It’s rush hour, and Beatrice Gibson is having a panic attack in a packed carriage on the London underground. The train stops suddenly in the tunnel. “I can’t breathe,” she says. Cascading images fill the screen, in a flickering montage of ecological doom, refugee boats overturning, Grenfell Tower burning, tumult on the streets, Brexit, Donald Trump … the daily kaleidoscope of our fears. She can feel her body, but it is as if the skin has gone, she says. Racing thoughts of disaster erupt from within, interspersed with more homely thoughts. Family footage of kids playing on the beach and in the bath, domestic life; even the reassurance of the familiar feels under threat.
So begins I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead, one of two new films by Gibson at Camden Arts Centre, London. Both are dense, sometimes disorientating and disjunctive, packed with words, images, poetry and song. Titled after a poem by CAConrad, I Hope I’m Loud repeatedly turns from the apocalyptic to the intimate. Like Gibson on the underground, I’m hanging on in here, not knowing how much the details matter, or which matter, as we swerve from one scene to the next, from one voice to another. These are the world’s mixed messages. A single viewing is not enough.
Later, we join Gibson and Conrad in fellow American poet Eileen Myles’s New York studio, on the eve of Trump’s inauguration. My eye, like the camera, scans the room: a desiccated frog in an open spectacle case, Conrad’s playing cards and the ephemera of Myles’ poetic “rituals”, a copy of Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard’s manic Concrete on the table. The camera hovers and moves on. I think of Bernhard’s relentless, bitter, percussive prose even as the two poets read to camera. “Fuck the real America up the ass with a fake one,” Conrad declaims, and talks about growing up, always taunted with the word “faggot”. Myles reads their poem The Box.
Swerving from news footage to home life, from Myles’s studio to an empty dancefloor, what a strange and ambitious thing this unguarded and intense film is. Gibson’s voiceover quotes fragments from Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and Alice Notley, all as part of an imaginary letter to her daughter Laizer’s future. However awful the world, it is almost all OK, says Gibson, “because these voices exist”. But the one Gibson learns most from, she continues, is her daughter. The edgelessness returns, not as panic this time but a kind of pulsating joy at her daughter’s lively, unguarded presence.
In a wonderful final scene, Gibson and her son Obie re-enact the ending from Claire Denis’ 1999 movie Beau Travail. In Denis’ film, a lone ex-soldier (played by Denis Levant) smokes and dances alone to Corona’s 1994 disco anthem The Rhythm of the Night. Gibson’s dance with her child is an ecstatic celebration of life and their relationship, an antidote to fear and crisis. Instead of a soldier, a mother and daughter, who wears the mask of a cartoon superhero.
Before Gibson and Laizer take to the dancefloor, a white poodle crosses the stage. The dog has wandered in from her second film, Deux Soeurs Qui Ne Sont Pas Soeurs, which Gibson was shooting simultaneously. Very loosely based on Gertrude Stein’s brief story Two Sisters Who Are Not Sisters, it too concerns itself with motherhood and fears for the future, but there is also a search for a missing poodle, another letter to an unborn child.
We jump between Paris, London and Lisbon, where a Brazilian woman smokes and smokes: behind her images of a pregnant belly are displayed on screens. She seems to be in a bar, and describes her fears for the future, and of bringing a child into the world, as Brazil’s new president takes the country on a turn towards a barbarism “that never went away, the one that spies from corners, lurks beneath carpets in living rooms with their macabre chandeliers”.
Borrowings and citation, collaboration and quotation, are at the heart of Crone Music. Even the exhibition’s title is taken from a 1990 album of the same name by the great American composer and accordionist Pauline Oliveros. Her music and that of the British composer Laurence Crane weave through Gibson’s new films. By the end I’m breathless, too. For all its telling moments – including a great performance by Adam Christensen – I have a sense that in Deux Soeurs, Gibson is still wrestling with her material.
Excerpts of Myles and Conrad’s readings – outtakes including fluffed lines and hesitations from the first film – are presented on monitors, and are somehow even more compelling, as portraits of the poets, than that edited scene back in Myles’s studio.
In the final room of the show Gibson presents screenings of favourite films, and there will be performances of the music of both Oliveros and Crane. CAConrad and Myles will be presenting readings and workshops. Gibson’s six-year-old, Obie, will host an “afternoon of mayhem”. Clearly, Gibson wants to put collaboration – with the past as much as the present – and with different voices to the fore here. I asked Gibson if she knew what she had done yet, with her new work. “No,” she replied. Me neither. Like the poets, we’re all still working through the material.
Beatrice Gibson: Crone Music is at Camden Arts Centre, London, until 31 March
This article was corrected on 25 January 2019. Eileen Myles’s pronoun is they, while Gibson dances with her son, not her daughter, in I Hope I’m Loud When I’m Dead
