2001

Museum of Modern Art, New York

Program, Video Viewpoints:
New Work/New York-May 14, 2001
Hollywood Inferno (Episode One). 2001. 40 min.
Edited by Enat Sidi; Special effects by Christian Perez; with Alissa Bennett, Nina Marie Gardner, Kel ONeil and Guy Richards Smit.

Laura Parnes’ work blurs the boundaries that define cinema and video art by using cinematic references as elements of installations. Echoing the staging of her own productions, Parnes requires that the audience physically enter the production set in order to participate in this work. Space becomes indeterminate, reality tightly nested in layers of art, popular culture, and experience. Knitting together references as diverse as Guy Debord and Julia Kristeva with South Park, or art criticism with Forrest Gump, a world is created that nears a state of total schizophrenia while still retaining narrative coherence.Central to the work is the nature of transgression in an age where everything is caught in complex layers of mediation. In the relative isolation of the living room, super-social events appear on the news and on such TV shows like Survivor, Blind Date, Boot Camp, Jerry Springer, as well as on the latest releases from the corner video store. In this atmosphere, individual, actual experience is suspect as fabrication and transgression loses necessary perspective.

Hollywood Inferno (Episode One) (2001) is a two-channel video installation set in the nightmarish world of suburbia. Dante is now an eighteen-year-old girl named Sandy (played by Alissa Bennett), who is a part-time mascot and candy store clerk. Virgil is a screenwriter. This modern day hell comprised of fluorescent lighting, saccharine soaked easy listening music and vicarious spectatorship is an exploration of the perverse pleasure of beauty, power and cultural production. As Virgil (played by Guy Richards Smit) speaks a hybrid language out of the pages of PenthouselArtforum, he guides Sandy on her career path to stardom. As he leads Sandy through a world of demonic Furbies, Columbine models, and fire-breathing teenagers, she becomes more and more seduced by the pleasure of spectatorship and her shifting definition of beauty. Like Dante, Sandy must learn to judge others while eluding judgment herself. This journey culminates in an introduction to a famous director and a dramatic scene of sisterly betrayal. The director (played by Kel ONeil) imitates Christopher Walken while wearing a mask cast directly from the actor Willem Dafoes face. His artistic diatribe, which directly references George Lucas talking about Star Wars, combines with Dave Hickey quotes from The Invisible Dragon and further skews this character.

BARBARA LONDON, Curator