Courtesy of the artist and STNDRD
St. Louis artist Sage Dawson is the innovative and thoughtful curator behind STNDRD, an ongoing series of projects currently housed in the front foyer of The Luminary on Cherokee. For each exhibit, an artist designs a flag, each time pushing the definition of that word to its furthest boundaries. (Dawson mentions by example Jeff Robinson's show last October: Dummy Vexillography violated every rule of good flag design—it was a clear, rectangular box crammed full of sundry materials that purposely aimed to be "needlessly overwrought, hopelessly illegible, and utterly useless.")
On April 14, STNDRD opened "Printed Flats," a project by Australian-born, Rhode Island-based artist Elizabeth Corkery, whose work plays with the ideas of materiality, excess, the decorative arts, theater, and cinema, among other themes. The work takes as its inspiration the 1936 film The Great Zeigfeld, a biopic on Broadway theater impresario Flo Zeigfeld. It tells his story—appropriately enough—as a lush, over-the-top musical with elaborate stage sets and hundreds of sparkling Follies girls. (Actual Zeigfeld girl Fanny Brice makes a cameo, too.) For Printed Flats, Corkery screenprinted stills from the film, specifically a dance sequence choreographed to the song "You've Gotta Pull Strings." A corps of Ziegfeld girls entertain a black-tie crowd in a supper club, throwing long ribbons out to them; as the audience pulls on the strings, an enormous wall of balloons emerges. Each individual ballon becomes part of the table centerpiece, and another layer of stage set—populated with more dancing girls—emerges from behind the balloon cascade.
In order to give the piece a depth, Corkery tweaked the orientation of the flagpole mount, turning it on a slant, then alternated screenprints with decorative, hand-painted canvases that pay homage to the elaborate sets of the era, which in addition to being aesthetically complicated, were often technologically complicated (and without the help of CAD or the ability to overnight hard-to-find pneumatic parts from Alibaba). "Elizabeth is playing with the idea of decadence, and the incredibly three-dimensional experience of that scene, with the interaction with the audience, and the way the stage moves out into the crowd," Dawson says. "When you first come into the gallery, it looks one way. But I like that you can walk around the piece and it changes it. It becomes more three-dimensional," Dawson says. "In fact, it's incredibly three-dimensional."
We talked to Corkery by email about the show, which runs through May 11. STNDRD's next exhibit, Travis Janssen: Inverse (After Jasper), opens May 12. After that show closes June 2, STNDRD will travel to a new location outside of Saint Louis for the summer and fall, then return to St. Louis late 2017 in a new location.
How did this particularly work take shape? What were your biggest considerations when making this work for STNDRD?
As a project, STNDRD has a very clear conceptual mandate that the work must somehow incorporate a flagpole, so this was really the launching point for my material explorations. Much of my previous work has incorporated printing on rigid MDF panels that can ultimately be stacked or leant against walls, so the approach of using hung canvas as a substrate for my imagery was very new for me. I was interested in the piece structurally referencing a montage sequence or the uniquely filmic action of “jump cutting,” so it was appropriate for there to be a certain amount of repetition in form, hence the multiple canvases. Another concern was that the scale of the work have a relationship to the body and be large enough that it prompted some motion around the piece rather than operating from the scale of a picture that could be experienced with a more singular view.
How does “Printed Flats” fit into your larger body of work, both in terms of content and form?
Much of my previous work has been print-based installations that reproduce sites of pre-cinematic spectacles (glasshouses, The Hall of Mirrors etc.) to explore the complex histories of representation, artifice, and place. This new work is part of a continued line of inquiry in my practice that mines the juncture between corporeal and representational experience; having a physical experience of a space versus viewing a representation of space. In the past, I have looked to architectural and cinematic strategies in order to generate a site where the two can converge.
Can you also talk a little bit about that choice of title?
Early descriptions of motion pictures would use the terms “screen,” “canvas,” and “curtain” interchangeably to refer to the surface onto which images were projected. In theatrical parlance, “canvas” could be another term for “flat,” so the movie screen became theatricalized by being likened to a “flat.” Because multiple parts of my series of “flats,” are actually digital reproductions taken from movie screengrabs, I decided “Printed Flats” was a more appropriate descriptor. I also enjoy that the use of the term “print” not only relates to the work’s possible reproduction but a release “print” refers to copy of a film that is provided to a movie theater for exhibition.
Can you talk a bit about tilting the flagpoles at an angle, and the effect you wanted to achieve in the work with that approach?
The obvious reference is to the hung wings at each side of a theatrical stage, but because I’m dealing with a single, flat wall rather than a deep receding space, I needed to find a strategy for offering a view of the piece from both the front and side. I also wanted to keep the “flats” single-sided as they would be if they were part of a stage design and if they had come out directly perpendicular from the wall I would have had to address both sides of the canvas. I enjoy that the angle of the pieces also allows for slightly different views of the five panels as you walk in front and around them.
Sage mentioned that your process generally involves quite a bit of research. Can you talk about what that involved for this project in particular?
