking figures, but they know how to party. Sometimes they wear animal masks, which is appropriate because they are the frog princes and big bad wolves of fairy tales, but they are also just humans in masks—humans who are frailer and crueler, more tragic and less innocent than other creatures of the earth. Sharon and Janice meet in a mall, where they are stalked by Arthur. Don’t worry about Arthur, though: he’ll never guess after whom he’s walkin’...

In this episode, Stephen Broomer takes on Cecelia Condit's video in relation to epic theatre, the fairy tale and the urban legend, and veristic surrealism, inquiring to the limits of video's documental nature, and the motives of Condit's plastic disruptions.

SCRIPT:

Absurdist, mordant humour has often played a role in revolutionary discourse and in radical art; the extraordinary horrors of reality become comprehensible through a deeper knowledge of the ridiculous, for example, the ridiculous bonds between laughter and the scream. The Surrealists knew this well: they knew that the naked eye tells less than the trompe l’oeil of a painted eyelid; and that, conversely, an f-hole painted on a woman’s hip could broadcast a profound simile between the caress and the eroticism of song. Surreal absurdity embraces the terrors of life, in its recognition of the logic of dreams, in the reunion of image and impulse that taps primal desires and fears. That reunion is often at its most bizarre in the illusions of veristic surrealism, in the paintings of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, Rene Magritte, Yves Tanguy, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning: visible, precise renderings of what has been concealed in the subconscious—melting clocks, faceless figures, symbolic distortions of a comprehensible realism that continued a thread running from Bosch and Brueghel to the court paintings of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the visionary paintings of William Blake and the metaphysical paintings of De Chirico.

Cecelia Condit’s Possibly in Michigan is a work of American video art that brings Surreal fantasy into dialogue with feminist critique. In it dwells an absurd synthesis of Melpomene and Thalia, a grotesque grin creasing tear-stained cheeks, topped with a nest of snakes like the head of Medusa. Its story is a fable, told in operetta and masquerade. Masked players populate this elsewhere, somewhere in America, somewhere we met before, possibly in Michigan, or in the suburbs of Cleveland, where it was shot. They are symbolic, lurking, stalking figures, but they know how to party. Sometimes they wear animal masks, which is appropriate because they are the frog princes and big bad wolves of fairy tales, but they are also just humans in masks—humans who are frailer and crueler, more tragic and less innocent than other creatures of the earth. 

Sharon and Janice meet in a mall, where they are stalked by Arthur. Don’t worry about Arthur, though: he’ll never guess after whom he’s walkin’. After fleeing him and parting ways, the women re-converge on Arthur through a series of discontinuous, dreamlike encounters that suggest he has arrived at Sharon’s home to court, murder and eat her. They avenge themselves on him and devour him.

In song, Sharon and Janice debate perfumes, culminating in an anecdote borrowed straight from the urban legend of the exploding chihuahua, a legend spread by the incessantly grim fantasy of bored middle America. Later it would be spread by folklorist Jan Brunvand, who, beginning with The Choking Doberman in 1984, anthologized accounts of popular urban legends. Brunvand’s collections, like Condit’s film, speak to an American suburbia where the boredom of consumer experience breeds dangerous and violent fantasy, where the unreal nature of the urban legend becomes believable, because once upon a time there really was a quiet man next door who really did chop up his family. Consumer safety has its fables built into it: it has all the promise of a microwave used to warm up a child or a chihuahua. The innocently lapping tongue of a dog becomes the perverted tongue of an intruder. The urban legend is just this: the intrusion of strangers with sinister desires, and consumer errors that flaunt common sense. In the urban legend, family dinners and teenaged sleepovers and an evening drive can all become sites of bizarre trauma, whether they are simple and funny, believable as a half-hearted joke, or feature outlandish manifestations of evil. All consumerism and all comfort is fair game for the vernacular satire of the urban legend. Remember that even love is a kind of consumerism: men are trained by magazines to objectify women, to pick out the model that they want, and women are trained by magazines to pick out bridal gowns, convinced of the myth of the charmed suitor, frogs to be kissed into the shape of a prince. This frog, Arthur, also known in the video’s credits as Prince Charming, wears a Manakin dental mask, a dentist’s plastic practice-dummy that gives him a grotesque, gaping maw. What big teeth he has, and what strange things he eats…

