Remember when you found out about Dadaism? The way you immediately began cursing the universe for having been birthed too late to catch the crazy Dadaist performances of chimpanzees with microphones taped their feet, walking across Dobros? And then how happy you were to find E.E. Cummings and feel like part of the in crowd, enjoying form over substance and understanding that Warhol wasn’t just painting Campbell’s soup cans?
Baltimore-based artists Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche seem to be of that same afflicted and addled youth. And out of their collective, art-for-art’s-sake deficiencies comes their surrealistically manic Ultimate Reality. An exhibition in visual splicing (Roche) and campy, ecstatic sonics (Deacon), this 40-minute DVD combines the two artists’ works to form a montage of completely unrelated though occasionally corresponding scenes.
Roche functions in the visual sphere, cutting and splicing together images from Arnold Schwarzenegger films. The disorienting scenes are doused in tie-dye and mirrored à la the butterfly affect from Microsoft Paint. Roche compiles clips from Terminator 2, Total Recall, and Kindergarten Cop, among others, mashing them together in an incomprehensible medley of bright flashes and seizure-inducing explosions.
Deacon, on the other hand, formulates his similarly spastic though ultimately more composed dance compositions for the piece’s sonic backdrop. His bulbous percussion and liturgical organs engulf the visceral images and serve as the only connection to the real world. Watching Ultimate Reality is not, I presume, unlike entering the Matrix: a complete disconnect from the true reality and entrance into a world where things don’t quite make sense, except to those running the show.
But the most disconcerting aspect of the piece is its almost total lack of coherence and relevance. Almost never does the film make an obvious, composed argument or statement (though during the second “track,” the interspersed moments of Star Wars-esque plot summary include a narrative pulling from other ‘80s classics like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), and only once or twice could one be argued. A scene of Schwarzenegger leading a group of children in a Pied Piper circle is shortly followed by three heads of Predator, shaded red, white and blue, potentially mocking his status as governor. Simple transitive property applies: Schwarzenegger kills Predator, Predator represents America, Schwarzenegger kills America. But that’s a stretch at best.
Ultimate Reality then stands as its own entity, wholly separate from the politics, drama, and experiences of the everyday world. Essentially, the aptly-titled film exhibits a reality all its own, separate from mediating, outside factors. It’s not quite Dadaism. It’s not quite postmodernism. But it certainly is something.
More about: Dan Deacon and Jimmy Joe Roche