I was actually in the midst of putting together a big research proposal when Sage contact me about creating a new piece for STNDRD, and so it was fortuitous that the timing offered me an opportunity to create a visual manifest of the themes I was already thinking and writing about. I have been reading a lot of writing by Guiliana Bruno, an extraordinary visual art, architecture, film, and media theorist who thoroughly articulates the relationship between cinema and architecture. This piece is in some ways a response to what she identifies as the “perceptual interplay that exists between immobility and mobility involved in the act of viewing films, even if the spectator is seemingly static;" my piece become static, but prompts a movement from the spectator and includes imagery captured and combined from motion picture and static architectural elements. I had also been reading a wonderful book by William Paul called When Movies Were Theatre which offers a comprehensive accounting of the history of motion pictures in the U.S., and the evolution of their production and presentation relative to theatre architecture. It was because of this book that I landed on The Great Ziegfeld as the cinematic source material for the piece. Once I understood how close a relationship early cinema had to vaudeville and live theatre, I knew I wanted to find a film that would draw upon those references while also living firmly in the realm of cinematic spectacle. The film is a fictionalized tribute to Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. and a cinematic adaption of Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies. It is a quintessential symbol of glamor and excess during the Golden Age of Hollywood; it’s nearly three hours long, ran grossly over budget and was also a Best Picture Oscar winner. In a funny bit of irony too the movie ends with Ziegfeld in financial ruins as his theatre productions are losing money due to the increasing popularity of movies.
As I mentioned above, my research around the themes of architecture and cinematic experience was already established before this project. My practice has forged a close relationship to photography and cinema and I have worked to cultivate a comprehensive understanding of the structures of these media as I continue to integrate strategies of filmic representation in my work. Barthes notion of the “filmic” as distinct from the motion picture is an idea I often return to—how can non film-based work behave in a “filmic” manner? In the same way that knowledge of the perspectival conventions of theatre influenced a Renaissance experience of space, how has the structure of cinema influenced the way we now view and move through the world?
I think this piece is far from a resolved exploration of the ideas I’ve been exploring, but rather is a kind of visual proposal for a potentially more immersive body of work that could draw from this continued research.
What was it about the “You’ve Got to Pull Strings” segment in the film that attracted your attention in particular?
I think what was fascinating about this sequence from the film was that it generates a cinematic space that draws heavily on the structure of live theatre, and could ultimately only be realized with the benefit of the medium of film; choreography, multiple takes, composed framing and careful editing. We have the stage literally moving out into the space of the auditorium, and the performers breaking through the fourth wall of the stage figuratively and physically as they engage directly with their audience and hand off the balloon strings, making the audience performers.
The work at STNDRD has an interesting play between printed stills from The Great Ziegfeld and hand-painted canvas that evokes old school movie/vaudeville stage sets. Can you talk a bit about the interplay between the two, and how they work together in this piece?
I’m fascinated by the history of motion pictures as they relate to and grew out of live theatre. Many early films were directly adapted from lives stage shows, and even those that were original screenplays often used the space of the stage or theatre as a site for narrative-driven action. In addition, the screening of early movies presented them in a varied program alongside other performances, primarily vaudeville acts. In the context of a vaudeville show, the addition of film segments within the larger program meant that the dropped projection screen could also act as a curtain behind which the next act might be prepared, creating an enduring relationship between the curtain and the screen. I liked the idea of offering the repeated, generalized form of the five “flats” but across their imagery I can visually move between the physical space of the movie palace and the imagined space of the cinematic environment.
Can you comment on the idea of architecture at play in this work (which I think would play out via the giant, elaborate stage set)?
It was important to me that there be elements of the piece that related to architectural forms as there are so many fascinating links between an experience of architectural space and cinematic movement. Architects must approach the idea of a sequence, with passageways and rooms relating to the idea of framing, cutting, editing. There is a shared element of movement and composition and really when movies first emerged, they were an experience of architecture; an experience of both the film image and the theatrical space that contained it.
Again, that was why it was important that the work be at the scale that it is; relating to the body of the viewer and also referencing the size of early projection screens (certainly modest by today’s standards)
What was also of interest to me was how the architectural form of the movie palaces used to dictate the kind of features films they would show. There was a hierarchy between the theatres and only the big budget, star-studded features would show at the premier venues. These venues were elaborately decorated as cinema was still pushing to be perceived as a legitimate form of entertainment, so the environment of the theatre was aimed at elevating the movie experience. The two painted panels draw from historic interior elements of Los Angeles’ Fox Wilshire Theatre (now the Saban Theatre) which would have been one of these premier movie palaces and visually encapsulates the idea of the Hollywood “Golden Era”.
Similarly, the presence of architecture (including interiors) and gardens in your full body of work?
My interest in architecture and gardens is dominated by a preoccupation with the history of their representation rather than just the physical form they take. While I was completing my graduate studies at Cornell, I took an Art History class called “Nature, Cultural Landscape, and Gardens in Early Modern Italy and France,” and the the outcomes of my research for this class was an installation I created called Nowhere is There a Garden (2013). This was a body of work informed not by a specific garden design but by the history of garden representation, from early engravings to contemporary cinema. Liberated from any intention to wholly reproduce a single environment, my ambition was to address the space between the cinematic “establishing shot” and its proceeding “close-up.” I looked to propose a structure for simultaneously looking at the representational view of the garden whilst physical being in a staged, “garden” environment. Similarly when I created a simulation of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in Absolutely Monarchy (2012) I was addressing a space I had never visited before or had any primary experience of. The ultimate production of the work was only made possible through sourcing imagery that had been captured and distributed either in printed form or online. So my work as it relates to architecture and gardens is really about investigating the space between experience and reproduction and the history of addressing the fraught task of representing three dimensions in two.
