After an uneventful day, excepting a visit from a 28-year-old, sober, HIV positive, gay mafia moll with a remarkable story…I braved the cold and walked from the East Village to an art opening in Soho.
Team Gallery on Grand Street is owned by a grumpy, reptilian gay guy called Jose Freire. I was introduced to him yonks ago by Max Wigram when I tried unsuccessfully to buy a piece by Ryan McGinley at Frieze.
As miserable as Jose may be…he has great taste and last nights show was no exception.
An extraordinary video installation by French artist Brice Dellsperger.
I met my sweet and excruciatingly handsome friend Leonard the young buff Buffalo boy who seemed a little overwhelmed by both the crowd and the show. We ate dinner at Prune. I had the monkfish liver and a very poorly executed lamb steak. He had prawns and veal. We did not stick around for desert or coffee.
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The Team gallery show was called: Refreshing Fassbinder…and others.
The show continues Dellsperger’s longtime fascination with the psychosexual in contemporary cinema.
Body Double 22, after Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut (1999) was perfectly delicious to watch. A mesmerizing, non-linear partial restaging of Stanley Kubrick’s thriller Eyes Wide Shut
Body double refers to Dellspergers’s performers (he and long time collaborator Jean-Luc Verna) standing in for and lip-synching to Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
The films examine issues of authenticity using digital slippage, irregular lip-synching, and crudely constructed sets and costumes…channelling Kenneth Anger and Derek Jarman. Gay art cinema.
I loved Jean-Luc Verna’s performance which is tinged with menacing humor..as only a tranny can.
Body Double 27, 2010 is a three-channel video installation which, of course reminded me of my own film AKA. The same scene repeated, side-by-side, with several different actors playing the same role.
This piece was particularly beautiful and more than adequately fills the main part of the gallery.
In Fassbinder’s film a man lusts after his co-worker Anton, who says, “Too bad you are not a woman”, to which the man responds by becoming a transvestite.
Dellsperger’s film is a repetition of a scene where a transvestite furtively approaches an anonymous man. The man is always unresponsive. The transvestite cries on his own. Dellsperger’s powerful looping fragments form an unrelenting examination of unrequited love.
Dellsperger revisits themes of gender, destabilized identity and homosexuality in the Hollywood mainstream.
If you can, go see this show.