Art Reviews

When I reviewed Off-Screen Space I filed Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s Director’s Karaoke under open questions. A microphone, a PA, a bench, a pot of water, no performance dates posted. Karaoke with nobody singing. I wrote that it might be the truest object in the show, or might just be incomplete, and that the gallery should schedule the singing and settle it. On October 29 they settled it, in the most on-theme way possible. The performance happened across campus, in the Performance Space at the Visual Arts Facility, while the station itself sat in the gallery, unsung as ever. Even the singing happened off-screen from its own installation.

Here’s what I watched. Kalman, in shorts and bare feet, stood in front of a scene from Dream Team, the feature he and Horn made, an absurdist homage to nineties basic-cable thrillers where, per the program, two hot Interpol agents uncover an interspecies mystery, corals included. He spoke the scene along with the screen. No lyrics, no prompter. When the agents slipped into their jacuzzi he shed a layer too, stopping deliberately short of a bathing suit, and held the pose with one foot in a cooking bowl on a table. He wrote these lines with Horn, so the memory is no miracle. The delivery is what interested me. He was poking fun at his own movie, openly amused, with small gestures shadowing the action on screen, like a man reading his dialogue back to the actors and finding it a little ridiculous. The film is already a send-up; here its director sent up the send-up.

The form has a long family tree: Japanese benshi performing every line beside the screen, the director’s commentary track, Miranda July and Sam Green speaking inside their own projections, every drag performer who ever lip-synced for her life. Kalman adds a small, dry joke to that lineage and doesn’t pretend it’s more.

The best moments were the slips. Twice, maybe three times, he fell out of sync, and those were where I sat up. Perfect timing would have made him a speaker. The lag made him a person. Across the gallery, Kerry Tribe’s pinned page says her car crash “keeps being re-told in 1st person” by people who only heard about it: stories migrate into bodies and replay there, with errors. Kalman performed a version of her thesis, with one wet foot. The program calls his mode Brechtian, and for once the word earns its keep: everything he did matched the movie while refusing to take it seriously. The cooking bowl is pure sweded cinema, the homemade effect whose visible cheapness is the point. Though I’ll note Brecht never held a jacuzzi pose on a folding table.

It turned out to be less a feat than a wink: the person who normally whispers the lines from behind the camera, stepping into the light to make fun of them. In a show about everything outside the frame, that may be the purest specimen in the building. The dark annex still holds my other debt. I’ll be back.