IF: people and places in recent film and video
Bloomberg SPACE 29.03 - 10.05.08
Great American Desert, 16mins, 2007 by Stephen Connolly
Graham Gussin
Stephen Connolly’s Great American Desert, 2007 dwells both in the past and the present,
geographically as well as temporally. The people within its structure seem to be looking
for something elusive to them; it is as if they are trying to sustain a sense of limbo for as
long as they can.
The idea of transit is central to this work. Travelers across the U.S.A.
come and go, seeking, resting and moving on. The place is caught between its history
and its present state and the entire ‘place’ feels like a crossroads - a crossroads as
big as a desert. Richard Ford speaks about journey and movement in his great novel
Independence Day, suggesting that it is within the journey where location ‘happens’, that
place is only found through movement. This is very much the subject of Connolly’s film,
the people within it only inhabiting the spaces through transition.
As we watch through a windscreen, we listen to a group of travelers talking as they
rationalise their desire to be a little lost, a little in tune with the ephemeral nature of their
surroundings. Wrecked war machines and aircraft litter the landscape in a place where
millions of people gather every year seeking escape and a sense of community. Yet,
ironically, this is a wilderness which was invisibly changed forever during the period of
atomic experimentation during and just after the Second World War.
The film is ultimately about a relationship to place which seems defined through notions
of spectacle and leisure. The spectacle lies in the re-creation of the 1945 Hiroshima and
Nagasaki atomic explosions (staged in Los Angeles only three months after the actual
events) which haunt the landscape, leaving it emptier than it ever was, and the leisure lies
in the idle killing of time undertaken by its transient population.
Graham Gussin, artist and curator
Spring 2008
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