Arthur is just a reflection of the dangers that lurk in Sharon and Janice’s world, one that muddles consumer and product: are you eating it, or is it eating you? In the mall, the surveillance camera follows the women just as Arthur does. Throughout images appear that further thematize Karen Skladany’s lyrics, an implied collapse of past and present, as home video, surveillance video, dramatic staging, and images of fire and destruction are interwoven in short bursts, the quotidian innocence of home video mixing with more ominous and rare images. Possibly in Michigan benefits from the violent, oneiric influences of veristic surrealism: unlike those painters who practiced an exacting realism to summon up the fantastical images of dreams, Condit’s medium, video, is too exacting in its realism. Its plasticity must be disrupted: parallels form among video-as-surveillance, video-as-amateur-home-movie, video-as-fashion. In contesting the boundaries of its documental usefulness, largely through fast, disruptive editing, video becomes art—and yet it retains enough of its descriptive precision to have a unique resonance with the realist thread of Surrealism. The photograph and the film image have an inherent romance about them; they cannot compete with the factualism of video. In Possibly in Michigan, video isn’t just a taking medium, it is the whole arena: somewhere we met before, possibly on video.

Condit doesn’t offer impossibly unreal images as the veristic surrealists did, but the carnivalesque spirit of these beastly gatherings, the elliptical disruptions of Arthur’s intrusions, and the melding of beauty and death speak to the same themes pursued by the Surrealists and those whose imaginations travelled in parallel to the movement. This happening party suggests the magical banquets imagined by Leonora Carrington, banquets governed by the ambiguous presences of imaginary beings. But veristic Surrealism is only one of the influences bearing upon Possibly in Michigan. Condit’s video is a forward-facing work. Synthesized from a heritage in the visual arts and highly imaginative in its own right, it anticipates the wild video culture of the golden age of the Internet, in which it would flourish when it was rediscovered by mass audiences in 2015. With this operetta, Condit reconciles dramaturgical and formal influences, developing through this fable a strangely cheerful, freewheeling shape. The radical dramaturgy of twentieth century theatre was of an immediacy that sought to alienate the audience from the comfort of suspended disbelief. The epic theatre of Bertolt Brecht cut the escapist veil of spectacle and melodrama to force the comprehension of an urgent political reality. The theatre of cruelty, conceived by Antonin Artaud, was a theatre of staging, but to the incendiary goal of shock and exorcism. These practices, that are meant for the firsthand experience of the theatrical spectator, can be expanded and challenged through the moving image, an experience that staggers to be reset, that assembles itself through the artificial marriage of the edit, that is always secondhand delayed viewing. Video, like film, has always been lacking in true immediacy, recalled from the backseat of tomorrow. Possibly in Michigan is neither a work of epic theatre nor of the theatre of cruelty, yet it has qualities that recall the urgencies and exorcisms of each, the shock not only of its gallows humour but of its imagery and discontinuity, a realism that is also transgressive, a brutal film with glimpses of real faces of death.

The film is structured in three acts: after the women flee the mall and separate, the editing becomes more disrupted. Is Sharon awake or asleep? Traditional continuity is traded for the intuition of the dream: Sharon sleeps and in her sleep, her face becomes into a putrid, mummified face. The necrophilic suggestions of the narration—that Janice, Sharon and Arthur share an erotic fascination with violence—suggests that this is not some narratological projection, but the revelation of another undercurrent, threaded through the film, that dreams and sleep and fantasy bring us closer to our ultimate form—that the slowed breathing, hazy logic and bleeding memories of dreams are like death. Answering a door and answering a phone become interchangeable: Arthur is an intruder even when he’s an expected suitor, because even without a mask, he wears a mask. Among Karen Skladany’s songs is one, sung by Sharon and Janice, about a man who is enigmatic and monstrous, the kind of man who, again, even without a mask, wears a mask. Arthur, the menacing intruder of this urban legend, confronts and kisses Sharon inside her home: she slaps him and he slaps her. His voice sounds in the mock-masculine cadence of a slowed and pitch-shifted voice. With this confrontation the film climaxes, as their struggle transports them between the inside of the home and the lawn, where Janice shoots the Big Bad Wolf. 

