Oregon Humanities

Shadow Art

Any regular moviegoer or fan of cult TV favorite Freaks and Geeks knows the name James Franco. He delivered a subtly stellar performance in Milk, stumbled his way as a hysterical stoner in Pineapple Express, and will soon play Allen Ginsburg in Howl. But there’s a less-well-known side to this actor moonlighting as a grad student (he’s in not one but two MFA programs, film-making at NYU and creative writing at Columbia) and that side is James Franco: Performance Artist.

Last year James Franco starred in a film by conceptual artist Carter, called Erased James Franco. Franco plays James Franco, not “as himself,” but as James Franco in movies James Franco has appeared in (he recreates dialogue from Spiderman, Freaks, and other performances). He also plays Julianne Moore in the film Safe (1995), and Rock Hudson in John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966), in which Hudson plays a middle-aged businessman who fakes his own death and buys himself a new identity as a young abstract artist for a second chance at life. Carter breaks the re-created roles into bite-sized, skeletal repetitions. Franco drinks glass after glass of water, picks up a ringing phone over and over again, walks through the same doorway dozens of time.

Through each of Franco’s context-less performances, the film dissects character into gestures, lines, and performance tics, while providing dissonant harmony to the beauty in repetition and nuance. Half way into Erased, Franco paints a silhouette of his shadow, filling it in with black watercolor, letting the darkness on his brush seep into the white paper.

The scene is an eloquent play on the major inspiration for the film, and its title—Robert Rauschenberg’s 1953 drawing Erased de Kooning. Rauschenberg created the piece by simply erasing a drawing by de Kooning, with de Kooning’s permission. Rauschenberg’s symbolic act of erasing the older and influential artist’s work was in and of itself his artistic statement.

Looking into Carter’s art, I found the following quote from his work for the 2006 Whitney Biennial: “Carter is interested in challenging notions of self-portraiture by making work that acts as a stand-in for an idea of someone. The subsequent second-generation rendering of a person who is already disguised compels us to question our own identity and the many devices we might use to conceal or transform it.“

It turns out Erased was only the first chapter in a multi-phase performance piece by Franco, all dictated by Carter. Last fall, James Franco puzzled fans and critics by appearing on the soap opera General Hospital, as a dangerous, bad-boy artist named, simply, “Franco.” Most recently he appeared on 30 Rock (a show within a show), “as himself,” participating in a fake romance with one of the show’s regular characters to cover-up a taboo relationship he wants to hide from the tabloids.

Carter’s film might contain a vacuum of identity issues, but Franco’s guest stints on TV tie in to a larger comment on their cultural context, one that’s replaced creativity with fake reality shows, dumbed-down remakes, and weak sequels. Not to mention a political context in which our “free press” is full of cable news pundits censoring anything complex or rational by shouting over each other with blatantly divisive banter, or celebrity-fueled yellow journalism eclipsing the ethical reporting and analysis necessary for any hope of true democracy, or the tragic loss of gray in a world reduced to black and white.

In Erased, as Franco’s repetitions and reinterpretations become monotonously absurd, they begin to plead with the audience, “Please, will you take a closer look, will you pay more attention to what’s missing, before it’s too late?” Unless you’d rather just keep painting a shadow of what could be there.

About Laura Becker

Laura Becker is the office administrator of Oregon Humanities.

18 February 2010 | Posted by Laura Becker in Inside O. Hm. New Ideas
Permalink | Comments? (0 so far)