2000

Sue de Beer and Laura Parnes Heidi 2

for Time Out New York by David Hunt

The horror-movie genre is so ripe for artistic send up, I'm amazed it hasn't already become a certified sub-genre. Iím just waiting for Evil Dead, Basket Case and Childís Play to premiere at the Venice Biennal as exampels of "found" video to sanction such a movement. The best horror movies stir comedy and tragedy into a thick stew of psychosexual histrionics (think of Linda Blsir vomiting pea soup). Sue de Beer and Laura Parnes's Heidi 2 characterized as an "unauthuruediiequeI," goes a few steps further. Athoroughly absorbing and eerily disturbing send up of Heidi. the Paul McCarthy/Mike Kelley collaborative video, Heidi 2 sends a letter bomb to the industryís practitioners of faux angst, exalted narcissism and Catholic high seriousness: attitudes that used to pass, in contemporary art at least, for tortured artistic nobility.

The installation, which covers the gailery with Astro Turf and fake plastic pine trees, evokes a pseudo-Alpine vista straight out of the original Heidi fable. You can sit in one of several biomorphic chairs resemb1ing internal organs turned inside our to waich vignettesó titled Unsatisfied Wantt, Reject. Repel, Abort. Rctry, Fail and Grandpa's Fetishized Disabilityóunf0ld on split screens placed at 90-degree angles. The actress playing Heidi wears a cute Heidi mask with blond pigrails, while Grandpa sports a wrinkled rubber face Heidi 2 features, in order, talking vulvas, projectile vomiting, Grandpaís spanking session, Leonardo DiCaprio as a paper cut-out, and an abortion that ends with a TV instead of a fetus. Throughout, pop-up balloons featuring the video-game character Frogger dispcnse sage bits of wisdom like: "There should be ni dialog in the film; it refers to what eludes speech," Also eluding speech: why someone like Scream-meister Kevin Williamson has been canonized as a postmodernist slasher nonpareil, when here, de Beer and Parnesís mix and match of everything from movie posters and product tie-ins to Hello Kitty and plastic surgery does it much better and much smarter.

DAVID HUNT