In the final act or epilogue, Sharon and Janice boil and consume Arthur. That they appear to do so naked implies a sapphic repudiation of masculinity, witches in an Eden where the consumer—man—becomes the consumed—meal; it may also suggest something of the edenic world these women can occupy without the threat of a man like Arthur. And that innocence is easily broken: when the Manakin-masked killer reappears at the window, drinking from a wine glass, participating in the Mysteries, only to vanish, this is both an example of the temporally-disrupted fantasy of the video and a suggestion that the venom of Arthur doesn’t vanish with him, and in this sense, the video's humour, its themes of community safety and vigilance, and its plasticity coalesce. The pervasive and continuing menace of Arthur is like the eternal resurrection of the fable. The leftovers of Prince Charming, crushed in a garbage truck, can never really be the last of him. He will be served again.

Art critic Patricia Mellencamp has characterized Condit’s videos as fairy tales told from the Princess’s point of view. The fairy tale princess is typically a figure in distress, or an object embattled by magic or the evil wills of others. In Condit’s work, the Princess is empowered to reveal the ugliness of the world she occupies, where the salvations of such fables are held under harsh light—she is not Sleeping Beauty Preserved, for when she sleeps, she becomes the mummified corpse. She is not womanhood idealized, for such an ideal is a False Woman, ageless and bloodless, beautiful meat long slumbering on a slab. Condit’s reorientation of power and violence into the hands of women is in itself a repudiation of the fairy tale’s structure, in which beasts almost inevitably stalk young and beautiful bodies. Further to this, even if they are to be taken as Princesses, Sharon and Janice are so far from the naive objecthood of their fairy tale counterparts that they may also be something else: just as a man can be both Woodsman and Wolf, both Frog and Prince, a woman can be both Princess and Witch. There may be little distance between these roles. Stripped bare for the bacchanal, Sharon and Janice capture a more universal humanity than that false womanhood of the fairy tale princess: like everyone and everything else in their society, they consume and they rot.

Condit’s video is precise in its politics, its aesthetics, its construction. But the uncertainty of its title is essential to its themes: the probing of a hazy memory—perhaps we’ve met before—suggests the fuzziness that comes with periodic repetition, the echo of a similar encounter. Perhaps we’ve met before but who knows where or when? Possibly there and then, when I was living another life, somewhere else, when I was passing through. It’s another way of saying, you seem familiar but I don’t know from where. Arthur seems familiar because he is a masculine type that exists in every man. The uncertainty of memory is like the uncertainty of screening a suitor, that old familiar vamp of kissing frogs that fail to turn into princes, or worse, kissing away grandmother’s shawl to reveal the wolf underneath. The frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain how to recognize flies by the local patterns of their movement, much as the urban legend reveals our suspicions about our world to make us wary of surprising threats. Possibly in Michigan refuses the alibi of the drowning scorpion: Arthur, change your nature or be devoured.

As political operetta, Possibly in Michigan shares an overt and superficial bond with the work of Brecht. With a fury that permeates deeper than form, it also recalls Brecht’s indignation, an urgent self-consciousness of broken artifice that, even in comedy, betrays a simmering outrage. Condit’s video might even be taken as a response and extension of Brecht and Weill’s song “What Keeps a Man Alive,” which declares that "mankind is kept alive thanks to his genius at keeping his humanity repressed.” To bite at the hand that feeds you, to slap at the face that eats you, is to refuse this inhumanity, to reject a war-waging patriarchal society that feeds on the hungry, that feeds on the poor, that feed its women only to feed upon them.